Create An Animated Microchip Landscape In Blender - No Addons Required

hello and welcome to another exciting blender tutorial i'm chris bailey and today we're gonna be making this super cool microchip landscape let's get started [Music] okay so today we're gonna be building up this microchip landscape uh using a lot of cool procedural techniques uh i hope you're really excited just a reminder you can find the full version of this tutorial on patreon if you go check that out it's about two hours long a lot of cut content a lot of things where i'm trying to figure everything out really worth your time if you want to check that out also you can get that on youtube if you become a channel member at the all access pass level all right let's jump in and get started i'm going to start with a fresh scene so i'm just going to go over here file new and i'm not going to save that there we go fresh scene we're going to hit a and x to delete everything okay so first thing we want to do is lay out our landscape so let's go ahead and hit shift a and create a plane i'm going to scale it right up and i'm also going to go ahead and create my microchip or at least a starting object to represent the microchip so i'm going to create the cube and i'll scale it on the z so g and z and then g sorry s and z to scale it down and then g and z and bring it up a little bit so it's just intersecting the plane there now let's go ahead and open up our shader editor and we're going to get some shader action happening so i'll come right here and i'll switch this window over to my shader editor just a little button up in the top right corner all right now let's click the plane and we're going to create a new material so with the plane selected you could come over here to the material tab right down at the bottom and click new or in this window with the object selected you can click new it does the same thing it just starts us off with a new principal bsdf connected to the material output now let's go ahead and turn on rendering now we're not going to see anything yet and this is eevee by the way so i'm going to come over to my render tab i'm going to turn on ambient occlusion bloom and screen space reflections now with all these things turned on we don't have any lights so many cameras things are looking pretty bland but that's all right let's go ahead and add in a light so i'm going to go shift a light sunlamp and i'll just tilt it off to the side a little bit by hitting r and then moving my mouse just to get a little bit of a side light i'll go ahead and create a camera as well so i can start thinking about my frame so i'm going to hit 0 on the number keypad to jump into my camera and i'm just going to roll my mouse wheel to zoom in a little bit so the view is a bit larger and then i'm going to come down to my camera tab go to viewport display and i'm going to turn up pass part 2 and that's just going to darken the outside of my frame so i can focus on what's actually going to be in my render then i'm going to come over to this little hidden dropout menu just click that little triangle and go to view and i'm going to lock my camera to view this is something you'll do pretty much every time any project i'm always doing this just to set up a camera all right so there's a rough rough kind of angle i might go for a wide angle like an 18 millimeter lens and just kind of pop right in here uh like so we can adjust this more later so i'm just gonna go ahead and turn off my camera to view now i can just zoom in and out on the view without changing the camera so i'll zoom in a little bit so we've got a nice clean view of our space and i'm going to come over here and i'm going to create a couple of nodes i'm going to create a vironi node so the bronide texture node i'm going to create a texture coordinate node just in case we need it i'm going to create a color ramp so the texture coordinate node that tells blender how to place a texture on an object so there's a lot of different ways to do that there's all these different options but it basically is always telling blender how to position a texture on an object next is the veroni texture and this one is going to create a noise pattern across our object that's infinite and it's random and it's generated by an algorithm so it's really powerful and useful color ramp is going to clamp that image and give it a gradient from black to white that we can control okay so let's plug all these in and start doing stuff by default blender uses the generated coordinates so if i plug this in it's going to be exactly the same as if i did plug it in so i might leave it unplugged for now i'll take the distance into the factor and i'll take the color ramp and i'm going to pop this into the emission all right now our object is going to glow and start getting bright and that's because emission is emitting light into our scene and we can kind of see what's going on but not really from this view so i'm going to pop out of this view and zoom out so we can see this thing now we've got these round shapes we're going to change this from euclidean we're going to go to let's see we'll go to manhattan and i'm going to take my color ramp and i'm going to switch from linear which is the uh the interpolation between these two colors so it's a linear interpolation see this gradual falloff i'm going to switch this to constant so now there's no follow-up and now you can see it gives you these hard edges okay and then what i'm going to do is i'm going to take this black pip right here and i'm going to click the plus symbol and it'll create another one if you click it over here it'll make it white so you can just change the color just right down here and i'm going to bring it over to the other side and this will allow my uh to create just lines basically so i can bring this white pip in really close to make these nice and small and then i can come over here and give it some color so i can like turn it up or something like that and let's see what else i can turn the strength up and start getting some glow and we can also add in probably add in like another uh another color as well so i can i can click here and click one more time and then take this one in between these two brighten it up and give it uh like a neon neon pink or whatever you want color now we got this cool pattern right now i can take my base color and drop it down to black uh if i want um we might bring this up a bit because i think things are going to get really dark soon so i might keep it up kind of a middle gray and i'm going to turn my roughness down to let it really reflect the environment now i want to create some bump on this pattern so i'm going to create a bump node and what i want to do is have something similar for the bump node um as this so i'm going to grab the verona i'm going to duplicate it bring it down and i will create a new color ramp and then we're going to connect the distance into the factor just like we did before color into the height so just the height of the bump node and now the normal into the normal now if you're not familiar with normals i've got a lot of stuff i talk about in my tutorials but basically the basic is we're faking geometry that's what normals are a normal is the direction a polygon faces um and so uh by affecting where the polygons are facing with a texture you're basically telling blender to render it as if there's more detail there's more faces pointing in directions it kind of knows how to behave when light hits an object so you get little bumps across things without having to add thousands of polygons to create that that geometry i'm going to drag these in so they're a bit closer together and you can see we start getting this bump that kind of outlines our glowy bits which is pretty cool i might make this system separate though so i'm going to drag my scale down and now i've just got a bunch of really nice panels and that's going to be a nice look i think this is what this is what i want to go for all right now we've got this section here let's uh let's zoom back in let's jump into our camera and let's take this and let's think about how we can make it work within the view so i might take the scale of my bump down even more so it's really tiny and then i'm going to take my strength down so it's not too pronounced i don't want it to like really stand out and i think with my other system up here i'll take the scale down as well i want to line it up though so see how like these lines are going a different direction from my cube so i want to line this system up so i'm going to actually we are going to create this i'm going to create a mapping node okay the mapping node is just a way of changing the way a texture is placed on an object so i'm going to need my texture coordinate to use this so we're going to use generated because remember that's just the default so it's already doing but for the mapping node you have to plug one in there's no default for the mapping node and then i'll plug this in here so nothing is going to happen this is the same as what we had before in terms of what's happening in the math behind the scenes but now what i can do is i can rotate this 45 degrees on the z and it's going to line up so it's going to turn the whole system so that it's the same direction as my cube now i can do the same thing with my bump um but i kind of like that it's a little different um it's sort of an aesthetic choice you can decide what you want to do with yours but i think i'm going to leave mine i'm going to drag this in so these lines are a bit thinner all right great let's take this uh object and let's shifty to duplicate grab zed and bring it up so we have like a ceiling to our world and i'm going to go ahead and start getting some depth into this space okay so we can't see off into the distance so i'm going to come over here to object we're still in the shader of the shader editor i'm going to switch from object to world and now what i'm going to do is i can make a shader for my world which your world is this sort of gray sphere that's surrounding everything right here you can change the color of it but we want to add some volume to this to kind of add some mist or some depth to the scene so i'm going to come over here and i'm going to go shift a and i'm going to search for a volume scatter node i'll drop that down and i'll go ahead and plug this straight in and instantly things are going to go dark i'm going to take the ansatropy and uh bring it right down an isotropy answer i don't really don't know how to say that to be honest and i'm going to take my density down i'm going to hold down shift that's a great way to uh slowly move my numbers you don't have to move them in such high increments i'm just gonna drag this around until i start losing that background so things kind of fade up basically adding like smoke to the scene in a sense right okay so now with all that set up let's uh let's keep moving forward we're gonna go ahead and do our micro chip now so i'm gonna take my cube i'm gonna turn my handles back on so i can see what's going on and i'm gonna come over here to modifiers and a little uh wrench icon and i'm gonna add in a bevel modifier to this guy and i will increase the segments maybe to three i think it looks pretty good now it's a bit hard to see um our sun lamp i could probably try rotating it around uh until i could see a bit more yeah there we go find a nice angle we could actually use this in our scene that's pretty cool all right i'm going to right click on this object and i'm going to click shade smooth then i'm going to come down to this green icon down here which is the data icon object data properties and i'm going to go to my normals and i'm going to turn on auto smooth shade smooth basically means that whenever you have an angle that's less than 30 degrees it's going to shade it as if it's smooth if it's greater than 30 degrees it's going to shade it as if it's a hard angle so it's just a nice little way to give it a nicer look to your geometry now i'm going to go in here and i'll enter edit mode actually we're also going to add one other modifier we're going to add in the weighted normal modifier and this is another kind of little trick to just kind of make things look crisp without having to add too much geometry to them all right i'm going to come in here to edit mode by hitting tab and that will allow me to edit the geometry here and i'm going to hit i to inset and i'm going to drag in a little bit and then g and z and that'll create this extra little face here and then i'll do it one more time i'll hit e and i'll grab zed drag this up and scale it in like so and then what we can do is uh let's see i want to take this group right here and i'm going to create a material for this object actually first so let's select the object i'm going to click new material but then what i'm going to do is click this little plus symbol and i'm going to go back into here and i'm going to create another new material and this time i'm going to click assign and that's going to assign this second material to the faces that i have selected i'm going to switch this from a principal bs to bsdf to an emission shader now that's the same as if i came over here to my object i could show you if we just go back to principle bsdf you can see that the node changed in the node tree so this is actually just the same as changing whatever the main node is so it's just a bit quicker than coming in and going shift a search emission grab that and then plug that in and then delete this it's the same same process so now i can turn the strength up this guy and you can see we've got this glowy bit just here on our microchip which looks pretty cool now i might take uh the body of my microchip so this first material and i'll bring the base color down for this i'm going to turn the metallic up which will make it behave like metal i'll turn specular up and i'll bring the roughness down so it starts reflecting the environment a bit and now let's see i might bring it down a little bit it looks pretty cool all right now next thing we want to do is actually i'll add in a little bit of color to this so it's not just white i'll take it to the blue spectrum a little bit that looks kind of nice it might might make it a little smaller i feel like it's a bit it's a bit too big so i'm gonna go into edge mode hold down alt click this to get this edge loop double tap g and that will slide that edge along the other edges that it's connected to so it kind of keeps its shape it's a really handy trick so there we go that looks a little bit better and i can come back over to this and turn the strength up on that right there okay cool now the next thing we need to do is create the uh microchip lines right the wiring um the circuitry wiring right and that's kind of a tricky effect because if you think about it um it it's a lot of lines that follow specific patterns and they all kind of go together right and that would take forever to model if we were doing this like by hand so we're going to use a trick to simplify the process so we don't have to model hundreds and thousands of these things we can just do a few and then let it play out across the entire design all right so i'm going to select my top plane and i'm just going to hide it also i'm going to go ahead and turn on with the little toggles filter here turn on show in the screen and render so i can see these these are really important because we need to make sure that if we if we hide something here and then forget about it and go to render it will render as if it's visible because we've got the render icon turned on so um and this is hide it from the display port which is very similar to just hiding it anyways okay let's uh let's hide this and that way we can look down on everything and see it a bit clearer i'm gonna go back into my just flat shaded mode so what i'm going to do here is i'm going to go shift a and i'm going to create a path a path is just what it is it's a path it's a a line basically um i'm going to delete those center vertices so i just have two and then i'm going to grab this one g gx and i'm just going to slide it forward a little bit and then i'll grab this whole thing and i'll bring it right over to the edge of my microchip make sure it's just right there on the edge of my line yeah that looks good now what we can do with the path is we can take it and we can add a bit of geometry to it if we come over here under the geometry tab and we can extrude it so i can make this like .01 for example and if i zoom in on it i think full stop on my numbered keypad you can see it's extruded it out but it's going up and down i want this thing to be flat right so what i can do is i can open up this side menu i can go into edit mode and hit a to make sure everything's selected so i've selected all the vertexes and there is an option here under item called tilt and what we can do with that is we can basically rotate this spline around so i'm going to type in 90 to tilt it 90 degrees and now you can see the extrusion is flat on the surface now i'm going to hit g and z just to bring it up off the ground a little bit so there's no clipping between the two planes all right now i'm going to go into the top down view and i'll just get rid of these windows so that we can see really clearly and what i'm going to do is i'm going to go here and i need to hit e to extrude and then in this top view so i get to the top view by hitting seven on my number keypad but you can also do it by just clicking on the zed on your little uh your little uh widget here so you can you can move your view around with this thing so if you're on a laptop that's probably the best way to do it anyways so i hit e to extrude and i'm just going to position this guy um let's see grab x and e and grab y just like this just creating a bit of a microchip pattern and just zoom it way off into the distance there all right that's pretty good should be far enough okay so now we've got this one patterned line now we can do is come over here add in an array modifier now we're going to turn off relative offset because we want to use constant offset we want to offset it at a constant rate not based on the size of the object and i'm just going to bring this first distance right down so that it's really close on the x and then i'm going to take the y and i'll bring it up a little bit just so it looks kind of evenly spaced now we're getting some weird edges here you see how this is kind of like giving me a bank on the corner right so i go over to my resolution preview i can turn this number up in my path um object and you can see it's going to make those corners sharp all right so now back with my array modifier i can just continue to adjust these until they look like they're kind of spaced well enough now what i can do is i can increase the count so i can go way up make a big set of these guys now i can bring it in so on the x just so it's tucked inside there we can't see that that slope now i've got a microchip line now what i can do is i can take this system and i can duplicate it so i can come over here and i can hit shift d and i can grab on the y and move it over so it lines up and i go into edit mode and i can delete all these points delete vertices with x and now i can just hit e to extrude and i can position these any way i want but now you'll notice if i'm going this way with this group it starts to overlap right so that means that what you need to do is for the individual groups i actually need to change the pattern for the constant offset so if i just come over here like that so i can just position this so that it looks right on this side now we will need to move this group over since we're doing it like that so i need to move it over just a little bit cool and now i can use this to continue to flesh out my design okay now that i've got two of these modeled out i can select both of them hit shift d and rotate on the z 90 degrees and then position these guys using x and y inside the object like so i'm just going to make sure they fit i've got a few sections where they're overlapping so i'm just going to come in and change these so grab x slide this over okay so the next thing i want to do is put a material on all these guys so i'm going to switch back over to my rendered view and i'm going to turn on the uh ceiling again and i'll select my nurbs path i'll click new and i will come over here and give some emission to these guys so like a bit of a blue emissive emissive surface i'm going to keep the principal bsdf for this one so i can have a little bit of roughness on them as well and i'll turn the strings up so they glow and then what i can do is i can select all of my nurbs paths like this control click that last one and go right here copy material to selected and that will copy the material that i have on the last object that i selected it'll copy it over to all the others so there we go all right it's looking good now the next thing we need to do is to have some particles that travel along these lanes so let's do that next and we're going to do this with a little bit of a trick so i'm going to take all these nurbs paths i'm going to click my collection button and i'm going to drag all these in here and i'll call this my wires collection now i'm just going to hide that there now i need to take these wires and i need to select all of them and i need to hit shift d over in the viewport to duplicate them and then what i can do is i can create another collection and i can drag all these guys into that new collection now this collection thing is just to help me keep organized so i know which ones which that's really the only purpose i'm going to use it for now we need to combine all these into one object so that we can use them so what i'm going to do is i'm going to first hit f3 i'm going to type convert and i'm going to convert all these curves into mesh alright so now they're all mesh objects they look exactly the same but they're all mesh objects now that they're mesh i can join them so you can't join curves right if you have a bunch of curves select them and i go join they're not going to combine into one object it doesn't work so i have to turn it to mesh first so i've done that so now i'm going to hit f3 and type join bam now it's all just one object you can see that here it's just this one big mesh object but now i'm going to use this to drive a particle system and particles have a cool trick where they can follow a curve right but i don't have a curve i've got this giant mesh object how do i get back to a group well we could just do the same thing we did a second ago f3 convert to curve and bam now this is actually one giant curve so if i hire hide my wires collection you can see what it's done is it's taken the geometry and it's turned into all these nurbs curves right so um there's no uh mesh now anymore but it's also this double lined thing it's not just a single line that may not be what you're after if you're wanting something a bit more specific but in our case this is actually going to work so let's turn our wires back on and uh i'm going to call this nerves path i'm going to call this my particle path now i need to create a particle system so what i'm going to do is i'm going to go shift a and i'm going to create a mesh uh go for cube and i'll scale it down and i'll just kind of scale it on the z i'll just hide it inside the microchip and then i'm going to come over here and i'm going to turn on particles here for this thing now we're going to keep all this stuff pretty much the same except i'm going to take my frame start and make it negative 200 so that it basically starts emitting 200 frames before we begin our animation so that way when we start playing you'll have particles everywhere you have to wait for them to kind of propagate out so the next thing i want to do is change my lifetime i'm going to take it up to i'll try 500 so that they live a while and i'll keep the number at a thousand now we're going to come down to uh let's see force field now field weights here it is field weights and we're going to turn gravity off for our scene you can see them there they're starting to appear and if i play now they're just kind of like flying around being shot out of the different faces of our cube and uh what i'm gonna do is i'm going to take um my curve right here the particle path and i'm going to come over to uh this right here the physics tab and i'm going to click on force field we're going to turn this curve into a force field we'll leave it set to force and we're going to change the shape from point to curve now what's going to happen is it's going to start repelling all these particles so it's going to be driving the particles away at a strength of 1. we want to attract them we want the particles to be attracted to our curve so i'm going to set my strength to negative five and i'm going to turn the flow all the way up the flow basically kind of slows down the movement of things and kind of creates a bit more control i'm going to max it out at 10. so now you can see all these particles are going to be following the curves really nicely now you if you notice uh when i start they're not fully out at the ends so that'd be a good chance to come over back to my emitter uh come over here and let's take the frame start to like negative 400 and then we need to increase the lifetime so to at least 600 i'll just do 700 to be safe okay so to really see what's happening sometimes just playing it live in your timeline doesn't give you a really accurate up-to-date uh demonstration of what's happening sometimes it can get a bit confused jumping around and stuff so it's a really good idea to cache your particles to kind of get a sense of what they're actually looking like so i'm going to open up the case drop down and i'm going to click bake caching is just a term for saving the emission the particles and and their physics and everything they do so it goes through for every particle and it makes a file and it saves the position information for all of them for every frame so it doesn't have to do any calculations you could just play those positions back to you so it's a way of speeding the process up and giving you a really accurate sense of how it's working so we can hit play here and we can see we've got all these different particle pieces you can see they're moving up and down all around the place and it's a nice little nice little effect all right now let's create a particle to uh to use right now these are all just placeholders these little spheres so i'm going to hit shift a and i'm going to create a uv sphere now you can bring down this little drop down menu i'll just move my face there so you can see and we've got a segment set to 32 i can drop this down because we don't need a lot so i might just go five and five that should be enough for this object uh maybe maybe a bit let's do seven and seven that looks a little bit better all right cool now with that done what we can do is we can take this object and we can come over here create a new material switch it to emission just like we did before and we could turn it right up so it's glowing go for like a bit of a blue and then we can scale it down and we can just move this out of the way right because we actually don't want to see this object i'm going to rename it particle and then i'm going to go to my cube i'll also rename my cube emitter so it's really clear what's going on and i'll come down all the way to the bottom of my particle settings to render open up that tab we're going to switch the from halo to object and i'm going to select my particle object if you can't find it in the list you can actually just type and there you go now the particle object is being emitted on all of these sections here so what we can do is we can change our scale here now underneath this until we get something that looks right and that's pretty cool so we can have a look at that we've got these little particles now traveling across our network which is really really what we wanted looks good all right now let's come back over to here and i'm going to select my nerves path and i'm going to change some of my colors here to get this image looking right so i'm going to push these into the a really saturated blue and i might turn the emission strength down just a little bit now the next thing i want to do is set up some connectors for my cpu chip so i'm going to jump back into flat shaded mode select my i'll turn on my visible things here and select my microchip and i'm going to hit shift actually what i'll do is i'll come to here i'll go into edit mode and i'll select this vertex i'll hold down shift s and i can put my cursor to selected that'll put my 3d cursor exactly where that point is i can leave edit mode now i can hit shift a and i can create a cube and it's going to create the cube wherever my 3d cursor is right so it's put it right there which is exactly in line with this section of this wire which is really useful because now what i can do is i can use this to set it up now we can scale this up we can grab this on the x and let's see i'll go into edit mode and just create a little bit of a shape to this thing i'm going to e to extrude grab zed and then grab x and just drag it in like so so it kind of comes out a little bit i'll fit a little bit out maybe so there's a gap and then i'll go into edit mode select all scale on the y and just kind of narrow it down so it's a similar link to the actual wire there and i'm going to take this and i'm going to create an array modifier and i'm going to set the array to go along y and i'll just drag this out a little bit so that it lines up with this second wire so i can just hold down shift and drag till it gets just right and then i can roll these out until we get right to the end and i can adjust this a little bit further just so that it's fairly close doesn't have to be perfect great now we can take this and assign probably assign the same material that we've got to our microchip so o2 i think would make sense so i'm going to take that assign it there and shift d rotate z 90 and i'll just move these around so that i can have them in the scene in the right spot so i'll position these all right great now let's take this sun lamp that we've got and let's add a bit of color to it so i'm gonna maybe go into this hot neon pink color and i'll rotate it around and find a good spot for it so it starts to kind of glint a little bit i want to get some light shining off the floor i think that would look good all right great now um one other thing we want to do is have this animated pattern in the uh the glowing lines in our object here the floor and the and the the ceiling so i'm gonna bring my shader editor back out and we're gonna do a cool little trick uh to make this work so in order to get this pattern to move i want to actually move the mapping coordinate for this bit of our texture so if i come over here and i move it up on the z hold down shift and drag you can see that it really starts going nuts and it's going to cool create some really really cool effects for us so so i click zed right here and we type the pound symbol and we can type frame and that's going to create a driver that takes the frame number and inserts it here so right now you can see 114 and 114 that's the frame drum this is going to move way too fast for us so i'm going to take this and i'm going to type in the star key to multiply and i'm going to go .001 just to make it a lot smaller and now we hit play you can see these lines are all moving at a much more tolerable rate you could probably slow it down even more maybe 005 yeah it looks a bit better that's really cool now to finish this off let's take our camera and let's rotate the angle a little bit uh just to kind of make it look cool now one last thing i want to do is add in a bit more light to my scene so i'm just going to select my microchip i'm going to shift s cursor to selected shift a and i'm going to add in area light and then i'm going to grab it on the z and bring it up so that i can see it my scene i'll put it just up here kind of off the top so that it's it's not visible in the fog find a good spot for it it needs to sit just above just kind of like you know i'm gonna make sure it doesn't go through the roof so i'll bring the power down and i might set this to be like a blue color as well like so i can change the size of it that's going to affect the reflection i can also change uh what i want it to be so i'm going to make it a disk and then i'm going to click on my floor material and i'm going to turn my roughness up a little bit just to blur that reflection and i think i want to take my scale down on my veroni so i'll just bring that scale down even further and i might bring these a touch closer to each other so it's a bit more of a fine pattern and if i play with my color as well we can get a sense of what things would look like i might turn metallic up as well for this material i think that could look good okay now to really sell this thing and bring it home let's take our camera and let's turn on depth of field and let's set our focus distance now first we'll set our f stop to like point five i'd say and then let's change our focus distance just to be right on the corner of our cube so i'm just gonna just drag this number around until it looks about right i could select the cube but i want to focus just on that point there so just getting that looking good and there we go now we can animate the camera if we want come back here hit i to set a keyframe for location and rotation go to the last frame move around lock our camera to view don't forget to do that and then move around to a cool spot and hit i to set a keyframe and there you have it a full microchip landscape i hope you learned a lot through this tutorial and you gained some really cool tips that you can use for your own projects please let me know what you think of this in the comments below don't forget to hit that like button and don't forget to subscribe to the channel to find out when i release new tutorials or go live when i record these try and catch those if you want to get the full live streams yourself head over to patreon you can get them a hold up you can you can join up there to get a hold of them or you can also find them on youtube by becoming a channel member at the all access pass on higher don't forget to check out the blender market as well check out see bailey film the creators page there's some cool stuff i've got there for you thanks so much for watching i hope to catch you in the next one until then have a fantastic week see ya [Music]

Channel: CBaileyFilm

Views: 38,228

Keywords: blender, blender turorial, blender beginner tutorial, scifi, create a short film, create a fan film

Id: l3zI2ep74DU

Length: 32min 56sec (1976 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 25 2021