Blender Tutorial: How to Create a Paint Splash in Blender

hey what's up Gleb Alexandra here for creative shrimp dot-com and welcome to yet another very exciting blender tutorial today we'll be dealing with the paint splash effect this will be very fun I promise you'll learn a thing or two about particle systems forcefields metal balls and how you can combine these techniques in blender to create astounding paint splashes oh and also we'll explore the awesome principal shader that was added to blender 2.79 so keep watching subscribe and let's jump straight in let's start off by creating a smoke simulation it may seem a little bit weird but we'll be using smoke simulation to guide our particle system and if your blender looks different it's because I use soft blend a theme you can change it in the blender user preferences alright we have a cube here and what I'm going to do is set the maximum draw type to wire this will be one of the objects of our smoke simulation let's go over to the physics tab click on smoke and select flow smoke simulation needs two objects flow and domain so let's create yet another cube go to the object properties set the maximum draw type to wire once again let's also align these two cubes in the center of the scene something like that and in the physics tab I'm gonna click smoke and select domain hooray we create a basic smoke simulation we can test it out by pressing alt a to play the animation and it works definitely let's now select other flow objects and to keep track of things I'm going to name it flow and I will select the second one and call it domain so I selected the flow object once again and the physics tab I'm gonna decrease the density just to be able to see through the smoke let's play the animation again my present alt a now we won't need the smoke to rise so I will set the temperature difference to zero if we now play the animation we will see that smoke sticks to the object alright step 2 of this tutorial is to create a particle system the idea behind all of this is that we use our smoke simulation to guide the particles so I created yet another cube and I'm pressing ctrl + 1 2 or 3 to set the level of subdivisions it automatically adds the subsurf modifier let's apply the modifier to get it out of the way go over to the particles tab press new to create a new particle system let's call it particles and the number of particles us maybe set it to something like 50,000 in the object properties again let's set the draw type to wire press alt a to preview the animation so that's a very basic particle system that is being affected by gravity and which has some velocity on birth and we don't need it but first of all I'm gonna crank up the life of particles so they don't die at 15 let's set it to 500 and we can also define when the particle system stops spawning the new particles I will set it to 80 the emitter geometry 0 now more velocity and if we now play the animation we will see that it just falls down because the particles are still being affected by gravity let's remove it from the equation go to field weights menu and reduce the gravity slider now the particles are just gathering on top of the sphere and that's definitely a good starting point for what we're gonna do next and we are going to add the turbulence force field this force field will help us to shape the smoke and then shape the particles let's go shift a force field blender has a bunch of different force fields let's select turbulence and rename it to turbulence right away this force field creates a 3d noise which affects the behavior of particles you can change the strength of it and the size and so on but for now let's just press alt a to preview and you can see how the turbulence forcefield wharves the physics of the particle system that looks maybe like an obscure ruse from fantastic beasts and where to find them let's set the size to 1 and other words let's increase the scale of the turbulence field of the 3d noise which bends and warps at particles that looks very interesting let's crank out the strength set to 15 and the other option that we can change is flow let's set the flow to 5 and now you will see that the particles are starting to flow along the curvature of the threading noise and I guess everything that makes it look more like a liquid is good because we're aiming at creating the pint splash effect without this flow parameter it's a little bit on a spiky side alright and maybe I will crank up the size of the noise a little bit more to make it smoother ultimately I think it looks good already I'm so fascinated with force fields and particle systems and physics now let's add this smoke flow force fields that is the key element of this tutorial before adding the smoke flow I will set the turbulence influence to zero in the field weights menu I'm doing this because I want the turbulence force fields to affect only smoke and not the particles itself see the smoke is pushed around by the turbulence and by the way one more thing that we can do with this maxime is increase the resolution or decrease it for example if we double the resolution we make it slower of course and also more intricate I'm not sure that I like the additional details here so I will send it back to 32 and the next step is to add the smoke flow force field shift a forcefields smoke flow what this force field does it essentially makes the particles can form to the flow of the smoke simulation that's a very cool way to drive the particles using the smoke scene that's crazy we can crank up the strength of the smoke flow and oh I forgot to take the domain it seems so in the domain object click on this eyedropper and select the domain object and now watch the real magic happening out eh and I have never known that I love particle simulations before I tried that thing I mean it's really mesmerizing all right let's set the flow to to make it a little bit more liquid ish does this word even exist the Quidditch the next thing we can try is increase or decrease the size of the flow object and that will affect the look of the whole simulation in a big way because it will interact with the turbulence field in completely different way just look at this it's like an exploding star something along these lines or maybe it's a fluid but in vacuum or it just exploded because it happens you know it's a bug nothing to worry about and if we make the flow object very small particles will take shape of this I don't know if spaghetti thing or a sea creature of some sort and I'm aiming for a little bit different effect so I'm trying to search for it for example here I'm trying to increase the divisions of the smoke simulation and I don't know yet if it helps or not because it's back and forth jumping between different settings and trying to find what works before actually recording this tutorial I made some experiments and tests and each time I tried it I got completely different results so here I set the strength to 15 and it helped a lot and a little bit higher flow will also help I think so let's do that the whole idea is to get to the point where it looks like a paint splash frozen in time and actually I think these settings are working pretty good the next thing is to animate the flow object I would say it's an optional step but still it's good to know we can animate any parameter but to keep it simple I will just take the location of the object and we can move it like this while playing the animation I think that's amazing what I'll do next is simple three or four key frames maybe let's trade the first key frame here by pressing I and selecting location to create a location key frame a smooth over here press I again select location jump to frame number 40 and create here's another keyframe you got the point sometimes it's very dangerous to animate parameters in the smoke simulation and in particle simulation because you can quickly lose track of what's going on because there are so many things interaction but now it looks like a meteor streaking through the night sky and leaving a trail of manga style particles I don't know I'm getting a little bit overexcited I admit it and it's not about coffee or something like that I feel like a particle physicist of some sort and if you want to change the length of the animation you can open the dope sheet grab these keyframes press s to scale it up to spread it out I would say and after it did it let's go back to the 3d viewport preview our simulation and animation by pressing alt a and once again what's going on here is the particle system that we created and the smoke simulation that we created they interact in brief particles are following the smoke okay one more forcefield that we can experiment with is the vortex field I will show you how to do it very quickly shift a forcefield vortex and it's very important where you place the vortex object in this scene because it will serve as a pivot point for for the vortex effect and in the particle object I will turn down the vortex influence again I don't want the particles to be affected by the force fields directly just the smoke and then particles follows the smoke using the smoke flow force I hope that still makes sense right now you can see the microscopic tornado in the viewport to get even more fun out of it let's increase that strength of the vortex watch out for Dorothy flying with her house I don't know and I honestly think that this effect would create nice bases for a tornado or something like this vortex plus smoke simulation plus smoke flow forcefield which effects particles but for now I will delete this vortex force field it totally makes sense to use vortex to create a circular pattern of a paint but let's keep it simple because it's already very complex now I will do the final tweaks to the particle system after we are satisfied with the look and feel of the particle simulation we can increase the number of particles we will be using matter bolsa minute later and metals love when the particle system is densely populated ok for now I will hide the smoke domain and the smoke flow object by selecting them and pressing H one thing to note is when you hide something like the smoke simulation it still effects the rest of the scene you just don't see it so here is our particle simulation with 500,000 particles and by the way this video is sped up the original simulation was much much slower of course I recommend you to choose your own number of particles based on how strong your computer is because it may probably burn okay folks now let's unleash the meta balls matter balls is a wonderful wonderful feature of blender let's go shift a meta ball bowled metaball whatever it means what I'm going to do now is select the particle system jump in the render settings of this particle system and select object now we have to pick the object that will serve as a particle and I will pick the meta ball when two metal balls appear near each other they merge and so we get this mesh and when we used with the particle system which has 500,000 particles it can get very slow so what I want to scale mater balls I press s then 0.5 for example to make it 2 times smaller or I hit the S key and press 2 to make it 2 times larger and so on so I made the matter was much smaller and I want to increase the resolution of mater balls and it works this way if you want to double the resolution you go the other way you have the resolution because 0 is the highest res 0.1 for example it's very high resolution and one is much lower resolution I think 0.1 will provide us with enough geometry to work with and the viewport got sluggish I can cope with it for sure but it's not a very enjoyable experience especially if you have a weaker PC and don't forget that we still have the particle system underneath so we can jump to different frames check the different stages of assimilation to see what gives us the best result for plain splash and let's set the madcap in the viewport to something more painterly I guess at the next very important step is to hit alt C and convert to mesh basically what it does it collapses the mesh created from matter bows to just the good old polygon soup so we create the particle system we used matter balls to mesh it and we converted it to a simple polygon mesh let's now do one or two additional particle simulations just to add the tiny details and stuff like that I'm gonna make the flow objects smaller it will do the trick it will still follow the same turbulence pattern but the result will look slightly different because of the smaller size of the flow and by the way that sphere bothers me because we converted it all to mesh and the sphere is also a mesh it's not a matter below I'm gonna delete it I will hit B draw the rectangle hit X and delete all vertices now let's create yet another matter before the second particle system select this particle system go to the doubly object-- tab and select this newly created s'matter ball in the Matabele settings let's reduce or rather increase the resolution by reducing this number to 0.2 or even to 0.1 and obviously when you step up the resolution of matobo's you greatly increase the poly count of the scene it can quickly get out of control alright so let's convert to mesh with prison alt C and so I can mesh from curve meta Cerf it's a very useful hotkey in many situations now I'm gonna delete this sphere again and do the same set of procedures for the third object only this time I will delete the keyframes to achieve a little bit different result set it to frame zero press alt I delete the keyframe and do the same for the frame for the next frame so to speak and for the rest of the frames alt I do a keyframe now we can move it roughly to the center of the splash object something like this and I think it would be nice to bring back the turbulence influence on the particles themselves to see what kind of effect it will produce also while I'm testing stuff I tend to set the number of particles to a much lower volume and and the result looks a bit weird let's remove the smoke flow from the equation and see what it gives us and now we see two tiny hands and the rest of the Cthulhu damn it's awesome I think it will work great as the tiny droplets now let's just repeat this stuff with matobo's and bring back the emission number and we are good to go we have three particle systems meshed with the help of matter bowls then convert it to the usual mesh objects I think it's a very interesting way of modeling things using particles it's not very obvious at first how to model stuff like paint splashes should I use fluid simulation that's the first question and sometimes as you can see we can get away with not using liquid sim because in the end it's about tools it's about tools that produce certain results and if smoke flow plus matabosch plus whatever gives you the same kind of thing maybe it's the right tool for the job and the same principles are applicable not only to blender but to every piece of software and by the way what other software has meta bowls maybe ZBrush has Z spheres yeah if you know any other software let me know in the comments ok guys the next step is to add this smooth modifier the smooth modifier really sells this effect ok so let's isolate the first object by pressing slash on the numpad now add the smooth modifier we can try to crank up the factor but because our mesh is a mess it will not give us what we want instead let's turn up the number of iterations let's set it to 10 11 may be as high as 50 oh it's great yet another modifier that I think will work very well with the smooth modifier is displaced we needed to bring back some of the thickness of the initial model so I'm gonna set it to something like 0.1 also if you look at the paint splashes references you will notice that they're a little bit bulky not very thin okay I'm going to do the same steps for the rest of the models first apply the smooth modifier cranked up the number of repeat iterations after that apply the displacement modifier to make it more chubby next I will sculpt the Masha's because I think it will benefit from from a minor artistic intervention let's jump over to scoped mode before any sculpting we need to apply the modifiers Shh now press T to invoke the left tool shelf now we can try a different brush is like a snake hug brush it's fun a man kind of silly at least without dynamic topology but I don't want to mess with topology right now so we'll just select the grab brush and shave this thing a little bit you can increase or decrease the size of the brush using right and left bracket but a really cool brush to use is the inflate deflate brush as its name says it allows to inflate or deflate polygons so we can create these droplets at the end of these tendrils tentacles whatever it's minor detail but if you check references you will see it literally everywhere it seems that it really helps to sell the leaked weed feeling maybe somehow relates to the surface tension and physics of liquids stuff like fats it makes it look believable and that's a good reason to do it so that's why we sculpt after meshing to add in that details that really helps to take this simulation to the next level all right guys let's now set up shaders and lighting jump to the add menu add the camera first you can press ctrl alt and zero on the numpad to align this camera to the active view and maybe increase the Alpha of the passport to of this camera okay I split the window in two because I want the top window to be the node editor and I'll put the button window in the rendered mode so it will show the cycles rendering in the render settings make sure you use GPU compute if you have video card I will also set the number of bounces diffuse gloss and transmission Mouse's to two and I think it's maybe a little bit too high because one will work in this case but I really want this second glossy bounce for no particular reason okay and in the environment tab click on use nodes and let's make the environment white I envision this as red and whites kind of color scheme so let's open the node editor create the new material and code red material surprise here we have the diffuse shader let's set it to red to just approximate how it will look and if you want to assign this material to all the objects what you can do is select everything then make sure that the active object is the object with this material red material in our case and then click on this icon and select copy material to others and bam we assign this material to all objects and I will tell you one thing that I'm really excited in this tutorial is the principled shader it was added to blender in 2.79 and it's amazing it's like an uber shader that combines glossy diffuse transmissive subsurface scattering components and so on let's just plug it into the surface output pick the reddish color I already see some specularity going on we can crank up or decrease the specular component and also the roughness I will take it down quite a bit because this is liquid after all by all means it should be highly reflective very glossy almost mirror like and to better see all these properties and to add some depth to it I will add the area light increase the size because you know it's never hurts to add some directionality to your lighting setup ambient lighting obviously can make objects appear very flat and to add some extra dimension to work make sure you have a dominant light source and it reads very well to mine Eliza's also a bad thing one dominant light source is all right and every other light source is practically a thin light or a rim light classic okay and what I'm trying to do here is not get overexcited with the light strength I try to give it a very subtle and now it's probably a great time to experiment with the look of this thing maybe you would like to turn it into a green blob and it will look gorgeous but I really like the red liquid not only because it triggers a dopamine response in your brain that is only a part of the reason and not only because it's deeply ingrained in our physiology and stuff like that pretty much all cultures around the world develop red color after black and white alright let's add the mix RGB node and mix red with a the adjacent color like purple and one cool thing that we can do is use the normals of the mesh as a mix factor between these two colors so let's add the geometry node the normal node plug normal in here and add the color ramp after that and we will hook this setup up to the mix factor what it will allow us to do is basically to take our than normal of the surface and reveal the second material based on this normal in this sphere and I'm dragon and you can see how it effects the look we can move the flags to effect the fall-off of this effect I don't want to go overboard with this effect I just want to add a little bit of variation to the colors so I will pick a peachy color to add a nuance to our original lipstick red or maybe to hint at a subsurface scattering that could be the case here a little bit lighter red and one more thing that I will do with the colors is first of all I will duplicate the mix RGB note then I will go input and add the free nail node and use it once again as a mix factor between these colors and some other color for example let's take blue just to demonstrate the effect the free nail node will make the second socket of the mix RGB node appear at a glancing angle it's very useful for imitating the additional reflections so let's use it and pick an orange color again I'm trying to not overdo this effect so it gets straight in your face it's a lot better when it's nice and subtle if you choose red as your main color it just complements the red okay and the next lovely thing is subsurface scattering principal shader has built-in subsurface scattering what it does it simulates the scattering of the light rays beneath the surface of the model just like our skin is red because underneath the skin is a red meat sounds creepy hello and the subsurface radius parameter governs how deep the light rays go so I will set it to two and leave a subsurface scattering at a higher value I think or maybe not but it will have at least some subsurface scattering in my opinion each should have at least some because if it's an oil paint or stuff like this it's highly reflective but still you can see the lights scattered inside the the paint itself I think it's totally reasonable for colorful liquids to have high subsurface scattering feel free to experiment with it it's very amusing just to play with this shader and the next thing is tone mapping we are dealing here with a highly reflective staff which shows the luminosity values through the roof so we'd better set the tone mapping to filmic because it handles the high dynamic range really well and to regain the contrast I will set it to the very high contrast mode or even set the exposure a little bit higher it's already a little bit on the extreme side so be very careful while I was tweaking the values I got an idea that maybe it would be cool to introduce yet another color how about a white color to create milk and strawberry shake something along these lines let's try it out and see how it works select one of the objects jump into the materials tab press this plus icon to create another material based on the material 0 1 and I will call it white material jump into the node editor and funny thing I will leave the subsurface scattering color it red and change the base color so it will have a monochromatic base but at the same time it will possess a reddish tint caused by subsurface scattering which is red which approximates that the underneath this white surface is meat oh my goodness that's getting creepy really creepy stop this clap awesome we're almost there the last thing that we're gonna do is just render it out now it's a good time to reposition the camera if you want to produce a static shot I selected the camera then place the 3d cursor onto the model pressed R 2 times to rotate the camera around it that's a very easy way to orbit your camera around the model while searching for the best shot you can get the next step would be to set up the render settings before hitting this magic of button let's move to this tab and make sure that everything is set up correctly let's crank it up to 3 bounces reflective caustics and refractive caustics is on and i'll set the render suppose to 512 just make sure i have a relatively noise free render house at the dimensions to 1912 by 1080 pixels 100% and hit render and it renders some kind of Silent Hill well if that's your intent go ahead but maybe something went wrong and I guess I know what went wrong let's select every object press M and move everything to layer number two because we still have a smoke simulation lingering around in layer one let's leave it there and just click on land number two as usual hit friend robot and hope for the best and after you render the image you may realize that something is off about it in this case maybe it needs another level of subdivision because you can see there's jagged polygons and that's probably not a very good thing when it comes to liquids but if you crank up the number of subdivision surfaces the poly count and it's right now 1 million and a half faces will skyrocket it will get much much higher so keep an eye on the poly count and if your computer allows you add another level of subdivision it will make everything much smoother and potentially it can be very beneficial for this liquid look and the last thing that drives me nuts is this protruding part what I'm gonna do is use the inflate brush to create this pimple it's always good to keep reference images nearby so you can evaluate your work I forget it done go to the object mode and probably the last thing if you want to cut the render times it would be cool to use the built-in denoiser go over to the scene tab enabled the noising I won't do it right now but if I were creating animation it would be way to go all right but now I will just set render samples to 512 and hate the magical button it's rendering it concludes the paint splash effect tutorial well I hope you enjoyed the tutorial my name's Gleb Alexandra of you're watching creative shrimp YouTube channel and as usual feel free to share this video with other nerds because it is really really helpful you helped me a lot share subscribe and leave a comment below that's the Holy Trinity of that's a that's a server afar with paint splashes stay tuned to take care Netta balls matter blobs

Channel: Gleb Alexandrov

Views: 199,168

Keywords: Paint splash, paint, splashing, effect, Blender (software), tutorial, how-to, blender tutorial, creative shrimp, gleb alexandrov, how to create paint splash, modeling, fluid, simulation, water, shaders, subsurface, principled, animation

Id: I0Tz1U6A5vI

Length: 35min 11sec (2111 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 30 2018