How to Make Lasers of Destruction in Blender - Iridesium

[Music] hey what's up guys joel adams with iridesceium and i am back with another pretty cool tutorial in this video we're going to be learning a couple different ways to create a simple laser so creating a laser as you might imagine would be pretty uh pretty easy however there are tons of different variations and i'm going to say right here that of course these lasers are not really gonna be physically accurate we are just cheating the whole time and uh that is perfectly fine that is what doing cg is pretty much all about so anyways i'm going to open up blender and we are going to vaporize everything here and then we are going to add in a well you could really add in anything but i'm going to add in a circle and let's set this down to 16 just to make sure and then we'll go to the front view rotate 90 degrees and then we're going to go tab into edit mode e and x to scale that out select everything s shift x to scale it down so i'm going to switch to ev the first laser we're going to create is um in eevee i'm going to go new diffuse emission then i'm going to go over here and turn on bloom and that's basically it we have just created a laser very very simple what about cycles let's go to cycles add our camera in control alt numpad 0 and let's switch to the gpu there we go i'm going to go ahead and make our background black move this up on the z rotate it down a little bit add in a plane cool i'm going to turn this down to 75 and render that very nice now go to the compositor click use nodes i'm going to drag this out a little bit we're going to go filter glare streaks fog glow ctrl shift click on this and drag your viewer node up here and yeah that's that's it you've now got your laser glowing and it looks pretty decent so what if you wanted to add uh uh just a tad bit more realism so what i'm going to do here is we'll go ahead and delete this and i'll add in a cube actually you don't i'm not going to delete that instead i'm going to move this new collection and we'll call this beam 1 and then i'm going to go and add in a cube tab gx1 basically we're doing the same exact setup scale it on the x and rotate it so this one's going to be a bit fancier go to the rendered view you can't see anything at the moment and then i'm going to go and i'm going to open up a new window here shader editor and new delete this and add in an emission plug that into the volume and you've got this pretty stupid looking let's go and go uh texture gradient i'm going to control shift click on this and if you add in a sphere you're going to get that it's basically pinned to this point right here i'm going to hit ctrl t to add in a mapping and texture coordinate node and then i'm just going to plug this object into the vector here and you can see that the sphere is now right there you're going to get this which looks kind of ridiculous if you apply the scale you're going to see a little bit more of a gradient here let's go ahead and turn the scale here down so if i just select all of these in tribe three now you can see kind of a half sphere which is pretty cool it might be the x nope try that yeah here we go so now we've set x to zero and that is stretched out infinitely on its local x-axis leaving us with this nice laser shape so you can kind of see where i'm going here with this now what i'm going to do is i'm going to add in a texture noise texture i'm going to go color mix plug this in here set this to multiply now we're going to go converter color ramp and you can see we're kind of breaking apart the laser which is very cool see what overlay does yeah now that we've turned the contrast up that's actually looking a tad better add another mix here set it to add grab this same gradient plug it in there and then go converter color ramp and turn that down there we go so now the core is real small but we've got this nice uh sort of detail around the laser itself so now if we give this a color let's plug this into the strength instead at a converter math node and this is going to control the strength let's set it to 10 okay let's try 50 and then we'll make this nice sith red there you go that is very simple and pretty cool i'm going to try blue so then if we go uh s shift x you can turn how thin this is down something like that and of course you'll have to turn up the strength to make it uh brighter very nice there we go now let's go ahead and animate this actually i'm going to go to the first frame and what you want to do is hit ctrl t on this noise texture what you're going to do is you're going to animate the noise texture moving along the laser so uh i think it's going to be x sometimes it is rather difficult to tell but uh if we switch if we control shift click on this color ramp unplug that and then uh head to evie so i'm gonna go and grab this uh x location insert a single keyframe on the x nothing has changed here if i click on the mapping node you can actually see the keyframe show up i'm then going to switch to the graph editor go over here and if your object is selected we've got the laser selected and then under this shader node tree we've got x default value selected we can go under modifiers and add a generator and that is going to sort of animate it for us it's going to be moving on its own you can set it down to 0.1 if i set this down to 0.01 you can see it's moving in the wrong direction so i'm going to try negative 0.1 and that looks like it's working so if i turn on motion blur i don't know if motion blur will work with this or not looks like it does go to the shader editor and plug it in there so now it is animated if you were to render this out you would see that it is moving all right so now that we've got this laser you can rotate it around and do whatever you want with it i'm going to move it to a new collection beam 2 whoops okay i'll go with that big claim and turn that off the next thing i'm going to do is make kind of an animatable laser which is pretty cool that has some sparks so let's go ahead and add in a plane tab into edit mode s y zero and then go m by distance so that we've only got vertices here and then let's go gx and one basically we've got the same setup except with only one well two vertices rotate this on 90 degrees then let's add in an empty i'll add in a cone rotate it on the x90 and just place it right about there which is fine so if we tab into edit mode e and x to just move it out just so that we have a little bit of geometry here we can now go into weight paint mode hold down alt and drag and that will give you a gradient tool and you can paint just these two bottom vertices go into object mode then into edit mode delete those vertices and our gradient should still be there now we can go add modifier hook select this empty and then select our vertex group as you can see this vertice did not snap to the ico sphere that's because we need it to be in that location when we choose the hook modifier so i'm going to go ahead and turn this off we'll go and place this up right at the bottom well near the bottom maybe a little above add the modifier back in hook select the empty and the vertex group and there you go now you can turn on magnetic face project individual elements and then you can snap this to the ground and move it around very cool so now i can go to our laser object add modifier skin if you go tab into edit mode you can hit control a to scale up and down a vertice you can add in a subdivision surface if you want i'm not going to instead i'm going to add in a new material remove that we're gonna add it we're gonna make it volume as well emission i'll set this to orange maybe crank this up to 50 60 and drag this over here very simple setup drag this down to start it lower which is pretty cool however it's not cool enough i need it to be even cooler this empty is controlling that end of the laser but this empty could control other things for instance a particle system so if i add in a plane well i'll select empty shift s cursor to selected add in a plane then you can add in a particle system i'm going to make this floor plane a collision turn its damping and its friction up and then maybe randomize that and you can hit play if i go velocity and go on the z so the plane is inside of the is underneath the other plane and that is not good so move it up now change this down to 1 2 something like that turn the randomize up for sure let's turn the random lifetime up and set this to maybe 25 very nice so now you can select that plane select your particles shift select to the empty and hit control p to object so now when we move this cone around the particles will follow which is really cool i'm going to just add in a quick particle here it's going to be a cube and i'll give it a just an emission shader that is set to orange my old spark tutorial for if you want to create a more advanced particle shader still is pretty relevant i might have to do an update in the future but not at the moment so if you want to make a more advanced spark material just check that out i'll now go under render object and select your particle system like that if you go rotation normal dynamic it's not going to add a whole lot but it will make it seem slightly more natural in case any of the actual shape of the cube shows up in the render which it really shouldn't these are going to be pretty small 0.003 turn the amount here up to 10 000. see what that looks like that's good and then you can duplicate the particle system hit the little two here set this down to maybe 500 and turn the scale up to point two you want some variation in size um and motion blur is on let's see what that looks like in a render yeah so you've got these sparks they're looking pretty good the other ones i think uh for some reason broke let's go and bake this and then grab the other ones and we'll just turn the random seed up and pick that yeah there you go so you can see all these real small ones and then the bigger ones and it just looks a lot more realistic now the actual plane itself you can do a couple things either you can add a transparent material to hide it or you can add an emission which is what i like to do make it yellow real bright and it's just going to add a really hot glowing spot right there on the surface you might even want that to be a little brighter let's try 1000 yeah that's really cool that's good it's very nice all zoom out just a little bit more and let's check out some animation for our cone here so the first thing i'm going to do is hide the particles and i'm going to add some animation here let's just insert keyframes so there's a whole bunch of keyframes on this then the first thing i'm going to do is add a generator to the x set it to 0.1 set the start value here to be negative so that it's kind of out there i'm now going to go on the y location and add a noise so now it's really jiggling back and forth let's turn the scale up and the strength up scale can be even further up so now you've got this uh pretty random laser motion here and it's not the coolest scene in the world world but uh in the world so let's go to render render image and our particles are still back here so uh yeah let's uh grab our particle plane turn the particles back on delete the bake and rebake and then delete the bake here and rebake and you could use dynamic paint on this plane you know to kind of burn it and scorch it i'm not going to show how to do that but that's definitely an option the other thing i've done in the past is use denoising to kind of give the particles a stylized look which can be pretty cool so if i turn this down to like five let's go over here and turn on denoising data render render image we get this super noisy image if i go to compositing filter denoise plug the normal and the albedo in here then we get this which looks like bad footage which is cool i actually like that um yeah i know you're supposed to put the noisy image in there but it looks like bad footage it looks like denoised cruddy footage which is uh you know always more realistic anyways you can see how cool and simple that was to create a laser very very easy nothing fancy and just adding a little bit more like these particles will really take it to the next step so uh yeah i would love to see some renders of this and there are tons of cool things you can do with lasers as you can see that was really simple and easy to create and came out with some really cool effects and i really hope to see some cool stuff coming from this if you want to post your stuff in the iridescent community you can join with the link below thank you for watching i hope you enjoyed and i will see you next time this is iridesium you

Channel: Iridesium

Views: 53,692

Rating: 4.9718752 out of 5

Keywords: blender, laser, 3d, destruction, iridesium, animation, starwars, lightsaber, blaster, deathstar, death, star, beam, sith, science, planet, green, red, blue, detail, volumetric, volume, light, photon, ray, blast

Id: 4HhavlMLV6k

Length: 17min 8sec (1028 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 16 2020