- [Zach] Hi everyone,
Zack Reinhardt here for CGBoost.com and in this video, I will give you a quick breakdown on how I created this cubic
worlds campfire scene here. This scene is actually the main scene of the first part of my cubic
worlds course for blender, there you will learn every detail on how to create this
scene here from scratch, from finding the idea to
a final rendered animation with sound and music. That means this video here
is not a full tutorial but rather an overview about
how the scene was assembled and what workflows and tools are used. So, enjoy. The whole idea of cubic world's is that every visible object is constructed out of deformed cubes. So no loop cards, no extrusions, etc, just building scenes as
playing with Lego bricks. So in this course we make
use of the new asset browser and Blender 3.0, which is
currently in the alpha version. And then we drag and drop
this super special cube here into the scene, and then by
duplicating and deforming it, we can create any asset we can imagine. For more complex assets we are actually using a
different modeling approach here by building something with a good old fashioned polygon modeling, and then we convert
this into cubes by using an edge split modifier
and a solidify modifier. For the small elements
like the grass and stones in the scene, I used the
free object scatter add on which is actually shipped with Blender. It just needs to be
enabled in the preferences. Then this tool allows us to
select one or more objects which we wanna scatter, then select the object
we wanna scatter on, and then simply draw some
strokes on the surface and confirm to place the objects. The cool thing is that
this actually generates little triangle faces on which
the objects are instanced. That means we can simply go into edit mode and duplicate them and move
them around and even delete them by just playing around
with the triangle faces. With face snapping enabled, we can place the objects
everywhere in our scene, which makes it more flexible to work with as using the particle system. Same as for keeping the
modeling process simple. We are only using one simple
shader that I built to color all the objects in the scene. It is a simple node group where
we can adjust a few sliders to change or randomize the color, add an edge or bottom gradient, make it emissive or transparent. And since this shader is applied
on the basic cube already we can build and color our
assets at the same time, which makes this a
really enjoyable process. Since as you probably can imagine, we will end up with a
lot of cubes in our scene and here a proper
organization is very important to don't go nuts. That's why I make heavy
use of collections to group all the related objects in different main and sub collections. This makes it easier to turn
certain elements on and off in the scene, or to quickly select a
bunch of objects at once. So here you can see, these
are my main collections. I have a scene helper collection, which basically contains all the objects which are helping with animating the objects and stuff like this. However, they are not
visible in the final scene that's why I mostly turn this off. Then let's disable everything here. And then you can see
everything is turned off, and then I can only enable
the props for example, or the particle systems, or the characters and stuff like this. Here in the environment
collection for example, you can see we have a
bunch of sub collections. So we have the ground for example, then the robot and even the robot has additional sub collections here, which makes it very easy
to select certain parts. For example, when I right
click on the hand here, select objects, then you can see the
entire hand is selected and I can quick and easily
move it around if necessary. Then we have some dunes here, we have some rocks, some trees, and we have the scatter
objects as you can see which again are organized
in sub collections so I can even turn single
scatter objects on and off. Then in the prop collection you can see, we also have a bunch of
sub collections where I packed everything which belongs together. So there's a lot going on
here in the collection system. And even the particle systems
are separated into emitters force fields for blowing
some wind into the smoke. We have a big collision
object as you can see, and we also have the particle objects which i used for the particle systems. So and sometimes for example
when you are here working on the ground and you
don't always accidentally want to select the ground,
we can easily disable selection for the entire
ground collection. So I can only select
all the other objects. And then as last collection
I have the render collection which contains everything
like the camera, lamp, light blocker objects
and so on and so forth. And of course, organization is not only
useful for cubic world scenes but for every 3D scene
so I highly recommend to get used to organizing
your objects into collections. And by the way you can create
new collections by pressing C. For the particle systems I use blender's good old particle system. So lets disable everything
here except the particles. Let's also disable the force fields and here I actually use
for particle systems let's disabled them and then we can see, I have one for the fire, then I have one for sparks. I have one for the smoke and I have some dust particles
flying around in the scene. And in general particles are a great way to add more life to your scene. And here I don't wanna
go into all the details because what I'm using here
is actually quite simple. When I quickly have a look
at the particle system. We have a typical emission particle system with a certain velocity, and as render objects we
are using some objects which I packed into the
particle object collection. So these objects here are used
for all the particle systems here for example this
is the one for the fire, the one for the sparks here the one for the smoke. And again here I'm just using
the same cubic worlds shader as I use for all the other objects. And then I just connect
these objects here with the particle system. And one important thing I used
here to make the particles fade out over the time or
change the size over time so they don't just disappear and this we can do here
in the texture settings. Just create a new texture,
go to the texture settings, change the mapping to strand particle and the influence enable size, and then using the color ramp down here, we can adjust how the
particles will change the size. This will be defined from left to right as if this here is a timeline and everything black means that
particles are scaled to zero and everything white means
they are scaled up to one. So they are scaled up to one
in a short amount of time and then over time they
are scaled down to zero. So then we have this
nice effect that they are appearing and disappearing over time. And the same I applied to the
smoke and the sparks as well. For the dust particles I just used some physics settings here. I enabled the brownian
value and basically disabled the entire velocity here and I set the emission to a negative value that means as soon as
the scene starts here at the beginning, the particles are there. And here I created a big collision object where I enabled the
collision in the physics tab so that the particles will
stay inside this boundary and don't flow away
because then at some point there are no particles left in the scene because they are all flying away. But here they are just bouncing
off the collision object and then they stay in the scene. Yeah and with a simple force field here I was able to make the smoke
blow into a certain direction and here I could even
increase the strengths As you can see, then we
have a very strong wind. Well and look at this, this smoke is bouncing around
in this collision shape looks super cool actually. Let's talk about animation. When I playback the animation, you can see that a lot of
things are moving in the scene. And most of this is
actually not hand animated because here I used a lot of
procedural animation techniques all in all the particle
systems of course adds a lot of motion to the scene. But when I turn this off, you can see that there's still a lot of
objects moving around. By the way we will discuss
the pop-up animation which happens at the start
and at the end of the scene in a later section of this video. Here lets just discuss the general movement of
some of these objects. And by the way, about the camera animation I will also talk about
later in this video. First of all when I zoom in here and disable the render collection, you can see that we have
a bit of random movement. The grass is moving. The vines are moving here, the cables, and also here the pot, the
tent, and this character. Let's go to the animation workspace. And let's have a look at the character and this pot here first, because all I did was adding one key frame for one rotation axis as you can see. And then here in the graph editor, when I press N, go to modifiers,
I added the noise modifier, and this will add this random
noise to the animation curve. And then you can see this
pot is moving around randomly on the X axis here and you can play around with these values here of the noise modifier to make this stronger
and faster or slower. Well, this is very strong wind right now, the same technique I
used for the cables here, here I added some shape keys and this shape key here, as you can see it's doing this
very simple wiggle animation and on this value here I also
applied the noise modifier and then the cable is
doing some random movements in the wind. So it's just randomly changing
the shape key value over here then for the character, by the way, the character is a pre-made character which we added here to the scene, which I provide in the course. However, in the second part of the course which I will add a bit later, we will also learn how
to create characters, robots and machines from scratch and how to rig and animate them. And here I used the same technique. I switched over to pose mode, select a bunch of these bones here. And then I added a simple
key frame for the rotation and added the noise modifier. And then the character is
also randomly moving around. Then I turned the animation
of the character into an action here in the
nonlinear animation editor which we can find over here. And here we can also open up the sidebar, go to modifiers and add some modifiers. And here I added the stepped modifier and changed the step size to six. And then the character is
moving as in stop motion movies, which I found to be a very
cool effect for the characters. Yeah and for the grass
and for the vines I used a different technique because
these are the objects which I scattered in the scene using
the object scatter add on. And as you maybe remember here we have a lot of small triangles
and what I did here, I added a displacement modifier which basically changes the
position of the faces a bit. Since here I added a simple clouds texture which makes the faces move up and down if I increase the
strengths here you can see what's happening. And then in my scene helpers collection I added a simple empty object. And by adding a simple driver here simply type in hash frame
then times whatever you like, and then this object is
moving with each frame of the animation in a certain direction. In this case the X
direction as you can see. And then I simply connected
this empty object here to the displace modifier so the texture of the displace modifier is moving and in this way, the grass is moving in the wind
all the time as you can see. And the same I applied
to the vines up here and also to the tent. So everything is moving
as if the wind is blowing. So and now let's have a
look on how I created this pop-up animation here at the start. And this also happens here at the end. So to quickly show you this, I added a bunch of objects
from the asset library which is shipped with the course. And first of all, this is important you
need to select everything, press Control + A and apply the scale for all the objects here,
in order to make this work. Then we need an object
which is animated already. Here I have this cube which I animated. It's a very simple animation
where I only animated the scale of the object. So it's popping up and this
will be our reference object. Then you find a link in the
video description to the free commotion add on which you can download. Then all you need to do is
to select all the objects which you wanna have animated and this last object, the one
which is animated already. Then you go to animation
utils and click on copy. Now we are copying the
animation from this object to all the other objects. And since I only animated the scale, the position and rotation of the object is not changing at all but you can see all of them are now popping up. And we can place our 3D
cursor in any position, for example over here
with Shift right click, and then we can offset the
animation by the cursor. Let's click on offset animation, and then you can see that
these objects are popping up and we can also increase
the offset if we like then click on offset animation but let's go to the first frame
to click on offset animation and then all these objects are popping up. Yeah and this easy, you can make your objects
pop up in your scene, which is not complicated
at all as you can see. Now let's have a look
at the camera set up. Here let's go over to the
rendered view port shading. And as you can see, when I go into the camera
view at this scene, even here in the view port
looks fantastic already. And that's because in this course we will learn how to
render the scene with EEVEE and cycles with very similar results. And there we also go over how
to optimize the render quality and the render speed. So however here I don't wanna go deep into the render settings first let's have a look
at the camera set up. Let's enable the overlays here. And first of all, let's have a look at the camera animation. Here we can see the camera and this camera is actually parented to an empty object which
we can see over here. When I press R and lock
this along the Z axis, you can see that we can
rotate the camera here. So I just animated this empty object to make this rotation movement. And then down here I
selected the key frames, press T and set the key frame
interpolation to linear. That means the animation speed is the same for the entire animation. So the camera's always
moving with the same speed. In terms of resolution and so on, let's go to the output
settings here, dimensions. I used a 21 by 9 aspect ratio in 4K, and I have set the frame
rate to 60 frames per second, to have a super smooth playback
and the animation later on. The camera itself is set
to an orthographic view here on the lens you can see it under type because I wanted to have
this kind of isometric look. That means if I switch
back to perspective, we have this more realistic look, which looks also pretty cool in general, but this low polye style
fits very nicely with this orthographic isometric view. And then we can change
this orthographic scale to zoom in or out, depending
on how big your scene is. Then as you can see, I also
enabled depth of field here to get this shallow depth of field effect. And since the whole scene
looks like a miniature, we can go pretty crazy with
the depth of field effect which will fit very nicely here. Of course don't overdo it
but it works really nice. And here I used a simple empty
object, which I placed here, which I connected with the focus point. So I can select this empty, move this around in the
scene to change the focus as you can see. Then let's talk about the lights set up. When I disable the light here, you can see we still have
this bluish ambient light, which is generated from
the world background. Here you can see I have this blue color with a very low strands. If I set this to zero,
everything is just black. Then let's enable the lights and let's disable the moonlight First of all I have this point lamp which I placed on top of the fire here and here I added also the noise
modifier in the graph editor to make this lamp wiggle around randomly, which makes the shadow
around the fire move randomly which looks very nice
in the final animation. And this is just a orange pot
lamp with pretty strong power. Then as a contrast to this orangy color, I added the moonlight, which is a blue sunlight
with pretty strong intensity. And to make this look even cooler. I added some light blockers
because by default, the scene would look something like this. And as you can see this is lacking focus. The whole background is
pretty bright and is also grabbing our attention. And that's why I added
some light blockers, which basically let only light into the main area of the scene here, which gives us a very nice focus and this I achieved by simply
adding some cubes over here, which are adding the shadow at the bottom. And these we can move around freely to decide where the shadow
should appear on the ground. And I also added a cube here where I added a simple
principled volume shader to also have a little bit of
volumetric fog in the scene when I turn this off, you
can see the difference. Then to make the scene look a bit cooler in the render settings, I
enabled ambient occlusion, which adds this darkening shadow in all the corners and creases. Here I increased the distance quite a lot and also the vector. And I also enabled bloom, which adds this nice glow effect
on top of glowing elements. As final touch, I added the
medium high contrast here under color management, when
I turn this off you can see the image has less contrast
so let's go back here. And I also increased the
exposure a bit to make the image pop a bit more. Yeah. And in the end, I rendered out the whole
animation as a PNG image sequence. So you will render out single images for each frame of the animation. And this is always recommended because when your computer crashes, you don't lose any render
information or when you have some errors in single frames of the animation, you can simply replace them. Yeah and then to finalize
the whole animation, I sent this project over to
my colleague Richard Albert, who is a composer and sound designer and he composed some music
and added some sound effects. And the final sound editing
he did actually in Blender. As you can see here when I play back the animation we have
all this pop up sounds. Also back here. And some ambient sounds here at the center to really add life to the scene. And in the cubic worlds
course you will also learn how to fully do this year
with free sound effects you can find online. But yeah, this would go too far to dive
deeper into this section here. But as you can see all that can
be done directly in Blender. Yeah. In this video we
just scratched the surface on what is possible with the cubic worlds workflows and style. If you find this video inspiring and want to dive deeper
into the cubic worlds and want to learn how to
create your own scenes, check out the course over at academy.cgboost.com Besides creating these
cubic worlds scenes. I will soon also add more
content to the course where we will also discuss character, machine and robot creation,
rigging and animation in the cubic worlds style. Yeah. See you inside the course
or in one of my next videos. Goodbye.
