Head Explosion Effect in Blender! (hot)

[Applause] thanks to nordvpn for sponsoring this video check out the link in the description to learn more and stick around to see how you can score a sweet deal alright the first thing i'm going to do is mosey on over to the movie clip editor open up my source footage i'm going to pre-fetch it so that it plays smoothly and set the scene frames so that the length of the scene matches our footage so the first thing we're going to need to do is camera track the scene so that we can put 3d objects inside of it and have them stick in the right spot we're going to be making use of blender's camera tracker and there's a little bit of setup we need to do over in the tracking settings we can set the settings that will be set for each tracker we set set there's a lot of flat surfaces in this scene so i find that the perspective motion model works best and for some reason matching the previous frame just works better i'm going to control click on my footage in an area of high contrast to add a tracker areas with lots of details and high contrast are easier for blender to track now i'll press ctrl t to start tracking you kind of have to baby it sometimes and change the track every once in a while if it's having trouble but generally does a pretty good job now i'm going to go through the rest of my scene making sure to track objects through various depths in the scene we want tracks in the background the foreground on each wall just to give blender a broad idea of the movement of the camera if one of your trackers is momentarily obscured by an object you can just move forward in time until it's not obscured anymore move it over to its original position and keep tracking now that we have a solid amount of tracks in our scene let's mosey on over to the solve tab here we're going to set two keyframes these are basically like reference frames for blender to tell the depth of your scene so try and pick two frames that have a change in perspective between them i'm not entirely sure what it's actually doing but i usually get better results if i select all the options for refine let's smash that solve button and it looks like we have a solve error of less than one which is what we're going for so we're good to go let's move on blender has a nifty little feature called set up tracking scene just go ahead and click that and it'll bring your tracked camera right into your scene now if i hit play you can see we have our footage set as the background and the camera is properly tracked in there however the floor is totally not pointing the right way so let's fix that back in the movie clip editor with our camera track there's actually a feature where we can select three different trackers and that'll pretty much fix our problem automatically so i'm going to go ahead and add a couple trackers to the ground track them for a little bit and then resolve the camera now with my three ground trackers selected i can hit floor and we're good to go back in the 3d view our camera is clipping through a cube so let's delete that but if we play it now you can see that our ground is correctly positioned however it'll make our job easier later if we have the axes of the ground matching up with the lines in the scene so i'm gonna go ahead and rotate the camera from the 3d cursor so it lines up looking good baby okay moving on let's bring in our random human head 3d model that we're going to be using i'll have the link to the one i used in the description now i'm actually having a hard time matching this up to riley's head position in the scene because i don't have any reference for how big or how far away from the camera this head should be so let's make some reference by creating a 3d representation of the walls in our scene i'm going to do that by going back into the movie clip editor and under the geometry tab converting them to a mesh i'm going to do this with both walls back in the 3d view i'm going to use these for reference as to where to put my walls trying to see around these walls the whole time we're working is going to be annoying so i'm going to go up into the view options and turn on backface culling so that it only displays the front side of the wall if your wall is facing the wrong way go into edit mode select the face hit n flip to flip the normals now i'm going to give myself a bit more reference by going into each wall adding some loop cuts and extruding certain parts of the wall so i can more easily tell where to place my objects however now we got these freaking walls covering up our background footage so i'm going to go into the object properties for each object and in the viewport display settings i'm going to display it as wire so now we'll be able to see through the mesh now i'm going to bring back in my head 3d model and roughly match it to the size location and rotation of riley's head next i'm going to go into edit mode and enable proportional editing after using the page up and page down keys to change the radius of the proportional editing i can drag the vertices into place so that they correctly match up with his collar and the outline of his face now i'd like some finer control over the animation and movement of this head and i'm going to do that with an armature so i'm going to add in an armature go into edit mode and extrude the bones so that they match up with the neck and the head now i'll select the head mesh shift click on the armature press ctrl p and select armature deform with automatic weights now if we go into pose mode with our armature we can control the head with the bones ain't that nice next step is to turn on automatic keying and make our way through the animation adjusting the neck bones position and rotation to match the actor i used a mask modifier and hid the head to make this a little easier it's a bit of a pain but it's definitely worth taking the time to get an accurate track on your actor because if you got stuff drifting around that's going to be the first thing people notice now if we go into rendered view you'll see that this looks like ass which is fine we just need to put some textures and love into it so what i'm going to do is project the footage of riley's face onto the head 3d model so that way when we do a bunch of our gore simulations to the head 3d model we still retain the original texture of riley's beautiful face so in the shader editor i'm going to create a new skin material i'm going to load in an image texture and select the frame of the footage in which riley's head is going to explode then i'm going to press ctrl t to bring up some mapping options if this doesn't work go and enable node wrangler in your plugins i'm going to change the texture coordinates to window so now if we go into the material view and move around you can see that we're projecting the footage of riley's face onto this face however you can see that the texture doesn't stick to the object which doesn't work great for us because when it's moving around we want that texture to stick right onto that skin so we're going to create a new texture in the uv image editor let's create a new texture i'm going to call it skin then let's select that noggin go into edit mode select all the vertices and press u smart project this tells blender where on the image to paint the specific parts of the object so we're going to be baking the current texture of the object onto our new texture and we have to specify what that new texture is so back in the shader editor let's bring in our new texture and make sure it's selected the baking settings are in the render tab so go there and under the baking settings we're going to be baking the diffuse and don't need the direct or indirect light just the color make sure you got your new texture selected in the shader editor and smash bake now if we go back into the uv image editor you can see we got our beautiful terrifying new texture make sure to save it surprise surprise back in the shader editor let's plug in our new texture and see how it looks beautiful magnificent terrifying the worst it's great it's good enough for what we're using it for now riley's hair looks like it's painted on his head let's give him some real hair let's go into the particle settings add a new particle system i'm going to name this hair let's change that to hair and now we got hair everywhere but we only want hair where it would grow on his head so let's go into edit mode and select the faces of his scalp of his scalp that's attached to his face select the vertices of the faces of his face where the scalp is over in the green triangle tab let's create a new vertex group name that and hit assign now if we go back into our hair settings we can scroll all the way down to vertex groups and under density select our scalp so that our scalp vertex group specifies the density of the hair so we don't grow hair on the other parts of his face let's make his hair a reasonable length and go into particle edit mode to give him a cute little hairstyle when you're doing this you might want to just text the person and ask them to send you a video of how they style their hair because i i got closer to paul dano than i did riley i i don't know i don't know now if we go into rendered view this looks horrendous i'm going to fix this by going over to the hair shape settings and turning down the diameter of the hair follicles i'm also going to go over to the children settings and turn on interpolated children just to give it a bit more thickness and right now the hair is using the same material as the skin so let's go ahead and give that a new one i'm going to make a new material slot create a new material and name that hair the surface type i'm going to change to principled hair and back in the particle settings under render we can change the material to hair now we can just go into the hair material change the color and the roughness to suit our actor now if i look at this over my footage it's still looking super janky and that's because we need to match the lighting this is actually super easy i usually just hop on hdri haven which is a free website for hdr lighting maps i'll search for one that roughly matches the lighting conditions of my scene here you can see i found one of an alley that matches that kind of top lit and blocked off sides lighting back in blender in the shader editor i'm going to go over to the world shader i'm going to bring in an environment texture and then navigate over to the htr that i just downloaded this hdr works pretty perfectly for lighting our scene but you can always add in more lights or some black planes to subtract light if you need to now you can see if we switch back and forth between the footage and the new head model the lighting is matching pretty well now that we have a solid representation of our actors head in the scene let's get on to simulating the skin exploding outwards in the physics properties for our object i'm going to enable cloth this is how we're going to simulate the skin flapping around i'm going to scroll down to the cache and just make sure that the simulation starts on the frame where we want the actor's head to explode now if we press play riley's head just falls straight out of the scene and we can fix this by pinning certain vertices basically telling blender to keep certain vertices in their original position and just simulate the other vertices we can do this by going into edit mode and selecting the vertices for that neck then we can create a new vertex group call it cloth pin or something and hit assign now back in our cloth settings under the shape category we can set the pin group to the vertex group we just made now if we press play his neck sticks in the right spot however his head remains one solid piece and we want it to break apart so i'm going to go into edit mode and press k to bring out the knife tool then i'm going to draw some cuts along the object where i want it to split apart pressing v will separate the edge and disconnect those two parts of the mesh now if we simulate it our head will break into a bunch of different pieces however it's more droopy than explosive so i'm going to go ahead and add in a force field after placing it where i want the explosion to originate from and jacking the strength way up if i hit play you can see we got a nice fleshy skin explosion going i'm also going to turn on self collision so that it doesn't clip through the bottom of the neck to give the head even a little bit more explosiveness we can mess with the shrinking factor this specifies how much your cloth will expand or shrink once blender starts simulating if we make this value negative the cloth will expand right when we start the simulation which will emulate the skin being blown apart i'm pretty happy with how this is looking so in my cloth settings i'm going to mosey on down to the cache and hit bake this will fully simulate and save our simulation the simulation came out kind of jagged so i'm going to go into the modifiers and add a smooth modifier just to smooth out the geometry a bit to finish out the skin i'm going to give it some thickness and then add a fleshy material to the inside of the skin then we're going to displace the geometry of that fleshy material so it seems like there's some chunks of flesh still stuck to the skin we're going to be doing this all through a series of modifiers which we'll set up now first is a solidify modifier just to give it a bit of thickness and we can actually set the material of the new geometry we're adding under the material settings this uses a material offset number which corresponds to the material slot of your object so if it's on zero it'll correspond to the first material slot and we already have two taken up so i'm going to add another material slot give it a new material which i'm going to name skin inside and then set the material offset of the solidify modifier to 2. now i just have a very simple red shader applied and i'd like to make this look a little nicer so let's open up the shader editor i'm going to add a noise texture so that we can have some variation in the color gonna mess with the scale and distortion until we got something nice then throw a color ramp in between that and the principled shader i'm going to give the color ramp a couple fleshy colors then i'm going to use this to drive the roughness of the texture we can dial this in a bit further by adding another color ramp and crunching those values until we have some areas of roughness and glossiness we can also use this texture to drive the displacement which will add detail at no render cost to make this work right you got to throw in a displacement node and then plug the texture into the height value it'll be way too much so throw a math node in between those set it to multiply and bring the value down until it doesn't look insane adding a little subsurface scattering will let light bleed into the flesh similar to when you shine a flashlight through your hand and you can see the light coming through this is the setting for that then plug the color of your flesh into the subsurface scattering color and we got ourselves a pretty good flesh material a cool feature they added to solidify in blender 2.9 is outputting vertex groups this will spit out the vertex data of the new geometry you are creating through the solidify modifier and we can use this data to drive a displacement modifier which will make it look like there are little chunks of flesh hanging off the skin so i'm going to go ahead and add a new vertex group and call this solidify shell back in the solidify settings we can set the output vertex group of the shell to our new vertex group now we have a vertex group which is going to spit out only the vertices of the flesh inside the skin it's going to leave out the geometry of the skin so that when we apply our displacement modifier we're only displacing the inside of the flesh and leaving the outside untouched so let's go ahead and add that displacement modifier we can create a new texture and set the vertex group to our new vertex group now if we mess with the strength you can see that it's only affecting the flesh in the texture settings i'm going to name this new texture flesh displace then let's go with some clouds now you can see it looks like our flesh is clipping through our skin and there's actually a really easy way to fix that just go down to the color settings turn on color ramp and add a new color thingy then delete the black color thingy and you're good to go now our flesh is looking pretty low poly so i'm going to add a subdivision surface modifier and place that before the displaced modifier so the displace modifier has some geometry to work with back in the texture settings for the texture that's being used by our displace modifier i'm going to screw with the size until i get something that looks nice now that that's finished if we hop on over to rendered view you can see that we have something that looks pretty nice and gross i'd say this is good to go let's move on now let's add the skull i'm going to bring in a free skull model i downloaded i'll put the link to it in the description i'm going to scale it down and rotate it so it looks right then parent that to the bone so it follows the head movements now our skull sticks in the right spot when the head moves around now this skull is looking pretty clean so i'm going to paint some blood onto it in the uv image editor let's save a copy of our skull texture so we can keep the original then i'm going to go into texture paint mode if you hit end that'll bring up the tool settings and i'm going to scroll down to texture and add a new texture in the texture panel i'm going to name this blood brush and hopping over to google chrome i'm just going to do a quick search for a blood splatter texture make sure to find something with a transparent background and save that back in the texture tab i'm going to import my new blood image and now we can paint with the blood but it's pretty jacked up so in the texture settings of the brush i'm going to set the mapping to view plane then in the stroke settings i'm going to turn up the jitter a little bit now i'm going to work my way around the model painting blood as i go if you want some variation in the texture settings you can change the contrast and brightness once you're finished make sure to save the image in the uv image editor and we're ready to go i'm pretty happy with how this is looking so now i'm going to break the skull into a few different pieces first let's separate the jaw by going to edit mode selecting all the vertices of the jaw and its teeth and pressing p separate by selection now let's select the top half of the skull and hide everything else i'm going to create a new cube this is going to act as our cutting object over in the modifiers for the cube i'm going to add a subdivision surface to give it some more geometry then i'm going to create a displace modifier add a new texture and call that boolean displace in the texture settings for that texture i'm going to set it to clouds and then mess with the scale until we get something nice back in the modifier settings i'm going to turn down the strength of the displace modifier until it's not going crazy then i'm going to apply all of these modifiers to the mesh next on our skull model i'm going to add a boolean modifier and use the eyedropper to pick our new cube now our cube should be cutting out the parts of the skull that it's overlapping with we could just hit apply now but we want both the top half and the bottom half of this piece so i'm going to duplicate this mesh then apply one of the boolean modifiers click on our duplicated mesh switch the boolean to intersect and then apply that now you can see that we have two perfectly cut out pieces of our skull however the inside of the cut has some janky uvs so i'm going to go into edit mode for each piece press ctrl i to invert the selection of vertices then press u project from view now in the uv image editor we can move around these uvs until it doesn't look janky anymore do the same with the other piece of your skull and bam we got some good skull pieces ready to animate alright next step is to have the top half of our skull blow into different chunks so i'm actually going to be using the cell fracture add-on for this and to make sure you have it just go up to edit preferences go to your add-ons and search for cell fracture make sure it's enabled but cell fracture is going to break our object into a bunch of different pieces and the inside of those pieces aren't going to have correct uvs and so the textures are going to look displaced and weird and we're going to have a bunch of white borders and random crap in there so we want to give the interior of the skull a new material so in the materials tab let's add a new material slot and now we're good to bring up cell fracture if we hit f3 and search for cell fracture we can bring that up and for the settings we can set the point source to the object's vertices turn up the noise a bit make sure to set the material slot to 1 because we want to give the inside of the skull a new material and hit ok that is looking good so now we can take our original skull move it over and turn off display and render so we don't see it anymore but it's still there now i'm going to dial in the look of the skull pieces so i'm going to go into rendered view and in the shader editor i'm going to once again add a noise texture throw in a color ramp in between to give it some variations in color give it a mix of bone and blood colors same process plug it into the roughness and dial that in then plug it into the displacement throw in the displacement node and the multiply node and dial that in until it looks good and we're good to go now we want to do a physics simulation on this head and since these are solid non-squishy pieces we are going to be doing a rigid body simulation so we can select all of the brain pieces hit f3 and search for rigid body add active active rigid bodies are the parts of your simulation that will be moving and passive are the ones that won't like the ground and the walls etc now if we hit play our brain pieces just fall to the ground which isn't what we want we want more of an explosive effect so i'm going to hit shift a and add a force field and you're really only going to be able to see the effects of this force field if you jack the strength way up so let's do that and then you can see that we have a nice brain explosion going however after that initial burst the pieces of the brain still continue to accelerate so i'm going to place a keyframe for the strength so that the force field starts out very strong and then over the next few frames dwindles down to a strength of zero so a few frames later i'm going to set another keyframe for a strength of 0 by pressing i over the strength value looking good now it wouldn't be a head explosion effect if we didn't have a little brain squishing around in there so i'm going to grab a free brain 3d model and import it into blender let's align this little sucker with our head and then go into the shader editor to give this a new material i'm going to follow the same process as before using noise textures and color ramps to give this a nice fleshy gross texture here are the nodes i used if you want to go the same direction after parenting it to the head bone i'm going to go into edit mode and select the vertices we want to use as the pin for our soft body simulation i'm going to create a new vertex group and hit assign now in the soft body settings under goal i'm going to set the vertex group to our new vertex group make sure under strengths to set the default to 1. now our brain will stick in the right spot but it's pretty droopy so we're going to need to add some bending bending specifies how much the mesh will try to keep its original shape during the simulation another little touch i like to add is an eyeball hanging off the head so i'm going to go over to blend swap and find a free eye 3d model i'm going to bring that into blender and change the position scale and rotation to match the scene i'm going to model a super rough eye holder flesh piece i'm pretty sure this is not anatomically correct but it gets the point across well enough i'm going to create a new material for our eye holder using the same techniques we've been employing thus far but for this one i decided it might be interesting to have some kind of rings going around it so i added a mapping node to the noise texture and i messed with the scale until i had something looking nice then i went ahead and finished up the eye holster material here are my nodes if you'd like to take a look i also added a displacement map with the noise texture to give it a bit of bumpiness then i'm going to add an armature and in edit mode i'm going to extrude it into several pieces so that we can pose our eye and its holder i'm going to select both the eye and the holder and then shift select the armature and press control p to parent with automatic weights now i'm going to reposition the eye so that it's in the right spot and then shift select on our head armature and in pose mode i'm going to press ctrl p to parent it to the bone now i'm going to turn on automatic keyframing and make my way through the animation posing the root bone of the eye first i'm going to eyeball this and try and mimic what physics would be doing to the eye holster once i'm done with that first bone i'm going to move on to the second bone and since we want this to be a little floppy i'm going to basically mimic the same movement of the root bone but delay it a little bit so that the second bone is kind of trailing behind the first bone giving it the appearance of being loose and flesh-like now this is looking pretty damn good if you ask me and the last 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will get you four additional months for free go to nordvpn.com peter france and use coupon peter france at checkout now this is looking pretty damn good if you ask me and the last thing i'd like to add is just some blood droplets spewing all over the place to really tie everything together we're going to be doing that not with a liquid sim because that would be a pain in the booty so we're going to be using a particle simulation because it gets the point across without having to deal with hours and hours of babying a simulation nothing against fluid sims they're lovely but they're just a pain in the butt alright so on our head 3d model i'm going to go to the particles tab and add a new particle system i'm going to name this blood it's looking a little bit crazy right now because the scale of the particles is huge so i'm going to turn that down a bit and then we only want to start emitting particles once the head explodes so i'm going to change the particle system start time to the frame in which the head is supposed to explode i'm also going to change the end time so we get a short burst of particles and they don't continue to emit then i'm going to scroll down to the velocity settings and play with these values until we get something explosive the normal value will eject particles out in the direction that the face they are emitting from is facing basically it just makes them explode outward for our particle we're going to create a new icosphere with just one subdivision because we want it to be relatively low poly i'm going to create a new material called blood and give it a real simple low roughness high transmission red material i'm going to rename this blood particle back in our particle settings we can scroll down to the render tab and change render as to object and we can select our new object we can change the scale to look not crazy and then add some scale randomness for a little variety and then jack up the number of particles as much as you'd like for some reason i got a little pp stream of blood particles but uh you know whatever go ahead and bake that and we are good to go baby also at this point i had kind of forgotten about the hair basically just make sure the hair is at this point in your modifier stack then mosey on down to the hair dynamics settings and enable that and then cache your hair simulation after that we're ready to render after that was all rendered and done i brought the footage into after effects and did a super janky paint out of riley's head if you'd like to know how to do some actual good paint outs make sure to subscribe because i'll be making a future video about that topic and there you have it a full head explosion effect right out of blender plus some compositing and after effects i hope you enjoyed this tutorial it was a long one i appreciate you sticking with it to the end or i appreciate you skipping to the end of this video either way you're a champ and i hope you're having a great day and i'll see you next time and finally you're going to use the egg tool and select eat it

Channel: Peter France

Views: 7,707,548

Keywords: gore, blender, head, explosion, the boys, vfx, sfx, riley olson, gunga

Id: KoEYdCF9WWE

Length: 28min 45sec (1725 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 14 2020