Create a Looping Sci-Fi Environment In Eevee (Blender Tutorial)

[Music] how's it going guys so in today's tutorial i'm going to show you how to make this really cool animating loop we've got a bunch of really cool grebel stuff going on we're going to be using an add-on to make this really interesting variable height kind of grid on the bottom having some fun with animation and some glowing so we're going to get into that right after this quick message today's video is brought to you by the real-time materials it is a collection of 200 fully editable and procedural materials made for eevee and cycles there's a wide variety of materials going from marble to ceramics to plaster and tons of beautiful abstract materials if you would like to know more hit the link in the description below all right we're back if you want to see the sort of grayscale view of what's happening here this is what we've created and yeah so let's go ahead and get into how to make this we're gonna be making this flat portion first so let's go ahead and get a new blank document and let me show you what add-on we're using all right so in the description i'm going to link this add-on right here it's totally free and you can choose to donate some if you'd like and this is how we're making the grids it's called grid breaker it's a really really cool add-on and let me show you how to use it first off when you download it you're going to get a zip file all you're going to want to do is go to edit preferences make sure to not unzip the file if you're using mac it'll probably unzip it for you be sure to zip that back up don't use the internal files here then right over here you're going to click on add-ons you'll click install and then you'll just go to your desktop wherever you chose to save it and for me it's right here grid like grid breaker kind of slurred there and just double click it and then you'll see right here mesh grid breaker click the little check mark and you'll be ready to go now if it doesn't work be sure to hit up the developer i didn't have any problems so i'm not sure how i would fix any problems that come up but it should work just fine for you so what you'll do is you'll click this little arrow here and you'll see grid breaker you don't need any mesh to start with just click the plus icon and you have your mesh now here's how it works it's really really cool so here is your cuts here so if you add cuts you add more it's almost like a big city you can add these sort of low poly cities if you want i'm gonna keep my cuts at three because i want three levels of detail for my scene after that it can get pretty heavy and the more things you add to this add-on the more computational more computationally heavy it will get so keep that in mind here we have distribution so you can the farther you the smaller distribution the more just regular squares you'll get the more distribution here you get the more smaller cubes so i'm going to keep mine at 0.8 here because i kind of like this distribution here for what we're going to be designing and then you you do have a seed right here in case you're not a fan of what's going on it's a little buggy once we get into these higher pieces but the developer said he will be updating and adding new features as he goes along so keep an eye out for that i'm going to do 0.75 actually i feel like that's a lot better now we can go ahead and add our height now let's go ahead to my flat view i'm going to bring my height down a little bit because i don't want it too tall something like this and also if you don't like the margin you can bring the margin down and that gives you more space there which is what i'm going to do right now so now you have your height what's really really cool is we have random height and now you get more random height if you bring our height up here like 0.5 here look at that look how cool that is that's super exciting for this add-on that's i think that's one thing that makes it super special and uh yeah so that's let's go ahead and bring that 0.2 maybe 0.05 this will probably do now here's something that's also really cool and what we're going to do now is making these circular grids so what i'm going to do is i'm going to go ahead and get an empty sorry i'm going to get a curve and a circle and i'm gonna bring it up about that size it doesn't really matter how big you make it but make it fairly big click on this here and we're gonna go here under the the wrench add the curve modifier and go ahead and select that curve and look at that it attaches itself to your curve now what you can do here is bring up the the size and make them touch so we'll go all the way to the end and you might go oh well that's pretty ugly yes it is but you can fix that problem with the amount of cells you add so the more cells the closer you get to having square so i'm going to go up here to a count of 40. and there we go now we have this this almost looks like an above shot of burning man if you know what i'm talking about it's a music it's a music festival and all the tents and stuff they go into the circular pattern and it's pretty cool so i'm going to bring my size back because they're kind of touching right here and as you can see there's some lag and that's because it does get computationally heavy once we get to those big pieces but once you're done computing all the changes in the add-on this is actually pretty low poly so you're not actually adding like massive density what you're seeing is what you're getting just a bunch of cubes all right so we finished with this outer piece here now for me i think i want the height to be a little bit more actually let me think i'm trying to remember how i initially designed this yeah so i think the height can be a little bit more here so 0.05 0.08 might be a little better so there we go it looks a little bit better now i'm going to go ahead and do the same thing here just make a smaller one here in the center i'm just going to speed through that process if you'd like to do that you can do it as well just copy what i did right here now as i'm designing the smaller one one thing i did was i made my margin really small that's one thing i did to make this piece in the middle less obnoxious than the one in the background so that's kind of a little subtlety i added there for detail if you'd like to do that just bring your margin down and your distribution up a little bit alright so here we go we have the initial piece here we have the one in the middle and the one on the outside the one in the middle is not quite so high has more of a margin in it and this one it has more margin higher pieces and more bigger pieces so we're kind of keeping that hierarchy of design here all right so what i'm going to do now is highlight these guys i'm going to hit alt d and what that does is create an instance of the guys below so we're not adding more topology to our scene so now that we are bringing that up we're starting to actually get into the design part of this tutorial so we already have something really cool and very alien ship like i'm going to go ahead and i'm going to hit the tilde key here and go to the very front we're going to go ahead and set up our camera now so we can kind of visualize what's going on i like to have fun while i'm designing so setting up my camera i can start to imagine how this is imagine how the scene is going to look so we're going to go ahead and get another curve and we're going to get the circle now for this one here in the outliner i'm going to double click it and call it rig and then we're going to get one more piece we're creating a quick camera rig now so we're going to go ahead and get it empty plain access and we're going to call this track so we have rig and track and then let's go ahead and get in our camera so let's get the camera and add two constraints to it so the first constraint so right here is where the contains constraints are so click on the camera click on constraints and we're going to add in a follow path click on the target and we're going to get rig so that's super important now we can go ahead and take rig and we can hit s and scale it out we can even bring it up a little bit but now that camera is tracked to our circle here now if we click here let's go ahead and bring those resolution previews all the way up so there's no low polyness and kind of weirdness in the circle now one thing we didn't do is add one more constraint to the camera and that is a track two so we're gonna go ahead and click track two click this and we're gonna go ahead and click track what that's going to do now is when we have that empty that camera is going to follow that empty so we can have some flexibility with where that camera is going with that without having to go in here and try to figure it out it's really easy to just kind of visually have this camera rig ready for you to go let's go ahead and fix some of this stuff here so we want the camera to kind of be pointing there and then clicking on the camera click on the little green camera icon we're going to go here to like 24 millimeters and then we're going to click on this here i want to be right about there i think we can bring these guys a little bit closer to the ground so now we have this now what's really cool about these constraints we added is we go back to the constraints and get the follow path right here on offset that's how we can get that really cool circular animation and we are off to a really good start let's go ahead and save the scene so we're going to hit save as with the desktop and just name it whatever you want which is what i literally did so have some fun with that if you want all right so now we have this we're going to go ahead and hit z and render view and we are in cycles we're going to be using ev so click to the camera icon and click evie there's no need to use cycles for this let's go ahead to the world bring that brightness all the way to black and then let's go ahead and get in a light we're going to get an area light here and we're going to bring it up for the shape of the area light click right over here i'm going to go here to disk i'm not sure how much of a difference that makes but if it does make a slight difference it does matter to me so we're going to bring that power up to 100 for now let's go ahead and add some volume into this scene so i'm going to hit shift a and get an object and it's going to be our volume object so scale it up to fit the whole scene control a control a apply scale right over here we don't want to really see it so we're going to go here to viewport display we're going to go here to wire so now we're going to do that let's go back here and we're going to click on the shading tab i'm going to hit 0 to go to the camera view right up here click that to suit see the render now we have the cube selected click new and i'm going to go ahead delete this shift a get an a volume we're going to get a volume object so principled volume in the search plug it there and we're gonna go to something like this so it looks at about zero point zero point one on the density for now now one thing we wanna do in our ev settings is turn on ambient occlusion bloom screen space reflections and motion blur and then right here on volumetrics bring your tile size to four what that's going to do is give these really these nice beams a much better look and if we were to render it right now they'll look even better in the render as you can see they're much smoother rather than having your tile size at eight so here on the tile size even if you bring it over to two you'll get even smoother volumes so now you have even better ones it's very incrementally better but it does up your render time and your preview times so just keep it at four for this really it's not gonna be super crazy now click on the area light really quick i'm gonna go ahead and give it just a subtle blue color that's what i always like to do here for these subtle blue let's go ahead and make a quick material for this make sure you are in the shading tab now this is a material i've made about a hundred times but it is in my opinion one of the most versatile materials you can use here in blender when making these sort of metallic looking sci-fi scenes so bring the metallic up here on this material i'm going to go ahead and bring the color down a little bit i'm going to go ahead and bring the color down a little bit and we are working on this one right here this uh this model so bring the color down we're gonna go ahead shift a get a color ramp and if you've seen the channel a whole bunch of times before we're doing that material with the the noise texture so go ahead and get a noise texture here with the node wrangler add-on enabled you just do that in the preferences here it comes with blender by default control t i'm gonna hit g to bring it up and we're gonna use the object coordinate and then we're going to plug the factor into the color amp and we should see some stuff changing let's go ahead and let's bring that detail up to 12 that roughness up if we bring this black portion in and then this white portion and now you're going to see some details start to show up and that is what we want let's bring the black up just a little bit so it's not like a full mirror now we have some details so what we're just going to do here is we're going to click on this guy hold down shift click on this guy control l which links things and we'll link materials and there we go now we have materials and because these guys up here are instances of this guy down here they have the material as well and that's really fun so we already have like a pretty cool kind of game concept going for us already and if we get this area light we do want to make it a little bit brighter so i'm going to give my brightness at and then i do want to move this area light up like this so that in the render we don't actually want to see the source of light we want it to be higher up so now we're going to go ahead and start adding some other objects here to this scene and i'm going to go ahead and actually bring this guy up a little bit and save my file let's go ahead back to the flat view and let's get in a icosphere right down here we're going to go ahead and run the subdivisions down to one this is one of my favorite modeling things to do here so we're going to bring that down a little bit we're going to click on the modifiers here add modifier wireframe bring up the thickness a little bit let's go ahead and add in a bevel modifier so add the bevel and then the last thing we're going to do is add in a subdivision surface to that bevel and bring up that subdivision right click shade smooth and then we're going to go ahead and bring that thickness of the wire frame up to something like this and then now we can just bring this straight up to the middle make a little bit smaller and i'm going to hit go ahead and shift d duplicate this guy like that and then we're going to make one more duplication shift d bring it down and then what we're going to want to do here for hierarchy visual hierarchy we're going to get this and let's go ahead and bring the thickness down on this one and this one bring the thickness down even farther so now we get a little bit of visual hierarchy and i'm gonna hit r twice and just kind of rotate them to see how they'll look in my scene and then if i go here looks pretty cool i'm going to get in a icosphere again but this time i'm going to subdivide him quite a bit with this dialogue down here right click shade smooth and we're going to bring it all the way down i do want to make sure that he fits within this here so i'm just going to get a view yep looks like everything fits correctly that's what we want he will be the focal point he will be the piece that kind of brings the focal point in one really interesting thing one really important thing to know about design is when it comes to focal point it's either the darkest or brightest point of your scene giving you a nice contrast and that's going to be this here i'm going to click on the camera icon go to color management make sure your visual view transform make sure your view transform is on filmic and you're on high contrast so i'm going to go ahead and click on the three objects that i made holding down shift of course and then the last one click here ctrl l link materials so now we have this going on here what i'm going to do though is make these brighter in a little bit let's go ahead and design this material here so let's go back to shading if you've seen the channel a whole bunch and you want to zoom through we're going to add an emission and a layer weight but if you've never done that before get a new material click this shift a e m in the search for emission plug that there we're going to get in a color ramp we're going to plug this here and then we're going to make this a green love to have some green glowing here so the last the last node we're going to add is a layer weight so search l-a-y layer weight we're going to do facing here and then now you can kind of see how there's a gradient we're going to bring that strength up pretty high we're going to go from linear to b spline so you get a more smooth gradient and then you can bring that in a little bit if you'd like and then this blend right here you can see how that kind of works so now let's see how this is looking in our scene so i'm gonna hit zero to go to the camera view and then i'm gonna make this kind of that color here and then you play with your blend until you get a material that you want so that looks pretty good all right so now we're going to start the animation process but i mentioned a minute ago we are going to make these brighter because i want these ico spheres to be more of a focal point so one really cool thing you can do you can see this number five right here in the shading we're in the shading tab right here you see how there's five that means this one materials on five objects so if you change this material it's gonna change on all the objects so if you click the five makes a duplicate and now you have a unique material the reason why we wanted to be unique is because now we're going to make this one much brighter here and then what you can do is now that you can't see it's much brighter we're going to darken these in a minute what we're going to do here is click this model that one in the middle and then this one that we just changed control l link materials now those are brighter we're going to go ahead and get these materials to be a good bit darker and then we're just going to go ahead and bring up that brightness in a little bit so now we have a better focal point so you can see these are much darker and these are much brighter so you get more of a focal point and you get the glare to really attach itself here so that's something really cool all right so now we're going to go ahead and start animating so let's go into the preference here edit preferences and one thing we need to do is go into the animation and make sure your default interpolation is set to linear so what we're going to do is going to click on our camera and we're going to go and animate those constraints we made so i'm going to give myself 500 frames may seem like a lot but you're using ev so it'll render much much quicker than any cycles animation at 500 frames so we're going to go right over here and we're going to start at frame 0. that's super super important for making this loop if you don't care about looping don't worry about that so we're going to get our offset all the way over here to zero in this particular constraint a value of 100 is a perfect loop so if you click here and i'm going to click this right over here and then type in 100 enter you didn't see anything change but it did a full circle so if just to show you that i'll click on the keyframe now we're doing a full circle here and if we go back here we're going to get a seamless loop at pause but that's just because of the viewport if we go here it's a seamless loop already now we're going to go ahead and animate our icospheres really quickly now i want them to start where they're at right now because it gives a more organic looking animation so what i'm going to do is i'm going to select all of them i'm going to hit control a and apply rotation so that means they're they're going to start where they're at so the it's it's sort of a organic thing for for look if you don't care you can just set them all back to a rotation of zero where they started so what i'm going to do is a little bit of rotation fun i've taught this a couple times here in the channel it's one of my favorite things to do so one thing is the bigger the object the slower i want it to rotate so the first one we're going to do is this keyframe in this keyframe of course starting at frame 0 we're going to go to the end and type in 360 and 360. that's going to give us a perfect rotation and then if we look at this now we have that rotating we're going to go back to frame 0 i'm going to click on the second biggest object and i'm going to animate these two here and then i'm going to do three six zero times three and that's going to give us 1080 and then this one i'm going to do 7 20. so these are all rotations so now this one's going to rotate three times this one's going to rotate two times you can see it's rotating faster than this object so it gives you this really really cool effect and on the smaller one i'm going to do a 360 time five so i'm going to do these two axes so i'm going to just slide over them go to the very end so three six zero time five that's eighteen hundred and this one i'm gonna do negative eighteen hundred and now we have our animation our rotating piece here doing its thing last thing i want to animate is the focal point i mean the aspect ratio of our lens that's really really fun to do i do want to go ahead and in our preferences go back to the animation default interpolation make it bezier super important for this so now in this particular instance we don't need to start at frame 0. so if you don't know what i mean by aspect ratio i mean sorry focal length it's this right here so i want to animate that so i'm going to start here really close in right in on our objects like that and then i'm going to go ahead and start my keyframe i want it to kind of sit there for a little bit so something like this click keyframe and then i want to give it a good amount of time to slide all the way out to 24 millimeters in fact we can even go farther out to be kind of crazy like that so if we check that animation it'll slowly go back zoom way out which is a really cool effect and then now i want to kind of zoom in a little bit to for kind of a refresher something like that and so if we check that animation it's going to zoom way out kind of give you a big look at what's going on and then bring you back in and then i kind of want to sit there for a little bit and so i'm going to click this keyframe so that it sits maybe set it right there i'm going to uh bring it back again to right there and then let's go see where it started we're at 66 millimeters so we're gonna go all the way to the end here and bring it at 66 millimeters so i want to stop and start at 66 so that it loops so now if we check that animation it's going all the way out comes all the way back in sits there for a minute zooms out again and then we're going to zoom all the way back in for this really cool animation now for volume i want to click on my cube it's a little bit too much well first off let's bring in that contrast to a very high contrast it's a little bit too much so what we're going to do is first maybe the area light is too powerful something like that and then we can also bring down our volume so click on the cube in the outliner go back to shading and uh because it's just so washed out just bring it in something like this actually let's do 0.08 and that should give us something a little bit better so there we go so that is the animation that we've created in my original animation i went around and added a little bit more flair to some things like that but i'm going to leave that part up for your creative control whatever else you want to add some particles some tubes some other things like that feel free to add to this animation to make it yours but that is how we create this if you want to know how to export it click on this little printer icon make your resolution whatever you'd like it to be you can even change the aspect ratio of this to make it look more cinematic or for mobile whatever you want to do there and then right here you can change your frame rate you can go here and click where you want to save it so click that file if you want to do a png sequence and compile it yourself you can just leave it here at default if you want to just have blender give you a full finished video we'll go to we'll click on png we'll go to ffmpeg video encoding to mp4 and output quality to perceptually lossless and when you're done render render animation let it render out all your frames and you'll have a really really cool animation thank you guys for watching i hope you enjoyed this and i will see you in the next tutorial

Channel: Ducky 3D

Views: 104,988

Rating: 4.9785256 out of 5

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Id: nUcwRFQ99O0

Length: 26min 2sec (1562 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 04 2021