Create Houdini Like Flowers in Blender Tutorial (cloth sim)

[Music] yo yo today we're going to be making these flowers in blender it's going to be using force fields not using geometry nodes so if you're not too well versed in Geometry nodes this should be an easy tutorial to follow the only tricky part is trying to get it from this cloth simulation into a mesh I'll show you why later in the video so to get started I just have four different petals that I made here if you watch the Rose tutorial that I just uploaded you can download The Petal in the description it's pretty much just a plane that's shaped into a petal basically with that I just took those and placed them all and rotated them to kind of shape into a flower we're just basically going to be making the flower fully bloomed and then we're going to use force fields in a sphere to kind of fold it back up and compact it we're going to export it as a light wave point cache and then we're going to have to repport it to make it play forward cuz right now when we do the simulation we're pretty much going to be simulating it backwards from where it's blooming so you can see right here the pedals are all down and then they're going to hold up and in so basically when we export it and reimport it we're able to change all the position into key frames we can just flip the key frames so pretty much when you're simulating just press the backwards button when you want to see how it would actually look like you can pretty much do whatever flower you want I've found longer and thinner petals don't work as well as thicker petals pointiness doesn't really matter too much you always just want to make sure you have decent topology so now they're all pretty pretty simple for a cloth simulation and just make sure that there's no subdivisions on there you can always add subdivisions later if you add them now it's going to slow down the simulation just before you start placing them into a flower position like this just make sure you go on the base pedal that you're going to be duplicating and just go into edit mode and select the bottom of of The Petal so where the stem would be and just make a Vertex group this is going to be the PIN for the cloth simulation you can do it after too it's just you're going to have to go over every single one and so we're just going to want to use these petals and duplicate them around each other and kind of build a flower so this one for example just has five kind of like a cherry blossom this one has five that are kind of layered this one has three that are layered this one's more of like a sunflower so you can really do whatever you really want um some will work better than others you just kind of have to test it with the force fields once you have all the pedals placed like this and you like the way that it is you can have them all individual and you can make it a bit more realistic or you can take two of them and or three and just join them together you can also take all of them and join them together that would be the most simple when we export it cuz you're going to have to export each object but if you do separate ones like this two here two there and one right here you can offset the key frames so they all kind of Bloom at different times so I'll get into the cloth Sim settings here so for the the quality steps I went with eight speed multiplier I went with two vertex Mass I went up with five I found just the lower the vertex Mass the more jittery they get and they kind of spazz out if you go with a heavier one they don't fold as easy but they look a lot lighter even though it's a heavier weight and then the compression I turned down to five didn't change anything for the internal Springs the pressure shape is the PIN group that we made and I turn the stiffness up to two collisions for the pedals all of them are six you might might want to turn this down or up depending on how many pedals you have this is going to make it slower or faster really distance just dragged it all the way down to 0.001 same for self collisions and the impulse clamping I turned up to 100 for the object collisions and just down on the property weights I changed the max compression up to 250 the big part is the gravity here and just one quick tip if you do cloth simulations on one and you don't want to have to redo all these settings in the cloth simulation just select all the ones that you want to copy it to and select the cloth Sim that you actually want and just hit F3 and type in copy modifiers and click this link SL transfer data one and that will give you all the same settings as the other ones although you will need to do redo the key frames but that won't really matter cuz you're going to offset them anyway so for the key frames and the gravity here for the pedals it's going to be playing in Reverse so it's a little bit confusing but basically we want them to start out on a positive value so they're going to be dropping downwards and these ones are offset so they don't really drop down where it's much but this one you can see it kind of it drops down and then it starts to go back up basically what that is is just a year it's 0.01 on gravity and that's just dragged out to -15 these don't really matter the placement you can always play around with them and see which ones you like better but kind of just want to have it to be drooping down a bit and then it goes to zero so it just floats and then at the end value 0.5 so that's going to bring it up Wards and just make sure too on each pedal you have a collision applied I think it by default it applies above the cloth Sim just make sure you drag it underneath the cloth Sim and change the thickness outer and inner to 0.01 you can just drag them all the way down to the left now we go into the actual collider here this is a cube that was just subdivided and then used a cast modifier to make it a circle and then I just kind of stretched it out to be a little bit more oval-like you want this to kind of be around the same size as what you want the bud would be for the flower we're going to change the scale and a little bit of the rotation later after it's exported but you want this around this size depending on like for example like this one these inner pedals are a bit smaller I would scale this down around halfway and all that will basically just fill in so for the force fields I have a collision modifier on top of it too and a force field underneath so the force field is starting off on zero so it's not affecting the only thing that's affecting these pedals right now are the gravity and then around 55 I bump it up to five so it's pushing them away just a little bit so it's not going completely negative to this value so if I remove this then it would gradient to this value which I don't want so I want it to jump from five to -50 pretty quickly you can see right around here when I do the -50 I key frame the location and then once it goes to -300 bring it all the way down so once it's all the way down here the -300 is going to pull in all the petals and it does kind of pull them in more than it does rotate them there isn't really a good way in blender to make the petals rotate with a cloth Sim this is the best way that I could find if you want you can try using this gravitation feature it works on some um for example on these ones I used it but it does also look like there's a bit more jitteriness in it so it might take a little bit of tweaking here and there with uh moving around the key frames for the strength and the positioning of this force field the same with the pedals you might just need to uh select all the key frames and just change them you can see all these kind of have different positionings for the gravity and that's just so they raise up at different times so you can see while this one's still kind of moving down these are already moving up kind of just makes it a bit more realistic you can see this one the one that I was talking about with smaller pedals this force field is quite small compared to the old one but it still works when it simulates all these pretty much have the same cloth settings the only thing that's different on some of them are the vertex Mass key frame positioning and whenever you're simulating a flower that has multi layers like this it's easier to just hide the layers underneath and just work on one layer like this just makes it a bit cleaner and easier to see what's actually colliding and what's not and before you start the simulation just go around the whole flower and try and make sure that no points are colliding that's going to make it kind of flip around so you can just float around and see if there's a DOT somewhere and go into edit mode and just drag it down also if if you play it you should be able to see some spots that are jumping around that's where the vertices would be poking through each other so if you play it and there's nothing jumping around then you should be good so here's a flower where I actually did use that gravitation feature without it I'll show you it kind of doesn't fold these long petals in very much you can see those Center petals are already quite long from the jump when it's folded up so that's not what I want so if I click this gravitation feature and we simulate you see that these middle pedals are already kind of attracting more to it and they're going to stick to it and try and fold around it that kind of brings them down in there a bit does kind of affect the other pedals you could always do a second force field and only use it on certain pedals now those Center pedals look like they're they're folding out a lot more than they were before so again the same thing all the same cloth settings just different key frames for everything pretty much the same settings for the force field 2 this was changed to -500 instead of -300 um you might just need to test around the bigger the pedals are the harder they are to simulate just because the more they weigh so you might need to increase the strength for some of them and for this last one here we have the original size sphere and going up to -500 pretty much the same settings as this one I did use the gravitation on this one too just to make them fold in a bit like that and I think it turned out pretty well they do kind of look like they're rolling out more than blooming but I couldn't find a fix for some shapes like that it's kind of looks like it's just the shape of the petal and how you make the flower but just an example that pretty much any shape that you make you can get to work with this now you might be wondering now that we have this cloth simulation we can't move it or scale it or do anything with it so instead of exporting it as a limic if you export it as a limic or fpx you can't reverse those at all so we're going to export it as a LightWave Point cache so if you don't have that by default go into your preferences go into add-ons and and type in new so you're going to it's going to pop up with new tech MDD format this is pretty much just going to export the cloth as a shape key for each frame of the cloth so with that we can just take all the key frames and invert them and it'll play Backwards so it kind of is a pain especially when you go with more pedals like this that's why I said if you want to join up a couple of them it's a lot easier that way cuz it's just having the amount that you have to export and import so I'll do a quick example on this one there's just a few things that you have to do when you're exporting it with this so before we export I'm going to bake everything so it will'll go down into the cache on one of the pedals and just click bake all Dynamics and probably only want it to go up to like 125 just for example we'll go up to 150 and I'll click B all Dynamics so now if we play it that's what I want okay so now I'm going to just name these so we know what we're doing so I'll go one two and three if you have them in different scenes this will be easier now we have one two and three so we're going to export all these now that they're all baked you just want to take off the Collision modifier and make sure that there's no other modifiers any solidify or or subdivision just make sure it's all taken off the only thing that's on there is cloth and we're going to export as lightwe Point cache and I'll just export it as P1 for pedal one and we'll take the next one export it as P2 and then we have P3 so once you exported all of it just take all the pedals that you exported and copy them we're going to go into a new scene and I'm going to paste them just since it's using shape keys we're going to need to use these original mesh and it's pretty much just going to transfer everything that we exported onto this mesh so I'm just going to take the first pedal here and I'm going to delete all the key frames that we have from the gravity and I'll go into import and we'll import that pedal that we just exported I'll take the collision and the cloth and delete them both and you'll see It'll get bigger because I didn't I didn't apply any of the transforms here we'll have to go through the location and the position to set them there is just one key frame in the start it seems that kind of changes the position so I'm just going to delete that and one at the end to we'll do the same for the other two so pedals two delete the key frames from the gravity and import the mesh cache that we exported and again delete the collision and the cloth then it's like just that and this end key frame changing it and we'll do the same for the third one delete all the gravity import pedal three delete collision and cloth and delete the first and the last key frame those are pretty much the steps that you want to do it in if you do one step differently it could mess up the whole thing so just make sure you do it in that order so now everything's kind of all over the place but nothing is jumping from position to position it's all staying in the same position which is good so that just means the only thing we need to do is change all these back to zero you can see if you reset everything now on all the objects they all stick together and it's just like the cloth Sim that we exported and this is what I was saying it can be a little bit complicated for some flowers like this where you have 20 different petals it's a lot of exporting so to make it faster you can either just join a couple of them or just do it all in one object again though the more you join the less realistic it'll be this is now a mesh so we can move it around and scale it and add geometry nodes and whatever so I'm going to take all these key frames and I'm going to go at the very start I'm going to press s minus1 that's just going to flip the key frames around and now if we put it back to the start you can see it's actually blooming it's playing in the right time it's not backwards anymore if you just add a plane somewhere and we'll give it a geometry nodes you can drag in all these pedals if we just make them a quick collection and now we have a whole object that we can scale and add a bunch of different transforms to and it's a blooming flower you can add some subdivisions after all this is exported like here it will make the pedals from the start look a lot better kind of looks a little bit cloth-like but still looks pretty good with geometry nodes just do a quick little edit here and I'm going to place It On the Origin point now you can do some things in Geometry nodes like the rose tutorial like scaling and rotating just to make it look a little bit more realistic now so you can see I just animated some scale from when it was a bud it's half the size and then when it's fully bloomed it's full scale you can also add a realize instances and now you can play around with the modifiers add some solidify you can even add uh simple deforms here and do whatever really you can add noise through geometry nodes to the pedals to make them wave around I do like to add a little bit of twist to them too I think it adds a lot of character when they're blooming so just a simple twist setup like this I've went over this a few times in some other videos it's pretty much just recreating the simple D form in Geometry nodes go back to the very start and twist it up quite a bit like that and I'll key frame it and we'll let it go to zero right around [Music] here it just adds a little bit but but it is pretty good so yeah there's a bunch of things that you can really do with this and if you want to make flower petal materials I went a little bit more in depth on the rose tutorial but just quick overview you can use a translucent with a principled bsdf into a mix Shader and that'll pretty much give you a good flower pedal material I have a roughness a normal and an alpha just to give the pedals a bit more detail all those are just done in Photoshop changing the colors a little bit and I think I used a normal converter with the original pedal and the alpha is just cutting out the edge of the pedal and I used that after with a transparent bsdf to just cut out the rest of the translucent and just one more thing for the materials if you're going to be using a flower pedal and you're not going to be doing it procedurally when you do turn the cloth simulation into the mesh with with the lightweight Point cache it will lose the UVS I might have done it wrong but the way that I did it it lost UVS so an easy way to fix that is to just keep the original pedal that you used and you duplicated if you make the UV fit on that with the image and it looks like a good flower pedal you can select one of the pedals from the flower that we now have and then select the pedal that we duplicated it from press crl L and copy over the UVS this is only going to work if you used single pedals if you do try and select two pedals that are in the same object and try and copy the UV it'll give you this error message just because it's not the same amount of polygons if you click this little box down here at the shape Keys though it'll turn the shape back to regular so it's a bit easier to select the pedals all you need to do is select the whole pedal and press contr p and separate it then you can do the same thing just shift select the original pedal and copy over the UV and it should work once you're at this step it's okay to separate the pedals and separate the mesh it's no longer cloth simulation so you can separate the pedals as much as you want and also some of them like this one the with the long pedals the center is pretty open depending on what you're going to do you might want it to be a little bit more tucked in but that could cause a lot more collisions if you try and pull them close together before simulating so a quick fix is after you've turned turn this into a geometry nodes with the collection you can actually add a lattice to it and just pretty much shrink in the center of the lattice and that will affect how the Petals in the center kind of scale in it's going to stretch the UVS a little bit near the bottom but you won't really notice it too much so yeah that's pretty much how you can make these Houdini like flowers and blender I'll have this flower in cloth simulation and in export stage down in the description to download for free if you guys want to study it if you guys have any questions just drop them down in the comments and I'll see you guys in the next video

Channel: Cheuqs

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Id: XS3JpWs9sIg

Length: 18min 30sec (1110 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 01 2024