EmberGen Tutorial: Thanos Portal VFX Real-Time Simulation | Beginners Welcome | RedefineFX

how's it going everybody Jesse patella here with redefine effects and today I'm going to show you how to create this Thanos portal with ambergen we're gonna cover many of amberjen's main features ranging from beginner to slightly Advanced there is lots to learn and let's jump right into it alright so when you first open ambergen this is what you should be seeing this is the default preset that it comes with you can hit spacebar to pause the simulation or R to reset you can also hit shift s to show the statistics up here so there are a bunch of nodes here but really all that matters to us are these four right now the emitter and the simulation node all this extra stuff is just basically adding the lights and the sky box and then rendering it out so we're gonna grab this shape primitive which is our Taurus you can hit Q to move W to rotate and E to scale so Q to move you can move it freely so I'll just move it up and then W to rotate and rotate it 90 degrees or you can just type -90 over here and I'll set the minor radius to 0.6 and the major radius to 4.8 these are the exact numbers that I used for my original portal so move it just slightly above the ground now we need to extend our simulation grid which is indicated by these pink indicators so simulation note and so we're gonna extend it on the x-axis so maybe 250 voxel count on the X and we don't need it to be as tall so I'll just do 150 on the Z and apply new resolution and this will change the size of the simulation area so now we can grab our Taurus again move it to the front next we only want to emit smokes in the emitter node you can scroll down to a mission and set the fuel emission To None I also don't want there to be any temperature because I don't want the smoke to be rising up so temperature emission also stood to no emission and for the smoke rate I did 80. so now we just have some smoke floating around like this and we need to somehow push the smoke to the right so just right click Force line Force the arrow tells you which way it's gonna go so w to rotate rotate it this way and move it in the middle of our Taurus and now you can just connect the force to the emitter Force like this and you see it slowly starting to get pushed to this side so in the four settings I'll set the push strength to 10 you know you can increase the twist the twist it around so this is how you would make like a tornado I ended up setting this to three now the sky is a bit distracting so you can just turn off the Sky Box to get a black background and we can also hide the emitter at this point so emitter volume scroll all the way down and just uncheck show emitter so you get just the smoke so now we might want to brighten up the smoke a little bit just so we can see it while we work but if you go under the emitter there's no color options for the smoke and that's because we need to go to the simulation node first and change the simulation mode from combustion to colored smoke so now if I go back to the emitter I have this smoke color option that just showed up and I can play with the color wheel here to get the color that I want so I'll just make it a bit a brighter gray so we can see everything and while we're here let's go under pressure because I need the smoke to be ejected out of the Taurus at more velocity otherwise it just creates this perfect ring so I'll just increase the additional pressure rate for the smoke to 45 the random intensity of the pressure I ended up studying at around 35 so you can see in real time what kind of a difference changing these settings makes which is awesome you can also change the scale of this random pressure so as I make it smaller and smaller I'm getting these big visible waves so I think I just made this around point two you can also increase the random speed so this is a bit hard to see but it just creates a bit more turbulence in the smoke so I think I end up setting this to around 10. next we need to somehow tell the smoke to be attracted to a point a little further back so we're just gonna right click force and create a force point I'm gonna connect it to the forces of the entire simulator because I want to affect the smoke in the entire simulator not just the emitter let's move the force higher up nothing's happening here yet but I'm gonna move it to the end of my simulator box out here and then you can start messing with the repel strength so if you increase this value it's gonna push the smoke away from itself like this and if you set it to negative values it's gonna instead attract the smoke to it so I'm gonna set it to minus 1.5 and then we just need the smoke to dissipate a bit sooner so for that you can just very slowly start decreasing the additional pressure rate to negative values let's do minus 2.5 for now all right and I also want to enable fall off for the 0.4 so that the smoke in the very front doesn't get affected as strongly and it will help us eliminate this perfect Taurus shape so under fall off I'll just set this to linear and then this sphere shows up and this sphere indicates how far the force is reaching so I'm Gonna Keep increasing the falloff radius until I get to about the front of the Taurus and now we have to play with the pressure rate again to bring back that suction that we had before so I'll set this to around maybe minus 13 and maybe play with the falloff radius more so final number also the fall of radius to 20 we might have to come back to it next we need to add some noise to break this up even more so right click Force noise plug it into your emitter volume Force here and then we just need to crank up some of these noise settings so if you want to know what exactly each does you can hover over this setting and it will actually give you a little tool tip that says exactly what it does but I just know that we need more noise so I'm gonna give it maybe you know five octaves okay nice now we're starting to get somewhere I think we can increase the suction Force just a little bit at this point so back in the force point I'm gonna play with the pressure rate a bit more you can play with moving the force back and forward to see how it affects the simulation awesome I think it's starting to look like a Thanos portal right here next thing we can do to randomize this even more is give some random movement to the Taurus so we can use modulators for that don't be afraid of this it's very simple you're just basically adding some random noise to the movement of an object so first you want to click on the Primitive and you need to click on this button next to the rotation if you click once you're setting keyframes if you click for the second time it changes into this curve and now you can plug something into this curve so I'm going to right click modulator and I want to add a oscillator which just gives you oscillation meaning waves going up and down on all three axes and I can plug this into the rotation for the shape so it's gonna freak out because it's way too strong so we can just set the type to be random noise and then lower the amount much much lower so I actually ended up doing just 0.8 on each axis and I can tell that it's working it's just laying flat and that's because the base resets to zero so we need to set the base again to minus 90. and now the Taurus is moving around just a little bit you can decrease it even more if you'd like so maybe I'll just do 0.6 on each axis to make it very subtle so now we can start playing with the lighting and trying to make this look better so under the emitter I'm gonna change the color back to be a much darker gray almost black and we're gonna add some lights to illuminate this nicely so first maybe we can add the blue light in the middle so I'll just right click lights Point light set the color to be like a nice blue and increase the intensity much much higher and you need to connect the light to the shading note so connect it here where the other lights are connected now you can just move the light inside of our portal here I'm going to make it more saturated blue and decrease the intensity and also decrease the bulb size to nothing and I think it's still touching the wall yeah so you can just move it right in the middle of our portal next I feel like the smoke is just too thin it doesn't have enough thickness to it so under shading scattering you can decrease the scattering of the light inside of the smoke so you can just set this to zero and get a much thicker smoke or maybe just do a little bit so like five percent and under simulation smog Behavior you can check show Advanced parameters for the smoke and you can increase or decrease the dissipation of the smoke over time so I'll just set that to zero and if you want to hide the bounding box you can just hit B on your keyboard to hide that so that's b as a box next we're gonna add like a nice Edge light over here so for that we can use the directional light that's already in the scene you can turn it on and off to see what it does so this acts like a sun so you need to essentially just play with the settings here to control the direction of it and the elevation so I'm sort of looking at the shadow on the floor to see where the light is coming from and then you can just move it back just rotate it and then increase the light intensity and you can also manually rotate it just like any other object so I'll lower the intensity a bit maybe 3.7 and I still need the smoke to be thicker so under shading we can increase the smoke density scale and you can see what that does that's darkening the smoke a little bit and we can also increase the smoke Shadow intensity so I'll just make that a hundred percent and I'll increase the smoke Shadow density as well so this really makes a huge difference that's pretty much the number one setting we need here so I just want this nice white outline along the edge of the smoke but now of course the front of it is too dark so we're gonna make another light so I'm gonna turn off this ambient light we don't need that so I'll just make another directional lights or right click lights directional connected to my lighting node and I want this to just be eliminating the front so I'm just playing with the elevation and the azimuth to control the direction of this light and we can decrease the intensity quite a bit because we're going for the dark look also the floor is a bit distracting so you can just click on ground and here you can select maybe just uniform color for the ground instead of the grid and you can also change the primary color of the ground so I'll just make it a bit more black something like that and then you can play with the ground lit radius so I just keep decreasing that all the way until I just have a nice circle of floor only around the portal so finally what you can do is go in the volume processing and for the Post process maybe you can sharpen the smoke a little bit and under the scene note you can play with the exposure for the overall scene if you want to brighten or darken it up and Final Touch maybe the smoke could still be just a touch darker so under my emitter smoke color I'm gonna push it to almost pure black increase the smoke rate to like 100 instead of 80. now if you wanted to increase the resolution of the simulation it would just go under the simulation node and you can set the upscaling to two times upscale applying your resolution and you're going to get way more detail in the Sim but it is going to start taking longer to simulate so if I set this to three times the resolution now it's gonna start getting considerably slower even though the detail is really beautiful but it's not really real time anymore so I'll just set it to X2 and this will be my final result so obviously there's so much to cover and so much to learn we haven't even touched on fire explosions GPU particles importing meshes so let me know in the comments if emerging content is something that you're interested in if you'd like me to make more tutorials if there's enough interest from you guys I will be happy to do more so definitely let me know as always if you found this tutorial helpful I would appreciate a thumbs up don't forget to subscribe thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next one

Channel: RedefineFX

Views: 62,166

Keywords: embergen tutorial, real time vfx, embergen smoke, embergen magic vfx, vfx artist, fx artist, fx td, unreal engine, houdini, blender, cinema 4d, 3ds max, vfx tutorial, portal vfx tutorial, jangafx, jesse pitela, redefinefx, wetafx, digital domain, vfx reel, scanline vfx, mpc vfx, dneg, rodeo fx, fusefx, image engine, vfx studio, how to learn vfx, unreal engine smoke, embergen vdb, vdb smoke

Id: oszQwIt71Rs

Length: 13min 45sec (825 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 06 2023