Looping Chinese Dragon Animation (Additional Part) - Blender 4.0 Tutorial

hey guys we are about to make this Dragon Loop and for this of you who don't know in previous video we created this Dragon animation it's a three-parts tutorial where we model animate and shade everything links are below in the description so I wanted to follow up with additional part and show you what you can do with it and how easily you can adjust it to create different Dragon variations it's a fully procedural way of work so we will take it from there and loop it first we'll do some modeling and shading tweaks creating simple environment with the particle systems so let's get into it let's Loop the dragon first so select the curve that drive the animation not the one that we use it to array the body scales but the other one to make a loop we have to close the curve so if we select one of the end vertices we can toggle the Cy click with Alt see let's enable simplify to move this thing freely something else we have to take care of so if we isolate the curve we can see that we have this sharp end and we want it smooth so we can go to the active spline and disable the end point to make it smooth this is in the option that closing the curve you can do it from here so now we want to adjust the segments to get some interesting looping part remove mov some of the vertices usually less you have the smoother the Curve will be to help with the visualization we can add some depth to the curve for now we want to keep the dragon in one place rotating around the center but leave enough space for the head and the other groups so they don't get into the body when moving definitely take some time here if you're doing changes to the path late later you have to adjust key frames if you ask me I had to do it a few times to get the path right so check how everything works and let's set the animation for this one I will change to 300 frames starting from the first frame but let's keep it to zero for now to make it easier for adding the key frames later we'll change it to one but we wanted to add the key frames at zero so we didn't have overlapping frames to create a loop we have to set the same thing at the beginning and at the end but then offset with one frame so we don't have two same frames in the final Loop because this will look like there is a glitch you'll see this in a minute we can also change the interpolation to linear just select everything in the scene with a then select all the key frames in a timeline with a again and change the interpolation mode to linear let's also go to the preferences and change the default interpolation as well so when we add in new key frames they with linear interpolation to Loop the things we can start with a head the empty there is using a follow path constraint and it's very easy to Loop because we have the offset value that we can use so let's go to the end of the animation and delete the old key frames then add a new key frame for the constraint offset go to the beginning offset negative or positive in this case is negative minus 100 and add another key frame holding shift and left right arrows we can check if the position is the same at the end we will change the starting frame to one to get rid of one of these duplicating frames and have seamlessly whooping animation but for now let's go back to zero to make it easier for adding the key frames the next part that we can Loop is the body and this is a little bit tricky because we don't have offset or values that we can use to set it precisely so we will we have to eyeball it and try to get it the same as much as we can let's delete all key frames again we are at the end of the animation and let's add a location key frame we can grab The annotation tool from the tools panel or just hold down the D key and draw with the left Mouse click the notation now stays only on the frame that we added it but we can lock it so it's visible on all frames if we open the side panel under the view top we can log The annotation to all frames we can go now to the first frame and offset the body on the X AIS it has to be locked on the x- axis to slide along the curve just eyeball the body to make a full circle and try to put it on the same place to match with The annotation we can precise the position from the side panel and let's add another key frame check it to see if it's all good holding down the DQ with the right Mouse button to aason notation moving onto the comp and it's a similar way but here we are using an empty to offset the texture on the xais so we have to animate this empty we have the displace modifier with this circle wood texture so it won't be hard to Loop let's first delete the out key frames offset the empty a little bit from the center and add the location key frame on the end of the animation and here is where we are using again the anotation to say it right and make it loop it's not precise I mean there're not a vales that we can use and stuff like that so we have to eyeball it and do it as close as possible go to the first frame offset the empty further on the xaxis and try to get this pattern exactly where it was at the end of the animation at the location key frame checking left right and it's not perfect but if we go to the first frame we can see that it won't be noticeable that much the legs are quite simple we have there the follow PA constraint and we can set it PR precisely like we did with a head get rid of the curve depth and let's go to the constrain settings delete the out key frames so we already offset the legs from the body you can offset where you want it to be and add the key frame then go to the beginning and Addus 100 right there after the offset value and add the other key frame so it make a full circle check if everything is okay and do the same with the other legs we can check what we have and let's see how it looks everything is okay and you can save it from time to time make sure you have backup copies if you want the dragon to move in the other way you can just switch the segment Direction like that also when you are in edit mode you can rotate freely the dragon or move the whole thing just like that but make sure you do it in edit mode because it will change the original Point position and everything will mess up we can easily add in more length to the dragon just grab The Body Curve and extend it along the X AIS in edit mode just like that Slide the tail as well on the x-axis to match with the new position we already touched some of this in the previous video but let me show you how you can add in more depth and adjust the other parts to do it grab the body and in edit mode move the scales on the Z axis then scale up a little bit check what we have and let's adjust the other body parts turn off simplify for now to see how it looks with the subdivisions we can start tweaking this in edit mode but we can see how the changes affect the dragon itself and we have to switch every time between the modes to see the changes so what we can do here is to display the curve modifiers in edit mode and this will give us live feedback on how it looks on the dragon and you know this shape can be adjusted in any way to get so many different results so play with it and see what you can get let's TW the tubes in the same way display all modifiers in edit mode to make it easier to see how the changes affect the dragon that's done and why not changing the com pattern as well previous part we created this mesh that resemble flames and now we can create something different the easiest way is to twg the existing mesh in edit mode just delete some of these faces extrude some and TW the vertices to get something different that's all you can turn on the subdivision C cage if that's it's easier for you to edit we can also display the modifiers to see how it looks back on its place while editing that's the advantage of the procedural modeling that we can always edit what we have and even create a totally different things from there so that's done and let's remove some of the parts that we added before instead of deleting I'll just move them to another collection and hide it from the viewport and rendering you can name this collection wherever you want but I found that is better to move their things and hide them not deleting them and that just something like a backup folder in case we need them later we can add back some volume to the legs because without that part they look skinny now let's also hide the whiskers there and Twix some of the head Parts everything is pared to the empty that have constraint so we can just disable it and this will bring the head back to its original position in the center of the scene you can hide the other collection if you want first I want to make the mouth wide open so just grab the curve and adjust it in edit mode then the MH side back to its place you can offset the mouth array just like that if you need get also the te back on their position TW the rotation where needed let's also change the look of these horns it's using cylinder that is arrayed on the curve and we can replace it with different objects I will add again cylinder but with only six sides this time isolate only these parts to make it easier to work with make sure the scale is up plat we're using here the copy attribute and that's an addom that you can enable from preferences this thing right here so just copy the location and rotation with contrl + C then copy the modifiers link the materials and that's the way to replace the object in this curved setup with array you can get total different results like that in no time we can quick further in this object insert these two faces and Bridge them for this menu you have to enable the loop tools add on from preferences we get some artifacts but if we change the angle we will fix the bevel just like that till and some of the vertices make sure this part is in the collection with the other head parts and and pair it to the empty so everything Stay Together unhide the other parts and enable the constraint to bring it back to its position we can easily make different tail shape by tweaking the machine edit mode that's the other way to get different variations fast Anything Can Be Still adjusted it's all procedural or non-destructive and that's the beauty of this will work so do whatever you like and let's move it with some material adjustments grab the body and twe this Shader first we can make it black and gray and for this we can play with a COR ramp or just delete this one and add a new cor ramp there get rid of the metallic effect on this one put down the white to light the gray core reduce the roughness add a little bit of cold also to get this nice reflection surface we can add an Sheen this is used for cloth or dust material but we can use it to give some core for reflection to the body let's add in a few emission lines pattern by mixing the materials with mix Shader note for this you can use the wave texture with a mapping and coordinates no triangular addon is needed for this control T shortcut plug it to the factor with a core amp there to control the mix bring the bars closer and we can start seeing the pattern which we can adjust Now by touching the wave texture settings to get it the way we wanted we want to make just a few curved lines nothing fancy keep it simple I'm staying with something like this and if we shift control click on the cor ramp we can isolate the wave texture setup to see better what we have so pick the bands Direction you like to be on adjust the bars and the other settings how we want it and let's connect the second Shader it's emission here need also a CO ramp and a layway note everything plug it to the second Shader input add course you like and set the bars position let's simplify in the tubes material we can use only emission this time with a lay note to get this light to dark gradient around the tubes changing the belly material it can make a totally different appearance even if it's only the cor for the compal we have a lot of stuff happening so let me organize a note first to make it easier to understand what we have on this Shader so this note here are making the dots pattern we can frame them with contrl j and label them from the side panel get rid of this part then plug back the nodes together output to input it's quite simple actually only a few patterns created by mixing materials with a mix Shader note we want using the bump on this one so just delete it this is the Lin's pattern and we can frame and label it as well delete and this gradient so we can use single core here enable the transmission by sliding the weight all the way up delete in this bsdf we will use emission for this wave lines pattern so plug the emission there and add a CO ramp and a gradient texture with a mappings using the UV coordinates here because we want a linear gradient from top to bottom for the comp emission you might have to unwrap the comp if you didn't already add whatever colors you like and play with the bars till you have all of them visible there increase in the strength of the emission let's switch a texture coordinates to generate it here I wanted to make the lines bigger and have just a few of them but I realized that there is some issue with displaying the generated texture coordinates correctly I went back and forth for a while I Tweed the scale I tried the different pce direction and wrap it and all these things then I found that this is because I flatten earlier the mesh on the Y AIS so the generated coordinates using the bounding box of the object and when the mesh is flatten it can get the right feedback on how to display it so make sure you have some volume there just move some of the vertices along the y axis and that's how we can get it the way it have to be once we set the wave texture settings right we can change the cor ramp interpolation to this plan and this will give us this glowing like Effect one more thing is to change the dots coordinates to generate it as well making the dots pattern still you can leave it on object but the dots will be shifting changing their position when moving the Dragon which is cool as well depends on what you're looking for we can leave it like that here is the whole Shader setup if you want to copy it continue with some of the head Parts materials let's grabb the mouth removing the metallic touch the roughness and add a bit of coat pick whatever colors you like you can also look for core profils on the web if that's thing we can link this material to different parts and if have to make it single user and adjust the colors we made this horns golden before but if we link the materials make it metallic and we can tap again to the AR SUV to separate the colors like we did in the previous video so now we have all these colors there we can also add some emission pattern to the spikes simple mix of two materials with a mix Shader wave texture with the mappings plug it to the factor bring the Coram bars closer and let's use the UV coordinates you can play with the wave texture settings to get different stuff but don't make it too complicated I will stay with something like this so let's also get the emission Co ramp and a layer weight using the facing add some Cs and that's okay for now we can check in Cycles what we have copy the material to the tail make it single user to set the cores as you want we're done with the shading so let's move on to the other settings set the camera light environment and all the stuff for the camera we can set the focal length to 100 for this one check the position I'll leave it here because I want the dragon to go outside the frame a little bit enable dep to field a few things are important here so let's cover them first one is the distance if you press e over the value we can set the distance with the eye dropper like that if we enable limits we can see where exactly is the focus just make sure when using the eye dropper you're doing it from the camera viewport if we do it from the other viewports it won't work properly giving you the wrong distance like you can see the other thing is the f- Stop and let's switch the view to see how this thing work so the basic is if we lower the f- stop we can get more blur the center of the camera limits is in the focus and if we say this is one for example this part will be in focus and we will get more blurred going away from the center if we set it to two we just have double it up the focus area and so on we have other ways to set the Distance by using object to control it I'll place a 3D cursor there and add an empty for this usually I'm using the shortcut with e key to set the distance for steel renders but if it's animation and we want to follow or track something is best to use the focus object when adding the empty as Focus object the camera will use the origin point of that empty to set the distance so if we were about to use the other empty the focus would be on different place keep that in mind it with the empty with a constraint so it's follow the head wherever it's going lower the F stop a little bit more we can add a nice motion tracking to the camera using constraint track to if we pick the empty as Target and play the animation we can see how it's targeting the head or the empty that we connected now depends on what you want to get you can leave it like that but for this SC I think the effect is too strong so we can lower the influence to limit this effect and have just a slight motion to the camera I think something like this look well but you can do whatever you like and let's move on with other things we set the camera so let's touch the other settings we can check the dragon on different frames until the vertices to precise the movement how it's rotating along the curve it's also important so don't skip this to adjust the light we can obviously go to the light properties panel and do it there but instead of doing this every time I prefer to use the right click panel here at the top you can see the values when we do it move left right to adjust it I will make the sides light smaller and not so strong and increase the power and the size of the bottom light checking on different frames and maybe add one more light to F some of the Shadows we can also use Point lights instead of area lights for the environment we can go to the world settings and enable the volume by adding principal volume there lower the the lot to 01 or 02 get also an icosphere we'll use it for the particle system scale it down and put it on the side apply the scale at a decimate modifier and put the ratio down to simplify the shape have something like this then duplicate it and TW it in edit mode to get different shapes duplicate it a few more times and adjust them to get something like a few small stones convert all to mesh and move them to their own collection let's add in material we will use emission but if you use object info to get different colors to the object using qu material it just don't work well with the loop because you will have one set of cols at the beginning and another at the end of the animation that's why give every particle a different emission col instead of the random thing with the object info we have this and we can actually hide the collection from the viewport and the rendering add a cube for the particle system and cover the dragon and the whole scene with the lights and the camera go to the particles stop and add a new particle system before we cover the things let's first go down and disable show emitter from rendering and view port to hide that big Cube so here we have the number or how many particles you want on which frame they will start and end we can set both to zero so we have all these 500 particles there at once but not popping up gradually the lifetime is how many frames they will stay before start disappearing if you go back to the first frame and press play that's what we have for now all these particles are spread on the cube faces only but if we go down to the source we can change the emit from to volume to spread them inside the cube to connect the particles that we created earlier we just have to change the rendering to collection and add them as instance collection right there below check the size and adjust it so they are not too big and not too small addend some variation to the scale using the scale Randomness values enable the rotation and randomize it if we press play they all going down and that's because we have a gravity so scroll down and right here below we have a field weights where we can disable the gravity just like that go back to the first frame to play and see what we have now they will all go outwards because we have the Velocity if we set the normal to zero you can see how they will stay on their place let's make them stay longer by increasing the lifetime to 150 frames we can add some velocity to specific axis let's push the Z axis and randomize them a little bit you can experiment with all the settings to get something you like also when doing the adjustments go back to the first frame then play again the animation to see what you have if I have to be honest it can be tricky to set the particle system something can be hard to get it right you can have some issues like adjust adjusting the settings and nothing changes or stuff like that so if you run into this book you can try to delete all Bs adjust some settings or even delete the particle system or the whole Cube then controls it to bring it back something like a restart it might help we can make the particles bigger while setting them up to help with the visualization we can stay with this setup and so the way to Loop the particle system is very simple we are just using the same particle system twice we will offset both of them so they meet in the center and the first frame and the last frame will be in the middle of the same particle system setup so if we have 300 frames for example one of them start fromus 150 to 150 and the other one will start from 150 to 450 so the frame zero will be in the middle of the particle system and the frame 300 will be exactly the same frame from the other duplicated particle system so let's first set our particles to start fromus 150 to 150 frames with a 150 lifetime now just duplicate that particle system that we created make sure you click here to make it single user data so we can add a different settings or starting and ending frames offset the starting frame to start from 100 50 and the a frame to 450 and let's see what we have frame 150 is where they meit and if we check what we have at the end and the beginning on frame zero and 300 we can see that we have the same thing and that's what we need for a loop so now if you want to change further some of the settings you can just copy paste to the other particle system or just delete the second one adjust the first one as you wish and then duplicate it one more time and set it with the start and ending frames like we just did for the rendering is best if we can bake the particle system so we don't have any issues when doing the render both of the particle systems one by one it might take a few minutes I'm speeding up here before the final renders I prefer to do a viewport animation first to make sure everything works well this is something like a fast test animation that we can do so set the settings for M4 video with this settings we can also set the resolution to 50% just for the testing animation hit view P render animation Under The View it will take again a few minutes and we have this animation that we can use to precise the final animation we can check if there are any issues see how everything is coming together check also if it's looping properly here is the final animation scene and a few things I touch it after this test video let me show you what is it so I link at the body material to the legs I separated from the body material and change the col ramp interpolation to be plan to get this glowing effect there Link at this material to the horns as well for the spikes I end up having different patterns with em Mission shaders like this one just a simple material mix it with emission for the emission I'm using clear weight to make them more interesting having this light dark gradien thing for these horns I added one more material with emission inside of the tubes this is quite easy just add one more material to the object then in edit mode select the faces you want and aside the new material then adjust it the way you want it I added a wave modifier to the Head curves just to give them some motion this is what we have using the wave and here are the settings to Loop the wave modifier I added a cod to the speed values let me know in the comments if you need help with this I also added one more Cube there with a simple particle system and I Loop it like we just did just to have some particles popping out of the head but because this particle system is in motion it's moving with a head to Lo it I have to pair the cube to another empty and offset the empty constraint we have the follow path constraint with a z00 and 200 offset Val frames I added the 200 frames here then I offset it there on minus 300 frame the volume I put to 01 and that's basically everything I did for this animation that's in the setting for the final rendering I'm doing the render a separate ping images then go to the video editing tab where we can add this as image sequence add them on the first frame adjust output settings if needed contrl F12 and we'll combine these images into animation in a few minutes now because we have all this stuff like particles volumes and a lot of emission shaders and so on the time for the rendering went up a lot but if you have problem with that your machine maybe is not fast enough or whatever is the case you can actually use Google coap to do some free GPO rendering you just have to download some code upload your file to Google Drive and connect the things with a Google coap it's a tricky to set it at first but once you do it it can render for free now there are more things to do and I won't get into the details too much but there are nice tutorials on YouTube that can guide you on how to do it if you need some extra rendering if you want to get together multiple clips you can obviously do it in blender but I prefer to do it in the Venture resolve which is a great video editing software that you can use also for free there is a pay and free version but all you need is in the free version so you can try in this one if you want and with that being said that's the final part of this Dragon series I just wanted to follow up with this this additional part and show you what you can do with this procedural thing so if you're still watching I want to thank you hope you learn some and I hope to see you on the next one

Channel: Shieverski

Views: 2,332

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Id: igV3Rwe4hbk

Length: 38min 26sec (2306 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 10 2024