How to Create a 3D Fire Tornado! (Blender Tutorial)

we are so back baby with a brand new blender tutorial heating things up by creating a fiery tornado you can use this to create regular tornadoes too but Flamin ones are definitely more fun I covered this topic about 4 years ago and since then we have new stimulation physics for smoke inside of blender plus some new rendering techniques for some faster high quality results and much faster simulation and render times you can download the finished tornado blender file over on the patreon page it's just a few bucks and you gain access to all the finished projects made here on the channel hope you're excited and when it comes to making professional visual effects like this it helps to have some Pro Hardware to work with like the pro artline of PC Hardware from Asus this video sponsor starting with the pro art z790 motherboard with full support for the latest Intel 13 and 14th gen processors all the ports and accessories you could want 10 GB ethernet and Wi-Fi 6E support and powering this with the Intel 13900 K processor that goes all the way up to 6 GHz paired with 48 GB of fast ddr5 8,000 MHz Ram which yes this motherboard actually handled perfectly and for graphics the pro art Nvidia RTX 470 TI overclocked Edition a big fan of the build quality and look of this GPU with the Sleek gray and gold for cooling on the PC we have the pro art all-in-one 420 mm liquid cooler and it does a fantastic job of keeping the hot 13900 K under control as it never thermal throttled in my testing lastly we have asus's Pro art case starting with massive cooling plenty of space onboard settings for fan control fast charging plenty of USB ports and easily removable air filters across the board all these parts together make for an incredible PC for us artists so let's do some creating check out all these parts along with this Pro art professionally calibrated IPS HDR display you'll find all the links down there below the like button and thanks to a for sponsoring this video tutorial so for starters and blender 2.4 we'll go ahead and delete the default we'll use the default Cube this time and just hit s and 14 to scale it 14 times you can scale it up along the Zed axis a little bit to make it slightly rectangular and then hit Z to switch into wireframe mode so we can see through it then go shift a and add in a UV sphere scale it up a little bit then tab into edit mode and box select the top half of the vertices and hit X to delete them now you can tab back into object mode and just scale this along the shift Z AIS so it's only scaling along the X and Y just big enough to fit inside of the cube and then hit G and then Z to move it along the Z axis to the top of the cube this will be our particle system for our tornado cloud so give yourself a little bit of room and switch to the particle settings here click the plus button to add a new particle system add an extra zero to the numbers to make it 10 10,000 particles give it a lifetime of about 150 and a little bit of Lifetime Randomness is good as well scroll down to the physics and give it some broni in motion this is for some erratic movement of the particles something around five or six here is good the only other setting then is under velocity by default the normal emission is sent to one just change this to zero if you hit play in your timeline you can see we have a bunch of particles raining down perfect to control now with some force fields so start by going shift a and adding in a force field Vortex move it down to the bottom of your Cube and see what that does starting to get a little bit of a funnel going go ahead and give it a slight negative value on the inflow to pull it inwards a bit you give the strength a little bit more value of a 1.4 1.5 and then go ahead and add in a second force field this will be a force force field for this one we want a strong negative value so it's a pulling motion instead of a pushing motion so give it a -12 on the strength and you can see that's having some control over the particles just make sure it's centered inside of your CU and last but not least we need a magnetic force to really pull these particles into our funnel shape so go shift a and add in the magnetic force fields change the shape from point to plane so it's only working on a flat axis give it a negative value again to pull those particles in of -2 and then a positive2 on the flow this gives us a perfect funnel shape for our particles and if you want to animate This Tornado you can move the force field around as you can see here or the vortex and control the position of that tornado cool now let's get cooking grab that Cube that we decided to keep and go to your physics tab click Plus on the fluid and then change the type to domain we won't leave it as gas we can increase our divisions to 64 for now but we'll go a little bit higher later and then we're just going to choose two settings one being adaptive domain and the other being dissolve you can set this to a value of 25 or 30 this is frames from 100% to nothing so you want to last about a second or so in your timeline I'm going to start with 24 but I might go up to 30 later then grab your particle sphere at the top and add in the fluid physics to this as well this time changing the type to flow you're going to change the flow type to Fire and smoke change the flow Behavior to inflow so it's adding smoke to the scene and then scroll down to the flow source and change it from mesh to particle system but make sure you choose the particle system in the bottom here even though it shows it kind of gray out it's not really selected until you click on it and choose particle system and with that you can see we get a little bit of fire added to our particles here and if we played our simulation back you can see we now have a fiery tornado being simulated inside of blender that's already pretty freaking awesome I'm going to crank the resolution divisions to 90 this is still relatively low but with the materials we'll be adding in a second it will be perfectly adequate if you have slower hard Ware you might want to leave this at a lower number and just roll with it and now it's time for the rendering and some of those material tricks to give us more detail inside of the smoke simulation starting by going to your render settings and changing the render engine from Eevee to Cycles change your device to GPU compute so you're rendering with your faster Hardware then scroll down to light pass and under volume give it one so you get some light balances inside of our volume metrics the other setting here is under volumes you can change the step rate I'm going to leave it at one but if you have slow Hardware you might want to crank this up to a two or three for faster render times I'll be it at the cost of some quality so now we're going to split our window we're going to choose the light source in the scene and under our light settings we're going to change it from a point light to a sunlight give a strength of two or something and an angle of2 and then a nice warm color you can double tap r to rotate it and pivot it so it's kind of pointing towards your view and then if you switch to rendered view you see nothing because we haven't done any of the materials yet silly okay so now on the left you can switch this window to your Shader editor and let's make some materials start by selecting the principled bsdf and hitting X to delete it then going shift a and adding in a volume scattered node this node is so cool we're going to duplicate it so we have two of them with the bottom one change the anastrophe level to be around to 0.9 and with a top one give it an anistropy level of about3 then go shift a and add in an ad Shader and then connect both volume scatter nodes to this this will be connected to the volume slot on our material output and you still don't see anything because we need to tell blender to use the density of that smoke simulation so go shift a and search for the attribute node drop it in and then change the name to density then add in a converter math node change it from math to multiply connect the attribute color output to the Top Value and then this value will control the intensity of our density connecting it to the density of both our volume scatter nodes Tada now we have some volumetric rendering and if you crank the value up on our multiply node you can increase the density we're going to be playing around with this a lot but you can see the resolution is quite low as we've only simulated this at 90 divisions with no extra detail added so it's time for some node material fun starting by going shift a and finding the texture coordinate node drop that in then go shift 8 and add in a separate X Y and Z node connect the object output to the vector here now we can have control over all three coordinates on the textures go ahead and add in a combined XYZ node as well now if you drop in a math node connect the z-axis to the Top Value and connect the output to the z-axis as well you can switch this to multiply and then control the value of Just The Zed axis on your texture coordinates cool this little node setup is going to allow us to do some cool deformations to the volumetrics just have to add in a mapping node now and connect the combined X Y and Z to the rotation on the mapping node now if you add in a texture noise texture give it a small scale of something like a 04.5 give it some more detail around a value of eight some roughness around 0.9 is good and a tiny bit of distortion connect the vector to our noise texture then go shift a and add in a color mix color drop it in after your attribute node and change it from mix to linear light now it's important to remember to connect the object output on your texture coordinate to the Vector on your mapping node this completes a nice little circle here of nodes and if you have this set up here you're ready to go and connect that noise texture to the bottom socket on that linear light node you can see this gives us some really cool highly detailed deformations now this is cool and all but we're kind of losing our tornado shape and so to get it back we're going to duplicate our linear light node here change it from linear light to Overlay and then grab the color output on our attribute density node and connect this to the bottom socket if you give this a value of one you see it cuts back that volume to just the shape of our tornado you can play around setting and give it like a 99 value just to incorporate a little extra Mist around the tornado and looks kind of cool then play around with your multiply node connected to your separate X Y and Z to control the scale of these deformations that are kind of twisting down our tornado now you can see we already have way more detail to This Tornado without having to do any more complicated simulations and we can easily take this detail even further just duplicate your noise texture change the scale to something higher this time around a 12 or 13 value was good and increase this detail even higher to around a 12 as as well then duplicate that linear light node and connect these two textures with it you want to play around with the factor here and probably take it down below a .5% you can also give this new noise texture a little bit more Distortion but that is looking pretty cool and if you go shift a and drop in a converter color amp node here just to kind of tweak that above texture you can have even more control over the shape of your tornado here and sort of the detail of that noise so to really light up your tornado now you're going to duplicate the ad Shader at the end of your node tree here dropping it right in place and then going shift a and adding in an emission Shader connect this to the bottom socket and you can see we're getting nothing but a white emission Cube that's because we need to duplicate our attribute node and this time change it from density to Flame connecting the color to the color on the emission node you can see that gives us some white hot fire in our tornado dropping in a converter color ramp though and pulling the Black value way in and then controlc clicking to add two more colors in here one of them being a flame and hot red color and the next one being a flame and hot yellow color playing around with these hand we can get a real nice looking flame look and to control the intensity of this flame just like with the smoke we'll duplicate our math multiply node connect our flame attribute to the Top Value and then that multiply to the strength on our emission Shader and you can see here we now have control over the strength of the fire and now just like the smoke the quality of this fire if you zoom in is pretty low let's be honest so we can go ahead and duplicate one of our noise textures and one of our linear light textures again dropping it in after the attribute node just like before connecting the noise texture to the bottom socket ET and giving it a different scale value you can see this adds a bunch of extra detail into those little bits of fire inside of the tornado making it look way better even though it's a low resolution simulation and congratulations you made it to the end of this tutorial you can now control the density of the volume with the color ramp here determining how much of those textures you want mixed in and of course the only overall density with this multiply note I found a value around 30 to 40 for the smoke worked well and then for the intensity of the fire you can go all the way up to 100 or whatever looks good to you but adjusting the color ramp and the linear light mix will kind of cut away at the smoke and reveal more of the fire underneath so play around with this until you get a little bit of that flame showing through which looks really cool as a bonus tip you can add a second sphere and another particle system at the bottom of your tornado and have these be sort of dust particles that are being picked up and swirled and with dust particles added you can actually render these as assets so for example if I grabbed a few of my Branch assets here from my nature Essentials asset pack and then under these particle settings just rendered them instead of a Halo as an object and that object would be one of those branch assets you get some debris being kicked up and also being able to be rendered in the scene with that same particle system and if you'd like the finished file it's of course available on the patreon but that wraps up this tutorial guys you already know I'm going to want to see your finished results so if you're on Instagram or Twitter tag me when you create a cool render cuz I love seeing what you create thanks again to Asus for making this video possible your pro art build was fantastic to use on this project accelerating my workflows while being quiet and stable check out the proart hardware with the links in the description hit that like button if you want to see more and I'll see you real soon in a new upcoming video bye-bye

Channel: CG Geek

Views: 30,388

Keywords: Blender, Animation, 3D, Gamedev, Animated, Computer Graphics, CGI, CG Geek, How to, Pixar, Easy, Free, Tornado, Fire, Simulation, Tutorial, Blender Tutorial

Id: fMV52BwercM

Length: 12min 11sec (731 seconds)

Published: Tue May 21 2024