How to make Neon Puddles in Blender!

hello everyone and welcome to today's tutorial on blender shader nodes today i'll be teaching you how to make this neon puddle effect using a few simple shader nodes and a few simple geometry notes it'll be a simple tutorial this time around so without further ado let's get started first of all what we want to do is make our mesh for our puddle so let's start with a circle and bring this into the center of the scene there we are and what we're going to do is take our circle and extrude it using the e key make sure you're in vertex mode when you do that or else it won't work properly and then we're going to scale this down to almost zero something just about like that you want it to be fairly small then what we're going to do is extrude and send it straight up just like that that seems pretty good and then what we are going to do next is select one of these faces let's go into the uv editing section just like that we're going to select one of these and press u reset and this will reset this uv map to be perfectly square then we are going to press a to select everything and then press u again and then press follow active quads and what this will do is unwrap the entire mesh based off of the already unwrapped uh quad that we have here so if we do that we can see that we have this very nice grid effect and if we add in a new material let's do that real quick and then look at the uv map we can see that the uv map is now laid out in the way it's supposed to so if we use a converter separate xyz node we could see that if we take the y gradient there is a gradient from the edge to the center and all the way up so now let's start making the actual puddle drip effect so to do that we need to use a math node and a fraction node just like this and as we can see let's hide it so that we can see the effect a bit better when using the add node if we just add to this it causes kind of a puddle effect so let's animate that by using hashtag frame divided by 24. let's see is that working oh hashtag frame let's see frame divided by 24 there we go that should be spelled correctly there we go and now that we have this we can see that is now animated properly which is very good but we could do a bit more to make this look a little bit better so as we could see with the top portion right here the drops are falling a little too slowly and actually let's let's make the drops look more drop like so let's move this over a tad and now we're going to use a color ramp and we're going to add in another node just so that it gets brighter than darker or darker than brighter than darker again just like that there we go but we could see that if falling takes too much time so to manipulate that we're going to take the top vertices right here in the uv map and if we press on this little arrow key right here it'll sync the selection with the uv map so if we do that we could just move this down and as we could see if i play this it looks like the drop is taking much less time to hit the ground just by moving the uv map and if we do this it makes it slower this one it makes it faster i think something like that is okay we might have to speed up the entire animation which i'll do right now let's speed it up to uh 20 should be okay yeah that seems pretty good so now what we are going to do is neon this thing so to do that what we're going to do is add in two uh a few nodes the emissions shader the transparent shader and a mix shader right here we're going to feed our transparent or our color ramp right here into the mix shader so if i move this over here i'll move this so that we could see more of the nodes in a bigger viewing area so let's move that right there if we look at this we can see that it's not working that's because we need to switch to the alpha blend mode if you are using ev if you are using cycles this will work just fine so let's switch that to alpha blend in the shadow mode to none as we can see this is now working but we can make it look a little bit better using my fancy glowy falloff effect you'll see what i mean in a second i've used this in previous tutorials but is incredibly useful whenever you are using emission effects so what we're going to do is add in a math node hook this into the bottom selection and we're going to have one node set to minimum then another one set to logarithm let's do that we're going to set both of these top values to 0.999 let's copy that over to here as well as we can see oh one thing that we need to do is flip around the mix shader so that the emission is on the bottom there we go and now if we crank up the emission shader it's looking a bit more glowy and just a bit better overall there we go so if we were to do this without the fancy falloff effect it would look like that not the best but with this it looks pretty good and if you want an even better um falloff then we just add a multiply node after that hook the multiply into there hook that into the color ramp so it will look just like this you could add in a frame just so that you could carry it around easier but this is how i do most of my glowy effects and it just makes it look that much better so there we go let's increase the brightness a bit one more thing that we could do is make it so that this fades off at the edges instead of just abruptly ending where the mesh ends so to fix that let's just go and use our uv map again there we go let's look at this color ramp let's make it so that fades off at the edge there we go that seems pretty good and then we'll just multiply the our gradient right here by that and it should work pretty much perfectly there we oh yeah that the dispersion it looks like uh yeah the dispersion is working quite well and now that we have the node set up pretty much done we could start making tons of puddles so to do that let's go and move our puddle to the side over here this will be our base object then we're going to add in a plane and do a little bit of geometry notes but don't worry it's not too much so let's add in a new geometry node editor set a new geometry node what we're going to do is use the instance on points node put that right there and we're going to drag and drop our circle mesh into here and do that but we're only getting four one on each vertices of this plane we don't want that we want many points on the surface so to do that we're going to use the instance or the distribute points on faces node there we go right here and as we can see if we lower the density we are getting lots more points and let's just make this a little bit bigger something more like that and we can control how many of these show up just by changing the density and you can change the seed if you want a different layout but as we can see here's a little problem all these are perfectly synchronized which we do not want let me go and just increase the amount here just a little bit more and we we don't want these to be synchronized we want each one to fall at a different time so to change that let's go back into the shader editor of our original one and we want to add a random value for our time right here so to do that let's use the input object info and this will give us a random value per instance as we can see here each of these has a random value with this random input and let's add that to the part right here and as we can see if i go back and play this we're getting a random value for each one but we need to make it a little more by just using a multiply node and cranking it up to something like i don't know 20 should be good enough but now we're getting random puddles for every instance and again if we go into geometry nodes once again and then go and crank up the amount let's see where is it ah there it is let's just crank it up a bit more and boom we got tons of puddles going and yeah that's basically the entire effect we could change a few more things like uh let's go into the shader editor again we can use the random node to also affect the color per instance so let's go over to here put this one to blue and the other one to more of a pinkish and there you go you have a very nice this could almost be a firework effect if you want but yeah it's quite nice and make sure you add some frames to your node setups just to make them look a bit cleaner there we go always organize your nodes and yeah that should be the entire effect if you enjoyed this tutorial be please like and subscribe check out my gumroad account there's plenty of free and paid stuff on there check out my twitter account my instagram account my art station account all that good stuff and yeah i will see you in the next tutorial

Channel: Cartesian Caramel

Views: 37,909

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Id: DGrv36iJQa4

Length: 9min 59sec (599 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 02 2022