Lava Lamp Animation Tutorial in Blender 2.93 | Polygon Runway

[Music] hey everyone welcome to my new tutorial a lot of you were asking about the lava lamp i used in a recent project so i thought it would be a nice project to try to create real animated lavaland here in eb let me pause this so that's something we'll be creating today and if you're new to the channel and you'd like to see tutorials like this in the future please hit that subscribe button and the bell button to get notified when i release something new and remember if you enjoyed this tutorial please leave a like it really helps the channel and before we jump right into the empty blender file i want to point out that there is a lot to go through here so i will have to move a little bit faster over some things if you're new to the world of 3d and blender and you'd like to learn in a more linear and structured approach with a lot of in-depth explanation please go and check out my courses on polygonrunway.com there are specifically designed to take you from zero to hero in shortest time possible in a most effective way and there were some pricing changes and a whole new ultimate 3d bundle that combines all of my courses in a single package so if you're interested please go check that one out you will find all the links in the description and now without further ado let's jump right into empty scene and let's create this lavalamp let's start by creating a simple line model so i'll press shift a and add a circle i will leave it at 32 words and just tab in press f to fill and scale it down tiny bit and now let's press e to extrude and scale this down e once again to extrude once more scale it out and now let's extrude the lamp body something like this and you can make it more wide if you wish whatever works for you this will be a shape of our lamp and now we'll need to reuse some of the geometry so let's press 3 for face select i will alt click here to select this loop all around and alt shift click here as well and now let's press shift d to duplicate right click on the mouse to release and now just press p and separate this by selection so that will move it into a separate object and now we can just step out and update the models for the sake of clarity let's name this main one lamp and this other object will be called bounce we'll just use it to contain the particles and we'll need to finish this up so let's press slash on a numpad to enter the local view and now let's tab in and let's press 2 for add select and alt click the loop on top and press f to fill we need to close this up and i'll click here and have to fill as well and now let's step out and let's change some properties here so in the viewport display section we'll need to switch this to wire so it doesn't get in the way and now let's press slash on a numpad once again so we exit the local view and now select the main lamp object and we'll need to add some modifiers here so first of all let's add solidify modifier and let's check even thickness now i'll press 1 for front view and switch to the wireframe by holding z and here we can see the thickness of the solidify modifier and by holding shift we can adjust that thickness however we want something like this should be fine now let's switch to solid view and additionally we'll add the bevel modifier to make edges nice and smooth let's increase segments to two now let's reduce the amount okay now right click shade this smooth and we'll need to separate the central part to create the glass object so let's tap into the edit mode let's press ctrl r to create a loop up here and one more down there and now let's switch to the face select by pressing 3 again alt click this loop and without duplicating it we just press p and separate this by selection that will separate it into a new object so you can see we have two objects now and for the glass to better see what we are doing temporarily we'll switch these to fire as well so this is a simple lamp model we'll be working with now i have achieved great results with metaballs when creating this plasma inside the lava lamp so you might as well just add a metaball object here in your scene you know and start duplicating it to create some interesting blobs and create your level manually if you wish so let me go back but i thought it would be interesting to animate this and to use meta balls in combination with particle systems if you're interested only in the rendering part and creating a shader just create your metal balls manually and move further up in the video if you're interested to see how to set up these particles let's do that right now the first thing we'll need to do is to add some object that will emit the particles this can be anything from a plane to sphere um whatever i feel like doing a cylinder here makes sense because i want to fill this area here with particles so let's press shift a and let's add cylinder and i will just press g then z and move it up here and now let's press s and shift z to scale it like that in the middle and maybe move it further down a bit we'll see about that later and now we'll set these to emit particles so we don't actually need to see the cylinder so let's set display as bounds now we can switch to the particles tab and create a new particle system you can see first particle appearing right away but i want them to appear all at once to be present in the lamp so let's set frame start to 0 and frame and to 0 as well and let's set the number to something like 15 really small so we have constant number of particles in our lamp and now if you play your animation they will just fall down because there's gravity in place so the second thing i want to do is to go to the field weight section of the particle settings and reduce the gravity to zero and additionally let's open velocity tab and we'll reduce the speed of normals to one because right now they will just fly away from the object as they are emitted so let's reduce this to zero and now they are staying in place and that's exactly what we want because we still have physics enabled and active but we just removed some of the forces there and the next thing we can do is to move them around a little bit now with the lava lamp i don't really know how the plasma works i think it's rising up it gets hot at the bottom then it rises up then it cools down and goes back down so this way you get this nice you know flowing of the plasma inside the lamp i won't be simulating that i just want to fake the effect and create some kind of movement so we can start adding some force fields and maybe we can start with the turbulence to give this some nice random movement so let's press shift a and go to the force field and let's add turbulence right here and let's move it a little bit higher up somewhere here maybe and let's play the animation so we have some particle movements but they are disappearing so let's select the cylinder object again and we can rename this to emitter we need to increase their lifetime first of all i will probably need to make this a little bit longer so let's make the animation 300 frames something like this and in the output settings let's switch this to 30 frames so we have more smooth animation let's go back to the particle settings and set lifetime to 300 so they will stay for the whole length of the animation like this and they're flying around that works just fine but they're flying outside the lamp so we need to contain them luckily it's really easy to do that just select the bounce object that we created in the beginning by reusing the geometry go to the physics tab and enable collision this will automatically collide with the particles and contain them within that space so they will just happily move around now we can of course edit their movement by adjusting the turbulence here so for example we can set the strength to 0.5 and see how that goes so their movement is a little bit slower and additionally we can add another fields so they're just not randomly moving around and i've come up with a simple solution here i'll press shift a at the force field and i will add the wind and let's move it up tiny bit somewhere here and in the wind settings you can adjust falloff so let's set power to one let's enable minimum distance to zero and maximum distance and let's set this to something like one point whatever and you will see this circle and that's basically the falloff of the wind so outside this circle the wind won't be working so so any particle that gets caught up at the bottom will be blown up by the wind object and you can see how that works here you can see them rising up so these are these heated particles that go up and then we can just duplicate the wind press z and press r x and 180 degrees enter and we have another wind object that will additionally push the particles down so this way i just wanted to simulate the behavior when the particle goes up it will cool down and it's forced down by the wind object so we have some of them going up and the turbulence is taking care of some of the wiggle so so far this setup will be okay i guess so we can just move on and actually change these particles to metabols so let's select the emitter object and let's go to the particle settings and in the render section we'll switch to halo to object so let's press shift a and let's add a metabol and we can make it smaller like this now select the emitter and down in the render section we'll switch halo to object and just pick the metabol object from the list like this and we'll adjust the scale something like this should be fine and scale randomness i want to set this to something like 0.5 and maybe make this a little bit larger if the metabols look a little bit choppy you can always just select that object and go into metabolic properties and change the resolution in the viewport to something smaller like point three it will make them more smooth but for the sake of keeping the viewport responsive during the animation that's all i want to do right now and now let's play that animation and see what will happen we have these nice blobs moving around nice blobs of plasma but what happens it goes out of bounds because only these particles collide with the outside it doesn't take the metabol mesh into account and there's easy fix for that too let's select the emitter once again and down in the physics section you can open the deflection and enable size deflect that should take that object that instanced by particle into account so let's see what happens now some of them might start outside the bounds and that's because the collision solver didn't know where to put them because they respond maybe near the edge here so the moment this starts to compute it will just move them out of bounds the only way to fix this is basically to play with the emitter here to make sure that they start contained within that cylinder so it might be a little bit tricky to find the best solution okay now they're all inside and we have some blob that's dancing around and we can now play with the position of these force fields we can move this more up so we actually have some particles detaching from the group the reason why they are not going higher up is because they are colliding with walls there with the bounds so another thing you can do is to reduce their scale tiny bit so they're able to go higher up okay that works nicely if you would like to see longer animation and longer behavior feel free to make the animation longer but i'm quite satisfied with this and one more thing sometimes you might have weird glitches or issues with these particle animations if you find some settings that you are satisfied with and most importantly if you want to render this out i strongly recommend to select the emitter and bake the particle physics so you can find the cache section here and just click bake all dynamics and this will basically bake all of that particle behavior right in so we now have some blobs moving around and we can move on and create some interesting shaders so let's add some background i will press shift a and add a plane here and press s to make it larger and let's add some camera into the scene so let's press shift a and add the camera right here and press alt r to reset its rotation and now move it along the y axis like this you can see the arrow where the camera should be pointing up so let's press r x and rotate it like this let's look from it and adjust the position something like this okay and i want to scale this plane down tiny bit and create a background so let's select the edge at the back let's press e then z and extrude it let's select it once again let's press ctrl b to bevel and adjust with the mouse wheel tab out and shade smooth so we have a scene like this now and we can now switch to the material preview and additionally enable scene lights and scene world so we actually see the lighting and now select the manaball object and we'll create our first shader and i'll need nodes so let's switch to shading and here we can enable scene lights and scene world as well and the camera and now let's create a new material let's call this blob or something and we have some principle material already in place or rather principled shader so let's create another one let's create a mission let's proceed a shader emission and now i will add input and final node and this will enable us to see reflections and this will enable us to see the frontal shading on the object if you have node wrangler item active if you don't go into the preferences and enable node wrangler and now ctrl shift click the node to preview and you will see what the frannel does and you can play with the ior to change that effect that's the index of refraction and additionally we can press shift a and add the converter color ramp to have some more manual control over this gradient here i want to see something like this and we can find a nice mix of that ior and the color ramp to create a nice mask and now we'll use this to mix those two shaders so let's create a new one shift a shader and a mix shader and i want to connect emission to the bottom here and principle here and let's connect our friendly mask and let's connect all to surface or we can control shift click the mix shader to see the final result this looks very similar but now we have full control over these materials and first thing i want to do is to bring up the subsurface of this principle shader let's leave it wide for a while and now let's add some strength to that emission to something like 20. okay and let's go to the render settings enable ambient occlusion bloom screen space reflection and refraction will need that for the glass so we have some simple object here and if you wish you can change the color you can make it a little bit darker like this and if you play the animation you will see how that frontal node helps us to light up the object and how the subsurface scattering with the principled shaders makes it look like a real matter or like a real material or something okay so that's it for the plasma material and i will leave it white because we'll color it with the color of the glass first of all let's select the lamp point zero zero one that we separated we can rename it to glass and one thing i want to do is to change the solidify settings for this one because it's too thick so something like this should work just fine and now let's go to the object properties and let's switch these to textured as well and we'll create a new material let's call this glass and we'll add transmission to it and down here since we're in the eb we'll need to enable screen space refraction so we have some glass material but there is a lot of roughness so we can reduce that to zero and there is pretty strong ior in place maybe you will like this effect that is refracting so much and it creates this strange effect maybe not you can certainly play with the index of refraction to make it less real i would say but more comprehensible let's leave it at 0.45 for now and now additionally we can change the base color of that glass to something you like and this way you can create multiple lamps and just change the color of the glass and basically create multiple versions of the same lamp like this okay let's continue with this and now let's select the lamp object and i want this to be simple rough material so let's increase the roughness i don't want to give this a metallic material and let's select the background and create background material and let's make it dark or darker now we can press shift a light and add an area light let's move it up press g then z and now i will hold period on keyboard switch to the 3d cursor so we can now rotate it around its x axis and now r z and rotate it like this okay now let's make this larger and i want to switch this from square to rectangle so we can make it slim and tall like this and move it up tiny bit okay and let's set power to something like 150 or even more let's start at 500 and we can see the nice reflection on the glass and you can even move it around to find some better reflections and change its shape to make it wider or smaller and now let me do this on the other side as well maybe from a different angle okay and of course we can give those some colors so we can make like a blue light from the side and the orange on the other one that always look nice okay and it doesn't hurt to give this some backlight so let's add another one move it back and let's set this to like 1500 and we can play with the color here as well something like this okay so um if i toggle the overlays now and play animation we have created a nice lava lamp effect with the particles of course there is a lot of things um you can play with here for example you can change the values of those wind force fields the turbulence field the size of those particles to make them fit a little bit better inside the lamp this could easily take two or three hours to fine tune and find something you like or even use different force fields or physics to actually simulate what happens inside the lamp i just wanted to show you how easy it is to create some easy particle system in combination with metal balls to create nice organic moving structures in blender and of course i will play with this a little bit more and show you the final result you can find the link to download my final scene in the description it's available on my patreon if you're already a patron or if not it's available for free on gumroad so you can grab that and reverse engineer what i've done after these steps so that's it for the lamp i really hope you enjoyed this one and again if you're new to the channel and you'd like to see content like this in the future please hit that subscribe button and the bell button to get notified when i release something new if you really enjoyed this content please leave a like it really helps the channel thank you all for watching and have a wonderful day 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Channel: Polygon Runway

Views: 23,265

Keywords: blender, 3d, tutorial, isometric, diorama, blender tutorial, low poly blender, illustration, isometric illustration tutorial, 3d illustration, 3d modeling, 3d modeling tutorial, blender modeling, blender modeling tutorial, modeling, modeling tutorial blender, 3d modeling software, blender 2.93, blender 2.93 tutorial, blender animation tutorial, blender particles, blender particle animation, blender metaballs, blender metaballs animation, 3d animation tutorial, lava lamp 3d

Id: SE75487eRu4

Length: 22min 29sec (1349 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 07 2021