Blender Tutorial - How to Create Steam w/ Mantaflow

hello everyone and welcome to another blender made easy tutorial today we'll be creating steam after many failed attempts of trying to create this effect i've finally come up with a simulation and material that i am happy with so without further ado let's go ahead and jump into it here is a basic coffee cup model and you can go ahead and download this model yourself to follow along with this tutorial the link is in the description once you have it downloaded and opened up we can go ahead and get started real quick just before this tutorial begins i wanted to let you guys know that i uploaded a brand new course called the complete guide to dynamic paint in blender here is a quick preview [Music] [Music] [Music] so if you are interested i will leave the full trailer video in the description go check it out first off we need to add in our smoke simulation and to do this i'm going to press shift a and add in a mesh and then a cylinder this is going to be our flow object i'll scale it down and press s and z and scale it down so it's pretty thin something like this i'll place it right on top of our coffee cup just like that and you want to make sure that it is not visible from the camera so the camera is going to be right about here and so you won't be able to see that inflow object next up let's add in our domain so i'm going to press shift a and add in a cube and then scale this up and then place it right in the middle something like this we can go into front view and press g and z and drag it up and something like that is perfectly fine from there we are ready to set up the smoke simulation so to get started we're going to go over to the physics tab and then click on fluid and set the type over to domain we're gonna leave the type at gas and we'll leave all the other settings for now we're going to select our flow object in this case it's going to be this object add in fluid and set the type over to flow of course for the flow behavior we need to set it to inflow so first off the initial temperature this is how fast the smoke will rise i'm going to set this up to 1.2 just so the smoke rises slightly faster next up we're going to open up the flow source and set the surface emission a lot lower let's go with a value of 0.6 bringing this lower will allow not as much smoke to come out of the flow object and i think this just looks a little bit better next up we're going to enable a texture and then open up this panel for the texture we're going to go over to the texture panel and create a new one switch the type over to clouds and then for the colors we're going to bring the contrast all the way up to a value of 5. let's go back over to the physics tab and then select that texture in the drop-down menu we're also going to be animating this offset value so add in a keyframe by clicking that button on the side we're going to skip all the way to the end frame and for this animation i want it to be about 300 frames long so i'm going to set the end frame to 300 we'll skip all the way to the end set the offset up to 1.5 and then add in another keyframe we also need to make sure the interpolation mode between these two keyframes is linear so box select both of them and having your mouse inside this timeline you can press t and then select linear our flow object is now done let's jump over to the domain and do a couple more settings over here first off the resolution divisions we're going to go all the way up to 160 resolution divisions next up the time scale value i want the smoke to travel a little bit slower so we're going to set this to 0.8 next up we're going to turn on adaptive domain and open up this panel and set the threshold a lot lower let's go with a value of 0.001 just so none of the smoke actually gets clipped off once we render out the animation after that we're going to open up the gas setting right here and set the heat value this is the temperature of how fast the smoke will rise let's go up to 1.5 we're going to turn on dissolve so the smoke actually dissipates at around this point and for the time value we're gonna go up to 30 frames so right when the smoke gets emitted it has about 30 frames until it starts to dissolve next up the end frame in the cast setting we're going to set to 300 as well and make sure the type is set over to modular and you can turn on is resumable and that's basically all we really need to do for the cache setting before we bake it though let's add in a little bit of wind to give the smoke a little bit of movement to do this i'm going to press shift a and add in a force field and then a wind force field right here and then a wind force field right here we'll go into front view and then rotate this so it's facing this direction and for the strength of this we want it to be much lower than this or the smoke will just fly out in that direction let's go with a value of 0.05 just so we have a little bit of smoke and for the flow i'm gonna bring that down to zero if you have any smoke that actually collides with your coffee cup make sure you select it enable fluid and set the type over to effector make sure the effector type is set to collision and we'll be good to go now that we have all of our settings done let's go ahead and save our project and then bake this out once you have saved your project go ahead and click on bake data all right the simulation has finished baking and here is the result i'm going to go ahead and skip through a couple of these frames to see exactly what it looks like i'm pretty happy with this result and now let's get started on the material i decided to add in a plane with a basic wood material the lighting in our scene i'm going to select the default lamp set the strength of this to 3000 and the radius which is the size of it i'm gonna bring up to a value of three i'm going to go into top view and place this over on this left side to give us some nice lighting for the world settings i'm just gonna go over to the color and drag it all the way almost to black now if we press z and go into rendered view here is the result i'm also going to go over to the settings over here in the render settings and switch it over to cycles i'm also going to position the camera in front view so i'll go into front v by pressing 1 on my number pad and then i'll hit ctrl alt 0 to snap the camera to place select it drag it up and place it right about here now finally we get onto the material for the steam i'm going to go ahead and split this view and switch it over to the shader editor and then i'll press and close off that panel and give it a new material with this material we're not going to need the principled shader so go ahead and select it and delete it by pressing x i'm also going to press shift a and add in a shader and emission shader we're not going to be using the principled volume because it doesn't look as good we're going to take the emission and plug that into the volume of the material output next up we need to tell blender where the emission is supposed to be so to do that we can press shift a add in an input and then a volume info node down here we can take the density value and plug that into the strength of the emission once we do that we can see it's already working and does look pretty good now at the moment since we're using an emission shader it's actually going to be emitting light into the rest of our scene and that is not what we want we only want the light to show up in the camera view so to fix that we need to add in a converter math node and place that here and then we can also add in an input and then a light path info node if we take the is camera ray and plug that into the bottom input and set this over to multiply now the light will only show up in the rendered view and it's not going to emit light to the rest of our scene next up we're going to add in some detail to the smoke to do this we're going to select the multiply node shift d it and place it here this bottom value now controls the density of the smoke blender just decided to crash on me but it's okay because we are back in our scene now and this multiply node allows you to control the lightness of the smoke so if you were to drag it up we can see it becomes a lot more brighter i'm going to set this value up to 4. the next thing that we'll add to get even more detail in our smoke is a color ramp to determine where the density is going to be so if we add in a color ramp if we drag the black value closer we can see it's going to clamp down on some of that light smoke now we're actually getting somewhere i'm also going to add in another handle and then we will select the white handle and switch it all the way down to black we'll select the middle handle and switch it all the way up to white and then if we drag this closer this way and then bring the lightness closer this way we get some really interesting results now over in the emission if we drag the color of the emission down to a gray color we're going to get the look of steam so somewhere around here will probably be pretty good and if you go even further down it's going to make it more transparent something like that will look pretty good now with these three nodes right here you can get a lot of interesting results if you were to drag the multiply node up really high and then use the color amp to change the density you can get some even better results and as you can see there with a value of 10 that actually might look better and then if you want it to be more transparent just set the color of the emission even lower all right after playing around with these settings a little bit more here is the result the multiply node is set to a value of 8. the color amp is about halfway with the black value halfway with the white and the emission color is set to a value of about 0.4 for the lightness hello everyone this is me from the future i just wanted to give a quick overview of why we use the emission shader instead of the principled volume shader and the reason for that is because the emission gives us a lot less noise in our scene it will improve the render time just slightly it's not going to be much at all but just slightly but it will also have no noise in the final render that's one of the reasons why we use the emission it also gives us a little bit more control over the color of the smoke so we can set it to what any color that we want here if we wanted like blue steam or something like that we can do that pretty easily but i also wanted to show you how you can render this scene using eevee right now if we switch over to the ev render engine you can see that our smoke does not look that good at all if we open up the volumetrics tab and set the tile size down to 2 pixels and then if we increase the samples let's set this up to about 128 or so we can see everything just completely disappears you can though render this in eevee if you instead use the principal volume shader so if i press shift a and add in a shader and then a principled volume we'll take the color plug that into the density and then the volume into the volume of the material output once we do this now we can see a little bit of smoke in our scene to control the density even more we can add in a multiply node in between the color ramp and the principled volume so if we add in a math node set that here bring this down to multiply and then if we set this bottom value to around 7 or so now we get that same look so if you want more density you can turn this value up and we get more density as you can see probably around a value of 7 is pretty good and then you can control the color over here so if you want it lighter just drag that up but as you can see we can't really get that white color with the principled volume it's more of a gray tone and that's one of the reasons why we use the emission it gives us a little bit more control over the color but if you wanted to you can render the scene using eevee using these other two nodes right here the multiply plus the principled volume shader another thing real quick is that this is the result with the emission shader and then if i go to slot 2 here is the result with the principled volume and as you can see they are almost identical except the one with the principled volume is a lot more noisy you can see this render took about 19 seconds and then this render took about 15 seconds so it's just slightly faster and it gives basically the exact same results if i go to slot 3 here is the result with evie so you can see here it does look very similar as well and this render took about seven seconds instead of the 14. so like i said if you want to you can render the scene using ev using the principled volume shader right here with the multiply node i'm happy with this result so now let's give it a render i'm going to select my camera drag it up so we get more of that steam and then we'll place it right about here i'm also going to close off this tab since we're not going to need it anymore then over in the render settings i'm going to set the color management the look to high contrast and with that done i think we are ready to render over into the render tab i'm going to set these samples to 40 and then i'm also going to enable denoising by going over to the scene panel turn on denoising data then over in the compositor i'm going to add in denoiser so make sure use nodes is enabled you can press shift a underneath filter add in the denoise and place that here if we take the normal and plug it into the normal then the albedo into the albedo our render will look a lot better with that done we can go over to the output tab and then render this out but there you go that is how you create steam using blender thank you very much for watching this tutorial if you enjoyed make sure you leave a like and comment down below what you would like to see next if you are new to this channel consider subscribing because i upload blender tutorials all the time thank you again for watching and i will see you in the next one

Channel: Blender Made Easy

Views: 160,807

Keywords: blender, blender tutorial, blender 2.8, blender 2.9, tutorial, animation, beginner, blendermadeeasy, blender made easy smoke, smoke, simulation, mantaflow, cycles, eevee, 3d, model, coffee, cup, steam, hot

Id: _K0XsHht6pg

Length: 13min 34sec (814 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 06 2021