Blender Volumes Are Kinda Crazy

hey so about three months ago I posted this video trying to emulate some Houdini smoke in blender and while it was definitely a cool process learning all of that and I I did learn a lot about the blender internal smoke it was so heavy and it was honestly a really hard project for a lot of you guys to follow along with and unfortunately I kind of knew that going into the video but by complete happenstance I found a way to create a very similar effect that is much less taxing on your system it's also incredibly easy to do with all that out of the way let's go ahead and hop into this so to start off we are going to create just some interesting kind of abstract mesh and the first thing we're going to do is we're gonna come over to preferences you're going to type in add and you're going to scroll down until you see geodesic domes I think yeah you said this so just go ahead and click that little check box there and if we Tab out of that come back into our regular scene if we're gonna get in some uh spot on some regular mesh we could scroll all the way down here to geodesic dome and if we open up this little menu on our bottom left we have all of these options now now by default I think this spawns in it as a triangle but I was already playing around a little bit so you just up your freak Quincy to get it to turn into a sphere and since we're going for some abstract kind of mesh here feel free to play around with some of these settings so for me these are the settings I'm going to be using here I've left a main and geodesic the same I went with class 1 tetrahedron edge up and try and then I changed my frequency to three and this just gives us like an odd little shape that you wouldn't normally come across in blender and you know very little work just a good starting block so what I'm going to do is scale this guy up a little bit I'm going to duplicate it and then I'm going to take this duplicated version and slide it off over here just in case we need it later we always have something to come back to now the reason we might need it later is because we're going to start adding our modifiers we're going to come over here and we are going to add a wireframe modifier after that we're going to add a solidify modifier and set your thickness to a negative value I've meant at the negative 0.1 and the reason we're going to do that is because if we set it to a positive value we get a lot of clipping in the mesh and we do not really want that from there we can go ahead and apply these modifiers after that what we're going to want to do is switch over to the sculpting Tab and we're going to come over here to remesh and this is going to be a little bit personal to your computer and what your computer can handle but you're going to want to remesh and play with your voxel size we want a little bit of mesh here to work with now in theory most computers should be able to handle this just fine so I wouldn't worry too much we're going to start with .07 and you can see that this kind of turns everything into one mesh it gets rid of some of the like dips and like crevices that the the wireframe modifier causes it also adds some just kind of General unevenness we get weird little shapes like this which are very like abstract and unique you can see it's only on two panels actually it's on three I lied to you but yeah rematch is definitely like a good technique for creating some Randomness if you're looking to start with like abstract mesh and you can do it more than once so let's say 0.07 is a shape that we like we can now increase our voxel size I guess decrease because we want smaller voxels but you get what I'm saying here so if we were like .03 and then remesh again you can see that we've added a lot more geometry to this friendly reminder good time to save your project file if you have not already and now what we're going to do is we're going to come over to Dynamic topology we're going to enable this guy and we're going to change relative detail to constant detail and we're going to change our resolution to something maybe like 40. now again if this gets too heavy just lower that number and you will be okay and the first thing that we're going to do is we're going to go around with our smooth brush and just kind of smooth out some areas where it feels like we could add a little bit more and you can see it gets this kind of like stretchy like painting kind of effect you can also with the smooth brush kind of create little like curves and crevices and things I really like how this looks so I'm just going to go ahead and do this all around and again you know you can't really do this too wrong so just kind of have fun with it and make some shapes you like all right so this is what I've ended up with uh nothing too special didn't put too much time into this couple of minutes um and and you can see that we've kind of like thinned out a lot of these shapes they've been stretched out into like more rounded triangles and it's just a more unique shape overall so some of you might be wondering why we turn Dynamic topology on because it doesn't really have an effect when you're using the smooth brush and that is because we're going to come through with the clay tool now we are going to create some separation in here and you'll find that with Dynamic topology if you're going over thin areas like this you can separate them and that's all I'm going to do I'm going to go through and pick out some line and just kind of add it random just little separations and pieces that are kind of drifting away from each other you can also add some you know further details to the rest of the mesh if you want to I probably won't be doing too much of that though because I don't want things to get too heavy and here we are after some playing around you can see I added a little bit of Separation a little bit more detail here and there and we're looking pretty good but in reality all we've done is add a Cool Base mesh because now we are going to work our way into the volume aspect of this tutorial so what we are going to do next is we are going to spawn ourselves in a volume empty now this is super cool and has tons of possibilities but what we are going to be using it for today is over here under our modifier tab we're going to be using mesh to volume and what this allows you to do is instance any piece of mesh and turn it into a volume so if you take your little eye dropper here and we just select our mesh you can see there we go we've got our little bounding box and our volume inside it so for now what we're going to do is we are going to turn off our original sculpt so that we just have our volume open we're going to click on this and we can increase our density a little bit so we could see it a little bit better we can also increase our voxel count to something maybe like 100 just to see the the shape a little bit more defined however I warn you the higher your voxel amount is the heavier your scene will be so while we're working on this maybe we keep this at something like 70 and then for the final render we're going to crank it up to somewhere between like 250 and 300. all right so what I'm doing here is just building out a basic scene I'm turning my world light value down to zero adding a couple of Lights just so we can better see what's going on I find it's best when you're working with volumes to work with a total black background just while you're kind of getting the shape and feel right all right so now that we have that set up the first thing I'm noticing is this is a little bit too blocky so maybe 70 was a little low maybe I'm going to go back up to 100 for now because my computer can handle it and we're going to start working on adding some more Dimension to this and how we're going to do that is with the volume displace modifier now this is a super cool modifier that works exactly like displaced does with mesh however you have more possibilities in my opinion because with a volume it stretches and fills gaps and you don't have kind of clipping of the mesh as you would if you know you were working with geometry so you can get these really kind of crazy abstract looking things that kind of look like they could really exist so we're going to do is we are going to create ourselves a new texture and you can see it's immediately done something we're going to click these little buttons over there and we're going to drop down and start working on a noise texture now feel free to play around here as much as you want and just kind of go crazy with this uh for me if we would just say click clouds right off the bat you can see that this adds a ton more Dimension to our volume and you could really kind of go crazy with this where you can create some very very abstract shapes or you can create some relatively low effort High detail high performance clouds that are super easy and you don't have to do any simulations which is kind of like a huge Plus in my book but you guys know me I love doing goofy little abstract things so for me I'm going to be using a varonoi texture and might be looking at this thinking well that's not very abstract but we can make it abstract by increasing the intensity and it gets abstract and cool very quickly now you can see with our voxel account not being very high it kind of looks a little bit blocky so maybe we turn this up just a little bit more again again be careful you know kind of go off of your own system don't push it too high too fast so with a little bit of playing around in your Verona texture you can change your coloring setting to position an outline you can also play with your feature weights and each one of these is going to give you like a slightly different shape and a different output so kind of play around with these and see what you're what you're looking for what you're liking you can also play around with the sizing of your Verona texture and this will dramatically change how it looks if we increase this up you can see we start to get a very similar effect to what was happening in our thumbnail some things that we can kind of do to help this is increasing our density if we were to go to say something like 10 you can see that this starts to fill out so much more you can also play with your exterior bandwidth and this will kind of give you more of a smoky plume feel if that's something that you're looking for and now if we greatly increase our Fox will count to something like 500 you can really see this like abstract shape coming to be that you couldn't create something like this with a mesh without it looking so out of place and weird but because it's a volume it's like kind of believable in a weird sci-fi way again 500 is a little bit heavy while we're working so I'm going to drop this back down to 150. we're also going to pull our camera back a little bit in preparation for adding our second volume except this time instead of instancing on our abstract object we are going to be instancing on this object that we made earlier and set off to the side so let's move that guy back to zero zero we're going to select our second volume empty we're going to go back over to add modifiers and we're going to add a mesh to volume modifier just like last time and we are going to instance that object now we can go ahead and turn that off for now and you can see that we've got smoke in the center of our guy again now the reason we're doing this is because I want the smoke to look like it's kind of coming from somewhere that way it's a little bit more grounded and rooted in reality now something we can kind of do is play around with the scaling of this object because as you know we are instancing it so our volume is going to take place with whatever our mesh is so if we scale this up and down and then turn it off again it affects our volume I want this to be just a little bit smaller than our abstract volume that way you know when we're playing with it it's a little bit more uh like I said coming from something and we want this to be just a little bit smaller than our abstract volume that way it acts as kind of like the core smoke object and now on this one we are also going to add a volume displace and we're going to add a new texture we're going to click our little button again and in this one we might work our way around to working on more of a real kind of cloud so I'm going to turn off our first volume for a little bit just so I can get this shape a little bit better all right so with a little bit of playing this is what I think I'm going to go with for our internal volume I added one volume displace with these bass settings here and we're going to switch over to our texture we used a Musgrave set to blender original and fbm here are settings for our size and this is just to kind of give us that wavy kind of smoke look I find that that kind of helps a little bit with the realism and then on top of that we added a second volume displays and this is going to help give us some of that like wispy kind of smoke you know like it's blowing in the wind so again there are the settings for that and if we come over into our texture we can see that it is a distorted noise set to Verona F1 and Verona F4 with our amount and size available here now if we turn both of these back on you can see it's definitely abstract and a little bit weird uh maybe a little bit too messy and we can kind of work on that a little bit I have a few tricks so the very first thing that we can do is come over to both of our volumes and increase our voxel count to something like 500. now this is definitely a little bit heavy while we're working the scene but this is just so that we can better visualize what we're actually working on we are going to turn this back down so from there something we can do is play around with our mid values and what this actually does is change the location of our volume so you can see as we increase these it kind of changes the value of where it's sitting a little bit and this can help to add some breakup if these are the two different smokes are at different values it can also change your your output and act kind of like a seed generator if you're on something where you're like I like the effect but it's not quite in the right position try playing around with some of these numbers you might find that you like something better just by changing these around a little bit so with our base shape kind of created let's start working on some of the materials that I used for the volume now I just pulled this one in from my thumbnail project file and you can see it's a very simple material we're taking two different principal volumes feeding them into a mix Shader and then we're mixing them via our texture coordinate and mapping nodes plugged into a must creative texture plugged into our color ramp and if we switch over to rendered mode you can see that this is where our colors are coming from so with our color ramp just like any other material that you see me make here before you could move around your sliders to kind of adjust the fade on these and something that I did on our principled volumes is increasing our density values it will make your scene a little bit heavier when you're in rendered mode however I do think that it makes the smoke look uh a little bit more like almost like egg crate foam if you know what I'm talking about I'll try to find a picture and put it on screen it starts to look a little bit less like uh like smoke but a little bit more cool I don't know I just really like it again if you're looking for more like traditional smoke lower the density of the volume it's totally fine and as for a Musgrave texture here all this is is adding a little bit of Randomness into how it's being separated you can see that if you increase your your size here a little bit you know you you play around with your detail scaling it's all going to change how this is getting faded between the two of them and if you don't like the way that the Musgrave is looking you can change it out for say a Verona texture you know just drop this guy in and it's the same kind of thing right so with both of our volumes turned on you can see it's a little bit heavier in the viewport than it was just navigating uh regularly but totally workable definitely manageable um and yeah I do think it looks very cool the only other thing that I did in the thumbnail scene was I turned back on the abstract model and I added my original glass Shader version one to it these are the base settings that I used for the roughness ior and value pretty default and then I changed the the red ever so slightly just so it's a little bit more pink in its refraction color and if we turn this back on you can now see it there in the center as for the lighting in the thumbnail I had a pretty similar lighting setup to what I have here however if you want to see the exact lighting setup you know the project files are available on my patreon but something that I did do was I put a light in the center of our volume here now for this one I'm not totally certain if I like the the light in the center it kind of gets rid of too much of the depth of the smoke so something that I might want to do is click on our volume number two and increase the density you guys want to just see the Discord message pop up for my friends too who's a fellow 3D artist so if you made it this far in the video can you leave a comment that says Stu it'll never end the render's gonna take forever I think that that's very funny sorry anyways um our density we can increase this a little bit to maybe something like three and it'll give us back some of the the breakup that we were losing by adding that light in the center you can see it kind of increases our shadow value over here and I really like the way that that looks and after playing with some settings I ended up with this now I tried a few different versions of this before I landed on this one and you'll see in the thumbnail I like that one a little bit more however it was just a lot of playing around with the noises and the displacements to decide what I really wanted out of the effect and I think we got a pretty good thing going here total render time on these was about 25 minutes give or take a couple you know now that is a little bit long but I rendered to 8K samples you don't have to do that but I thought it was necessary because it is a still and either way I think it turned out pretty good however if you want to know more details about how I got the thumbnail to look the way that it did that project file as well as the project file that we went over in this video are available on my patreon speaking of my patreon thank you to my patrons for making as possible and continue to support me I can't express enough how much I really really appreciate it thank you so much for watching I hope you have a wonderful day and I will see you again real soon

Channel: atti

Views: 61,087

Keywords: Editing, animation, #3d, #blender, #render, #b3d, #abstract, #scifiart, #surreal, #3dart, #design, #mdcommunity, #renderzone, #illustration, #adobe, #graphicdesign, #artdirection, #octanerender, #behance, #styleframe, #motiondesign, #motiongraphics, #houdini, #satifying

Id: 0faTUXpphos

Length: 14min 10sec (850 seconds)

Published: Sun May 14 2023