How to Create a Volumetric Cube with Animated Noise and a Metallic Shader in Blender

Hi there, in this tutorial I'm going to talk about  a simple geometry node setup and some material   setup create this sort of bit of abstract art  a bit like what you can see on the screen now   I've actually used a couple of materials but the  main one that I did was this sort of shiny colored   metallic sort of look it's a bit like crystallized  bismo I guess I've animated it as well so I'll   demonstrate how to do all this if you enjoy these  tutorials don't forget to click like And subscribe   feel free to comment or ask questions or even  dislike the video and if you don't like the   video I'd be very interested to see what the  issues you spotted were so that I can improve   going forward if you're a patreon supporter I  do upload these files for any use available to   my patreon supporters and I upload tutorials quite  regularly so let's start the tutorial so to begin   with we just need to add some geometry and we'll  just add a plane it doesn't really matter what the   geometry is because we're not going to see it  and then we click on here and we can go to the   geometry node editor I'm just going to press end  to close that window on the right for the moment   and then click new and you can see it just calls  it geometry nodes we are only going to create one   so I won't worry about giving it a specific name  what I will do though is open a second window and   we'll put the first one back to 3D view Port  just so that we can see what's going on so at   the moment the geometry which is the geometry  coming from our plane is going straight to the   output and that's why we can see our plane if  I cut that you can see the plane disappears and   we've just got an origin point there the plane  is still there if I look up here you can see it   there but it isn't visible so I'm going to create  something called a volume Cube so I'm just going   to add a node and we're going to search for the  node so if I start typing volume and you can see   first option there is volume Cube and then I'm  going to attach that to the geometry output and   you can see we've got something appeared here just  gone to orthographic mode and I'm going to remove   all the grids just to make things easier so this  is essentially a cube of mist we start to look   off axis you can see it goes slight fuzzy we've  created a volumetric cube because we want to be   able to play around with the shape of the cube on  its internal faces as it were some of the settings   will leave at default and some of the others will  change this one down here is the main one because   this volume cube is really constructed of voxels  which is a three-dimensional pixel a pixel being   a two-dimensional shape and the higher these  numbers the more detail we can have so we will   change these but I'll leave them at 32 for the  moment the resolution is how many voxels are in   the axis that this relates to so assuming we have  them all the same this is currently saying there   are 32 voxal along the x axis 32 on the Y and 32  on the Zed a higher number will give us more voxal   or more pixels in that particular axis and give  us a finer resolution and we will want more but   we'll leave it at 32 for the moment to start to  create more interesting shape than just a fuzzy   Cloud I'm going to add another node called volume  to mesh so this changes this volumetric Cube back   into a mesh and you can see there it is so that  seems like a very hard way to create a slightly   rounded looking Cube and that's because obviously  it fades out towards the edges and you can play   around with thresholds in here and so on but  you can just stick with the default it's fine   we'll add a couple of additional nodes in here  but before we do let's just go to materials and   we'll just create a material I'll call it shiny  and we'll make it fair metallic and let's just   make it a bluish color at the moment and copy that  down into the viewport display as well so you can   see I've created this material It's associated  with the plane but it's not visible here even   if I go to the material preview options it's just  showing a clay form Cube at the moment and that's   because we need to set the material so we go  up to here and we type set you can see we can   set material and drop that there and then we can  select the shiny material I created and there it   is and finally because you can see it's faceted  at the moment we want that to be smooth now I can   right click here and say shade smooth but you see  again nothing changes because that's setting the   original plane to shade smooth which we can't see  at the moment it's not setting this so if I I've   just used shift a there to bring up the menu and  we just start typing set shade smooth and we can   then drop that in there and now you can see we've  smoothed this cube out now we want to do something   a little more interesting with it so we want to  affect the density of that cube in some places we   want it to not be there basically so I'm now going  to add and a texture a veroni texture and just as   a point of note if I turn the density down you can  see the cube first of all shrinks a little bit at   the edges and then disappears so I'm now going  to put the distance option of my verono texture   into the density option of my Cube and you can  see something interesting is happening there and   I'm going to set this to 4D because I'm going to  want to change this over time as well other than   than that I'm sticking with the defaults for the  moment although I think we will turn the scale   up a little but you can see apart from a little  bit of wobbles on the surfaces and some Dots here   hasn't made a massive difference to our Cube so we  need to add utilities color a color ramp and we'll   drop that in there and we'll start to pull the  left hand side up and you can see our Cube starts   to dissolve and that in itself might be an effect  that you want if I turn the outliner off you can   see our cube is starting to change into the shape  that we wanted and you can make it more positive   by bringing the right hand side in a little bit  as well so where you have it is entirely up to   you perhaps we'll turn the scale down a little  but you can see it's still quite crude so what   I'm going to do now is select all of those and  we'll double it we'll put it up to 64 you can see   it hasn't changed the noise scale but it's made  pixels or voxels that make up these shapes smaller   and therefore gives us a smoother line still not  perfectly smooth you could go higher still but it   does have quite an effect on the memory used so  if I go to a really low resolution let's say 16   you can see that's very blocky now but I felt 64  was a reasonable compromise and if I play around   with W you start to see what's going to happen  going quite fast so I'm going up by 0.1 at a time   but you can see the noise pattern is evolving  so there's another node that's quite useful if   I search for that one and we type scene time you  can actually do this by creating a driver by just   typing hash frames but the same time gives you  the option to use seconds as well but in this   case it's something that I want to involve based  on just the frames it's entirely up to you really   what you use so if I just plug frames which is  obviously the frame number we are on into the   W value what happens now is as we Advance through  the animation the W value is evolved but obviously   one frame and advancement is way too much so  we need to make that a lot smaller I'm going to   stick with a 250 frame animation for the moment  but we now need to add a math function so we'll   go to utilities under math and we'll just put that  in there and we'll change that to divide and then   for the moment let's try divide it by a th so the  frame number will be divided by a thousand before   that's passed on to the changes for the Verona  texture so if we now Advance frames you can see   that's now advancing much more slowly so you can  see it's changing a little bit at a time now but   what if we want to control that more easily well  I can take this group input here and I can take   this out to there and if I now press n and bring  up the right hand side and click group you can see   I've got this input called value here I select  that we'll give it the name speed and now if I   go to modifier properties I've got a speed option  here and I can just type a number in here I could   say 500 to make it quicker so you can see shape  is changing more rapidly there so for the geometry   nodes that's all we need to do and obviously  you could use different noise options and so   on to give you different effects so we'll change  over to the Shader editor now and that's the basic   Shader that we've got I'm going to add some lights  into the scene or at least one light we'll put an   area light I think over the top and we'll just  try 500 watts something like that we'll see how   that works and we'll set the background to Black  and we'll see what that's looking like currently   that's in Cycles if we change over to EV it should  render a little quicker but in fact a lot of the   work is being done to create the geometry node  simulation so doesn't make a huge difference I'm   going to turn on ambient occlusion up here in  render properties we'll turn on Bloom but we'll   drop the intensity back quite a bit and perhaps  the radius as well quite importantly will turn on   screen space Reflections which then you can see  illuminates the internal if I turn that off you   can see it's dark shadows there but turn it on and  we get some light bouncing around if you're doing   this in circle you won't have these settings  I added a volumetric cube a genuine volumetric   Cube around it just to give it a bit of mist and  so on but I've covered that many many times so we   won't do that here but we're ready now to have a  look at the material so first of all I'm going to   add a converter which is a color rump and we'll  take that into base color it's just gone gray at   the moment and then we'll add an input which is a  layer weight input so this is a node which detects   the angle that light has bounced off the object  before it reaches the camera although of course it   all happens in Reverse in reality we'll take the  facing output into the color ramp and then we'll   just put a color onto this lowest level and we'll  make that blue go to the next Point fat will stick   with white on that one I think then we'll add some  more nodes and we'll just spread those around a   bit let's let's make this one red and then perhaps  we'll go with green for this one perhaps not quite   such a bright green and then a yellow with this  one and maybe make that a slightly darker yellow   it's entirely up to you I found making them a  little darker helped it to work a little better   so at the moment that's a very colorful object and  you can see how the colors change with the angle   that the camera is seeing the bounce light from I  used ease which will change it again think we'll   move that one up there and I left the blend at  0.5 that's a start and then we'll have a look at   what we've got here so we'll put the Metallica up  a little bit higher and we'll turn the roughness   down something like 2.3 something like that so  it's even shinier now and now we need to give it   some surface texture so I'm going to add another  veroni texture so under textures we'll select   veroni and we'll also add under Vector a bump  node this gives us as it were fake geometry so   it's not really adding to the geometry but it's  making blender know that we want it to render   artifacts that we create as if they were geometry  so I'm going to take the distance output from my   Verona texture into the height on the bump node  and then the output goes into the normal input   normals are how we determine what geometry is all  about and you can already see we're getting a more   interesting shape now and I changed from ukian  to chbby however that's pronounced and again   change to 4D gives me that extra parameter which  I can change over time as you can see so let's try   a scale of about 90 and you can see we've got  quite an interesting shape there and it makes   it a lot more interesting in general I think so  again I wanted this to change over time but what   I wanted this to do is to be connected to the  speed of my other system so the geometry node   system itself I will actually open another window  here and go back to the geometry node editor in   in my material window so let's shrink this down  a bit so this is shiny my material I'm going to   add converter which is a math node and I'm going  to make two math nodes this one's going to be set   to divide and this one set to multiply the output  of the multiply goes into the divide and I'm going   to put one there so whatever comes out of this  one is divided into one so if this is one we get   one if it's two we get5 I and so on and we'll take  that into W so I can actually use this over here   because what I want for the multiply value is I  want this to be associated with the speed aspect   if I increase the speed at which my main geometry  changes I want the speed of the material changes   to increase as well if I come over here and I  right click I can say copy as new driver then   I come over here and I can right click and say  paste driver now you can see that's got the same   number if I change this back to say a th000 that's  changed to a th000 as well and we know that of   course has change the speed of my geometry node  so that's one way that I can link in this case   a material property to a geometry node property  and keep them in sync for the frames I could do   the same thing and essentially expose the frames  number and then use that but it's just as easy to   click in here because we don't have a scene time  node for materials it's just as easy to click   in here and type hash frame now you can see it's  showing the current frame and that's being divided   by the value here which is reflected here so we've  got it on a th000 which is relatively slow and   in fact because this is unlikely to play at the  speed it will when you have created the animation   you need to bear that in mind that it may be a lot  faster you'll want a slower animation rather than   a quicker one and that BAS basically is all there  is to it and I then just animated my camera moving   through it I did add a volumetric fog to the whole  scene just to give it a bit more interest we could   perhaps cuz we're not getting much in the way  of Reflections there at the moment we can turn   the thickness d a little bit on our screen space  Reflections parameters and that's just giv us a   little bit more light bouns or you can use cycles  and you can see we've got a lot more bounce there   but it clearly takes a lot longer to render that  I think what's interesting about this scene is   the bank light itself so I hope you found that  interesting if you did let me know I will upload   the original file for my Patron supporters to use  as normal if you liked or disliked the video don't   forget to click that if you have any questions  feel free to put those in the comments below about   this or any other tutorials otherwise I will  see you in the next one thanks a [Music] lot [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Sardi Pax

Views: 380

Keywords: SardiPax, Blender, 3D, CGI, geometry nodes, volumetric cube, animated noise, metallic shader, 3D animation

Id: UvISST0uowY

Length: 15min 46sec (946 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 12 2023