Create a Sci-fi Animation only with Geometry Nodes (Blender Tutorial)

how's it going guys so in today's video we're going to be making this animation right here and it's completely done in geometry nodes and we're rendering it in evie so it's going to be really fun and very easy to render now really quick the free version of the real-time materials add-on is now available on blender market totally free hit the link in description and it's going to give you 40 procedural materials that you can use on any project professional personal whatever very powerful really cool materials so if you want to check that out hit the link in the description all right so let's go ahead and get this going so we're gonna hit shift a and get a plane then let's just run up over here and get the geometry nodes workspace and i'm gonna delete this window because i never use it all right so let's go ahead hit new and delete that group input and we're gonna go ahead and get in a a grid so let's go shift a search grid we're going to give the size right here on 20 and the size here at 40. so we get this nice big thing here all right so i'm going to go over here to the wireframe view so we're going to give this right here 30 and this right here 60 and that's going to give us some relatively square faces and it's going to be nicely subdivided now for this to give the give you that kind of low poly kind of older looking style we're going to triangulate it so shift a search t ryan triangulate throw it there and now we have these triangles rather than squares squares don't really fit with the style that we're going for now for the longest time i couldn't figure out how to displace within the geometry nodes workspace i figured it out there may be other methods but this is my method so we're going to go ahead and get a set position node and that's going to control where this guy goes so we're going to use a noise texture to displace this so let's go ahead and get in a noise texture and we're also going to get a map range instead of using a color ramp the map range gives us more displacement capabilities the color ramp is pretty uh pretty useless here in this example so we'll put in the offset and what we'll notice here is if we go to the max just kind of goof with it we're having an issue so we need to go ahead so we need we need to go ahead and get a combined xyz and so that is going to limit the displacement to the specified axis oops that's rgb so comm combine xyz so that's going to limit it to the z-axis which is going up and down so now if we play with this it's displacing up and down which is what we want all right so now that we have this let's go ahead and just play with the displacement so we're going to be messing with this map range so what we want is to kind of see it kind of plateau so we have we want these flat regions and then these other regions to kind of poke straight out those flat regions are going to kind of make you feel a little bit more grounded in the animation so now that we have that then you can play with the max and you're going to get this right here and if you want to kind of meet it a little bit you can play with that minimum actually maybe it's not the minimum it is the right here so you can kind of meet it there now we can also go from 3d to 4d so we can actually animate this and then play with that scale you want that scale to be like 0.4 we have a lot more control here and then we can just kind of bring these down a little bit and really just kind of play with the look of this animation but it's really fun you can have a lot of fun with this and again that w is going to be what we use to animate this whole scene um so we're going to try to get the perspective of the camera things don't need to be that heavily displaced this will work for now and then we'll edit it later as we go um so something like this that'll look pretty good all right so let's go ahead and continue modeling we're going to go ahead and get a we're going to go ahead and get a join geometry node join geometry and then we're going to get a mesh to curve i'm going to highlight these two and use g to move it over let's put this right in here set all of these nodes creates this flat portion and then we're going to plug this here and you'll see now it's working you can see those outlines it's recognizing your mesh and it's turning it into a curve now we're going to curve to mesh curve to mesh and then we're going to get a circle curve search circle curved circle uh let's bring this radius here to 0.05 that's probably too big but we'll find out and plug that into the profile curve yeah it's too big so we'll go down to one that's good now we do however need to add one more node which is another set position plug that there and then we need to bring this up we want this to be above and then we're gonna make this one maybe two all right that'll work for now we'll probably bring it down it might be too big actually but it's really gonna depend on where we put our camera all right all right we need to add one more node to all right so we need to add one more set of nodes to finish this off but first i wanna go ahead i'm gonna hold down control and right click and slice this off and we're gonna put the set position node here because that's important for the next node that we're going to add so we have the set position which is only moving that so let's go ahead and get an instance on point so an instance on point node and then we're gonna plug this set position right into the points and we're gonna get ico sphere with a subdivision of 3 and a radius of 0.1 and plug that into the instance and then we'll plug this instance to point into the join geometry so that's going to give us that definitely needs to be smaller so i'm going to hold down shift and just kind of move the scale manually to however i like it so 0.06 it's probably gonna be too big so let's go to four all right that looks about good i like that now we may notice in the animation that this is not smooth so we'll get a set shade smooth node and put that right there that's going to smooth that out all right so now we're ready if we just want to kind of test how this works this is what we just created all right so now we can go ahead and add our camera so i'm gonna hit the tilt key which is right above the tab key i'm gonna click front shift a add that camera and then what's very important let's hit the tilde key and go to the right i'm gonna go to the move tool here bring my camera up hold down shift it's very important hold down shift because we're going to go to the very exact edge of this to make sure that this is going to be a seamless loop so i'm going to hold down control so it snaps to each grid and go to the very end which is to me is going to be a negative 20. so if i hit zero i now have my camera all set and ready in my camera settings i'm going to go ahead and make it very wide angle right here on the focal length so that's going to look nice and then we can hit g and middle click and see how that's going to look pretty cool all right let's go back to layout so i'm hit g maybe move my camera down a little bit here which we should do that in the transform settings to make sure we don't mess anything up now i'm going to go ahead i'm going to click this guy i'm going to hit alt d to make an instance i'm going to hit r x 180 and then i'm going to move it up so now we have this whole scene ready to be animated but we need to go ahead and instance this down the line so that it's a seamless loop and you can't see the end so i'm gonna highlight these two i'm gonna hit m new collection and i'm gonna name it whatever i want shift a collection instance and loop now this is another example we need to hold down controls hold down control so it snaps to grid and bring it to the very edge right there so this is going to ensure again that we have a seamless loop and then if we want to be careful hit alt d and do that one more time just to make sure we can't see the very end of our animation so let's go ahead and animate this animate the camera really quick just to see what we're working with now go to your edit preferences and click on the animation tab right here make sure your default interpolation is linear i'm gonna hit zero and we're gonna go to the camera and we're gonna animate this camera i'm gonna keep it at the 250 frames that's pretty good for me and i'm gonna hit the back arrow on the timeline to go to frame zero so here on the camera i'm gonna hit the tilde key i'm gonna go to the right and what we wanna do is just bring the camera to the edge of this first set so remember when we move the camera we held down control just to make sure we stay on these grids you want to stop the camera at this grid right here if you follow if you've done everything i've done you should just see the numbers and i'll give you the numbers so we'll go back to the camera and then here on the y making sure you're on frame zero i'm going to click the 20 i'm going to bring my cursor to the over here to frame 250 and then i'm going to hold down control and go all the way to the end right here which is positive 20 and then we'll get the keyframe and then now if we go to the very end here you'll notice seamless loop so i'm going to go to the end of the timeline seamless loop it just kind of goes forever so that's the goal and then of course we will also if we go to the geometry nodes tab [Music] we're also going to be animating our displacement like this so it's going to look really really cool all right now that we have this let's go ahead and start adding materials so let's go to geometry nodes first and we need to add something specific to geometry nodes so see this join geometry each wire that's going in it represents one set of objects here so we have this flat plane here we have the wireframe and then we also have the spheres so we need to add a material to each one of those and the way geometry nodes is set up you need to add the materials within geometry nodes so shift a search set material and i'm going to do that i'm going to bring this geometry over here i'm going to hit shift d and plop it on each of them so we need to create three materials right over here in the sidebar so we're gonna click new call this metal right there and then if i'm not mistaken this line right here represents the flat portion so we're just gonna add the metal material that we need to add another material called wire now you can name these whatever you want i'm just calling them wire so i know it's the wireframe or it's the instances or if it's the flat plane so i believe the other one with the curve to mesh is going to be your wireframe and then make another one called inst short for instance and put that one here all right so very quickly on the metal one we're going to go here to the material preview let's go ahead and click on the metal we're going to make it metallic and make it much darker here and then on the wire frame we're just going to go ahead and also make it metallic and darker but we're going to add something else to that and then here on the instance we're going to go from principled to emission make it a nice blue and then bring up that brightness so so far we have this which looks really cool but we're going to we're gonna make it even better so let's go to shading and go to my camera view just so i can see right here we're gonna go to slot one which is this metal and we're gonna make it rough so let's get a color ramp add that to the roughness let's go ahead and get a noise texture if you have the node wrangler add-on enabled comes with blender by default hit control t which is adding a mapping node and a texture coordinate using the object coordinate we'll plug that into the color ramp and then we'll just crunch these two in a little bit like that we'll scale it up let's bring that detail to 12 you never want to max it out to 15 that makes it slow and then we'll bring that roughness up maybe we can bring some of that detail down roughness needs to come up on this black portion bring it closer to a white so it's more of a rough metal which is what we're looking for let's just see how this thing interacts with light looks pretty good we'll bring that roughness up some more and this is what we have so far in our metal let's go here to slot for the wire and then we're going to create a much more interesting material here which is a combination of the metal and the glowing so let's get the mix shader we'll get an emission which actually let's go ahead and just steal i'm going to go ahead and hit ctrl c and steal it ctrl v to paste it put it right there okay so now we have that we need to mix these two together so let's get a color ramp let's get a noise texture hit control t to get that plug that here plug the noise texture here and plug the color ramp into the factor and then if you bring in this color ramp now it'll start to reveal that metallic material so let's go and make the scale like one and then bring it something over here maybe even like that and so what we can do is when we go to 4d on the noise texture and let it load we can animate this as well it gives you a lot of really cool power let's go back here to the metal and let's just go ahead and highlight that roughness ctrl c go to the wire control v just paste it and hit g to move it over and plug that into the roughness of the principled so now that metallic material is just like the one below it marries them together now it looks really nice so let's go ahead and switch over to evie make sure you hit the check mark on ambient occlusion blooms screen space reflections and motion blur and then on your screen space for reflections turn off half res trace and bring your trace precision all the way up and so now in ev we have this i'm going to hit g and middle click on my camera so we can kind of explore it it's looking really good let's go ahead and add lighting so here in the world bring that all the way down to black all right now let's go ahead and add the light so shift a light area and then it's going to be right here let's just give it a power of a thousand i'm going to go here to my transform and bring it closer to me with the y just like that and then we'll bring it and then we'll rotate it on the y by 90 degrees and then we're not really going to see the full effect of this until we add our volume so let's do that click on the world icon go to volume on none go to principled volume and then bring your density to 0.1 maybe 0.01 yeah that's better okay so now on this area light we'll just go ahead and change the color to a nice orangey red i'm gonna hit shift d on this area light bring it over to this side and then on the transform settings just add a negative right by the 90 and that's going to flip it the other way and we're going to make that a nice blue it kind of looks like a police blue you make more more teal and then maybe go to like 2000 of the brightness very cool all right one more light we're going to add just to give it some more some more interest is a point light right here in the middle we're also going to make red give it power of a thousand and then here on the y bring it as close as you want to kind of fill that out and this is the scene that we are working with now here in your camera settings go on here to color management and make sure you are at high contrast i'm gonna go to very high contrast and then bring my gamma down to make that contrast even higher so we have our camera if we press play this is going through but it's pretty boring and we also need to parent the lights to the camera so click on the area light hold down shift click on the other area light hold down control click on the point and then the last holding on control click on the camera hit control p that's going to bring up your parent menus and then hit object and now when you press play your lights are going to follow this guy let's go ahead and add some depth of field so this isn't going to be so weird so click on that camera go to the green camera icon click on depth of field and bring your f-stop all the way down to one so you can get very exact so you can see your focus distance so i want to focus right about there and then bring your f-stop back to just things like in the um what would this call be the foreground the foreground are out of focus making things look a little bit better all right so we're ready to animate let's go back to geometry nodes and play with this displacement a little bit to make it look better so let's go to the ev preview we're going to go to our noise texture and let's go ahead and play with this until we kind of like the way it looks all right i think it's going to work now so we need to animate this displacement now if you haven't saved your file go ahead and do that now so you don't get a real depressed when it messes up we're going to call this okay all right so we need to animate this noise texture specifically animate the w but there's not really a very easy way to make that loop seamlessly so we're going to do a little bit of a hack it's a really fun way to do it so we're going to go ahead and hit shift d on the noise texture shift and search mix rgb plug that there and we'll plug this noise texture into here so we're going to go ahead and animate between the two of them i've done this a few times here on the channel it's a very fun way to loop the w which the w is kind of the reason is to kind of give randomness and stuff like that i'm sure there's a more technical way to explain that so right here in the timeline go back to frame 0. here on this mix rgb bring it to factor of zero hit i go to very end and then just drag it all the way to one and then hit i again so that animated that now let's go back to frame zero here on the w let me see if i can just kind of eyeball how much i want it to animate all right so we'll do maybe three okay so here in the w hover over that make sure you have frame zero hit i go to the very end and type three and then hit i make sure this noise texture is exactly the way this one is and right here on the scale right right here on the w make sure it's at zero here hit i go very end go back to frame 0 and type in three so they meet each other halfway so now if we press play it is going to loop now it's really slow it's really really slow and the reason being we need to go to geometry nodes right here on this circle curve bring your resolution down to like five so now it's going to play now see how it's animating i actually think that's just far too slow like the animation is barely moving this needs to be cool this needs to be fast so here's what we'll do notice i mentioned i said three i'm gonna go back to frame zero see how it says three we're gonna double that we're gonna make it six and then you right click replace keyframe and then go to the very end right here where it says three type in six right click replace keyframe and now it's moving much better i would even animate it faster but for the sake of this tutorial we're just gonna you can do whatever you want but the higher that number the faster this is going to animate so we'll leave it at that so now when we press play your displacement's coming up it's coming down and it's very it's very slow but i don't want to redo it again you guys get the idea you can now have some fun with this loop so one more thing needs to be animated and that's the wireframe material so we'll go here to shading and we'll go here slot 2 for me which is the wire and then right up here you have this noise texture we're going to animate this guy and it's pretty sensitive to my knowledge um this is a 10 second animation so like one two three four yes so it's pretty sensitive so we'll animate it to six as well so we're gonna do the same thing make sure start your w at zero shift d on this noise texture bring it over here get a mix rgb and then we'll plug the factor into color two let's hover over here on this plus icon and just bring this up click on that and get a timeline so we'll go back to frame zero so same thing right here on this mix rgb i'm gonna hit i go to the very end slide it over to one let's go back and get to frame zero right here we're gonna hover over this and hit i go to the end and type in six hit i and then right on this one since it's at zero at 250 hit i go to varian go to frame 0 and type in 6 i so that's also extremely slow honestly surprised so we'll do the same redo process so but in this type case let's just go extreme and do like 20. right click replace keyframe go to the end right click replace keyframe there we are now let's see now that that emission is animating really nicely over the scene i like the pace of it so that i would do 20 with the scale um the parameters were different when i was planning the original tutorial all right so this is the process everything's pretty slow um and you can also go ahead and like change things like i'm at 24 frames a second let's go to like 30 make it smoother um but this is the animation and you can make it crazier i would say have some fun with your displacement on the geometry nodes and make it even more dramatic with this to max that may be like um there we go maybe have some more fun with the max on this but this is you know the rest of it is like totally up to you to do whatever you want but this is the animation this is the design let me show you how to export this and we'll be done so right here on this printer icon click that pick your resolution because this is evie it's likely not to crash if you have a pretty decent computer so we're going to go inside of a png sequence if you think your computer is going to crash i would recommend just sticking to png otherwise we'll do just a video so ffmpeg video we're going to go to encoding make that mp4 output quality perceptually lossless render render animation and you're all done so there you guys go that is how you create that animation by the end of it you'll have something really cool uh so thank you guys for watching be sure to get the free real-time materials add-on if you want to check that out and i'll see you in the next tutorial

Channel: Ducky 3D

Views: 20,245

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Id: 3p2B6dZIRTY

Length: 23min 39sec (1419 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 22 2022