Blender Tutorial - How to Create Glowing Smoke in Eevee

hello everyone and welcome back to another blender made easy tutorial today we're going to be creating this glowing smoke animation we'll be taking a UV sphere and making it follow a curve while emitting smoke and the smoke will be glowing there's a really cool trick that you can do in the node editor to make the smoke actually emit light also shout out to dark crow over in the discord link is down in the description for letting me use this idea for a tutorial the first thing that we need to do is delete the default cube so press X and delete then press shift a will add in a mesh and then UV sphere and then we'll scale the UV sphere down quite a bit somewhere around there looks pretty good now let's add in the curve so the UV sphere can actually follow it press shift a we'll go to curve and then bezier curve now here is where you can get creative and edit this curves you go in circles or whatever you want to do I think I'm just gonna rotate it 90 degrees along the X go into front view by pressing 1 and I'll go into edit mode and I think I'll just drag it down this way scale it out a little bit and then I'll select this and you can add more curve just by hitting E and you can extrude it out I'll rotate it this way something like this and then E and I'll extrude it out like that alright I'm happy with that I think that will look pretty cool now to have our UV sphere follow this curve what we need to do is select the UV sphere go over to the constraints click Add constraint and then you should see an option for follow path once you select that go ahead and hit the target the Bezier curve and then hit animate path now if we play this you'll see that it follows the path all the way over and then ends at a hundred frames now if you want your animation to be longer what you need to do is select your curve right here go over to the curve settings underneath path animation you can set the frame number here so if you want it to last 150 frames you can go ahead and do that and now if we play it you can see it's moving a little bit slower I think I'm going to add a little bit more geometry to this let's go with 32 and that will just smooth out that edge right there let's play this again and that looks pretty nice okay so now that we have our UV sphere following the path let's go ahead and add in the smoke simulation so select your UV sphere go up to object down to quick effects and then quick smoke we need to scale the domain up to match the size of our of our curve right here so I'll press s and then X drag it over and place it something like that I think will look good and maybe scale it in a little bit we don't need to have it that big now that we've done that let's go ahead and play this and see what it looks like and it doesn't look that great so let's go ahead and change some of the settings first off for the domain settings let's go ahead and select our domain go over to the physics tab over here in the settings at the temperature difference you can turn this down if you want to and this will make sure that the smoke doesn't rise as fast I'm gonna leave it at .1 what I am going to change is the dissolve so go ahead and turn that on and set the time to 20 so this means that blender will dissolve the smoke at around 20 as you can see there and that doesn't look too bad the next thing that we're going to do is open up the high resolution smoke so go ahead and turn that on I'm gonna set the resolution to 3 and the strength of this to 5 so the noise is going to make the smoke have a lot of swirls and it will look pretty good normally I would turn on the adaptive domain but the problem with that is it kind of cuts off the smoke if you're using a light material the adaptive domain doesn't really know when it dissolves so it kind of cuts it in half and you can see on the animation on-screen of what that looks like so I'm gonna leave the adaptive domain turned off for the final bake I'll be setting the resolution to 128 but for now we'll leave it at 32 so we can actually see it next I'm going to select my emitter which is the UV sphere and underneath I'm going to set that to 1 so it's just a little bit closer to the UV sphere and I'm also going to be using a texture so go ahead and turn on the texture then go over to the texture panel and select new change the type to clouds and the size we can leave at 0.25 what I do want to change is the contrast so I'm going to be setting the contrast all the way up to a value of 5 and here is what our texture looks like so what this is going to do is kind of chop up the smoke and so the white parts are emitting smoke and the black parts aren't and I think this will give us some more randomness in our smoke and that will look a little bit better once you do that go ahead and go back over to the physics tab and click on the texture and select that texture that we just created another thing that you want to change is the sub frames we need to turn this all the way up to a value of 6 and this will make it so that it has a smooth transition all the way over if you leave this at 0 your smoke might look choppy like some parts will not have smoke and some parts will it'll just look a little bit weird so make sure you turn that up and as we can see here our smoke is starting to look pretty cool alright so now that we've done that let's go ahead and bake in our simulation so select your domain I'm gonna set the resolution over here to 128 and then enter and then you can open up the baking cache settings right now it's grayed out and that's because we haven't saved our project yet so go ahead and save it and you this should pop up now that we've saved our project I'm gonna set the end frame to 150 and then I'm going to hit bake alright our baking has finished and here is our result if I play it you can see what it looks like it's pretty cool this smoke does look really nice but it is moving pretty slow now let's set up the material so first off make sure the background is set to black just like this and now let's select the material so open up a new window we'll just drag this out and I'll actually restart this we can actually move a little bit faster there we go and then go up here and click on shader editor and then n to close off that panel all right so here is our basic material we have the principled volume shader plugged into the volume and the next thing that we need to do to actually make the smoke look like it's glowing is in attribute node so press shift a go to input and attribute and place that here we're gonna be typing the word density right here and then taking the color and plugging that into the strength of the emission so now instead of using like flame because normally when you plug an attribute into this you type in the word flame here but since we're only using smoke we're gonna be typing density so so it will take the smoke and actually emit light then press shift a add in a converter and then map node and place that here set this to multiply and now this value controls how bright your smoke is so let's go ahead and just jump to frame like let's go for T oh that's way too a for T right here and then press Z and go into rendered view now if we turn up this value here we can see that our smoke is actually emitting light now currently since we're using evey as the render engine this actually won't emit light this doesn't really work in EB it's like almost faking it if you were to switch two cycles then it will actually emit light the only way to emit light and EB is to use like a lamp since this is not a lamp it's only going to look like it's emitting light but it actually won't affect the rest of the scene over in the EB settings I'm gonna open up the volume metrics and set the tile size to 2 pixels so we can actually see a lot of detail in our smoke and then also I'm going to turn on a volumetric shadows and then also you can turn on bloom and that will give it a cool effect over here on the principle volume you can change the color of the smoke by clicking on this emission color and changing it to whatever you want or you can do something interesting like adding a gradient to do this I'm gonna press shift a go over to texture and then gradient texture right here now to control what colors show up on the gradient we'll be adding in a color ramp of course taking the color plugging it into the factor then the color into the emission color and now here is where we set the color that we want so for this white color I'm gonna go with like a blue somewhere around here and then for the black I'm gonna change it to like a red color so I'll drag this all the way up and then give it a red color something like this and as you can see over here it already has that gradient effect and it looks really cool I might make this a little bit more red somewhere around there and I might make this color a little bit of a more saturated blue something like that now if we jump over to frame like 80 or something you should see more blue pop-up but if your scene is only showing like one color you try messing around with the sliders if I drag this this way you should see more blue come into our scene as we can see here one thing to note while using this technique once the UV sphere actually crosses back over here it will emit red / pink smoke but over here it will emit blue so it's not emitting blue the entire time it's it's emitting the red then it will emit some blue colors and then emit emit some red over here I'm not exactly sure how to get it to emit one color and then while the smoke rises it changes color I'm not exactly sure how to do that but this technique works pretty well if you want to change the strength of your emission just change the value over here I think I might go with like 80 I think that will give us a nice glow as you can see here and that looks pretty cool so now we are ready to render so I'm gonna go ahead and close this off Presi and go into solid view and position the camera so go into front view by pressing 1 on your number pad ctrl alt 0 to snap the camera into place then I'll select it and just move it up a little bit zoom it in something like this and Z go into render view just to make sure it looks good that looks really good there's one more thing that I want to do I'm going to select my UV sphere and turn it off in the rendered view if we leave it on we'll see like this weird circle in the smoke and it'll just look a little bit weird so make sure you turn that off in the rendered view if you don't see the camera icon that's because you need to enable it so click on this little menu right here and turn on the camera icon and then you should be able to disable it now that we've done that let's go ahead and render this out so set an output section right here you can change the file format to a mp4 set the encoding do all of that stuff once you're happy with all your settings you also need to set the end frame down here since we only baked in 150 frames I'm gonna set the end frame to 150 and now we are ready to render so go up to render render animation and it will take all of those frames put them into a movie file and put them into the folder that you specify it in the output section once this is done rendering we'll go ahead and take a look at it okay the render has finished and now we can view our result by opening up that folder or you can go in blender go up to render and click on render animation or the shortcut ctrl f11 once you do that this will pop up and you'll be able to view it and that looks pretty cool so there we go guys that is the end of this tutorial thank you for watching if you created something cool I would love to see it so make sure to send it over to me on Twitter or Instagram also in my analytics it showed that 87% of people who watch my tutorials are not subscribed so make sure you hit that subscribe button for more tutorials like this one thanks again for watching and I'll see you guys in the next video

Channel: Blender Made Easy

Views: 152,568

Keywords: blender tutorial, 2.80, eevee, smoke, simulation, b3d, cycles, realtime, smoke simulation, beginner, blender 2.8, blender 2.8 tutorial, curve, follow, glow, how to, create, 3d, blender, tutorial, blender quick smoke, blender made easy

Id: hMh0pyMt1YE

Length: 12min 44sec (764 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 27 2019