Make a CRAZY PLASMA BALL sci-fi Scene Blender Tutorial

how's it going guys so today we're going to be making a really cool sci-fi kind of plasma ball hard surface scene it's actually pretty simple we're gonna have some fun with some circular arrays but before we get into that let me shout out today's sponsor today's video is brought to you by radical it's an incredible software what it does is it takes footage of you or any subject that you're filming moving around whatever it can sense all that convert it to a rig take that motion capture and apply it to a rigged character that you have so you can use any consumer-grade camera to make this including just footage you found on YouTube of just a person and you just film it you run it through the radical software it does its calculations it can see the arms the legs the head the body all that stuff really incredible software and then they could take that turn it into an FBX rig and then you could take that put it into blender add it to your character and your character is dancing around doing whatever you were doing in your footage or whatever footage you decided to use and very soon they're gonna release an add-on that helps you automate the retarget to to your character because it's a bit of a process if you've never done rigging but this add-on is really gonna help you out and in under a month they're gonna be releasing radical studio which is going to be an on-prem solution and give you unlimited visualisation time so if this is something you're interested in hit the link in the top of the description go check them out to get the software it's super cool now let's get into the tutorial alright so I'm gonna be using blender 2.9 for this but everything I'm doing in here is gonna work perfectly in 2.8 if you don't feel like trying out the beta if you would like to I'll leave a link in the description to grab the beta it's available right now it's pretty cool it's got some great viewport denoising stuff which I'll be utilising here but you don't need that to run this tutorial now heads up for evey users you can follow this tutorial on very easily an EVO all you won't be able to do is make the glass ball but you can make the plasma ball and everything else here we're all going to be doing simple simple shading all that fun stuff so before I get into the full design I want to give you guys the concept of making a circular array if you don't know what an array is we'll just go with here with this sphere and then you go here to the array modifier and you can make a bunch of these guys also the gonna look a little bit different in 2.8 the modifier but still does the same stuff so you take this bring over the relative offset and bring over this factor that's an array very simple used quite heavily but how do you make a circle there's not a pot in the the array to make a circular array so it's a little bit of a weird thing and I would love for blender to make a button that helps you make circular arrays and kind of automates that but right now that it's not a thing so first off we're gonna use a controller object to make the circle that's going to be done with an empty so we're gonna go here empty plain axis now what we're gonna do we're going to do is we're gonna hit tab go to edit mode and then we're just going to bring this over making this little little orange dot the Anchor Point stay in the in the world origin that's what we want to do now that we're here we can open up the array modifier you're gonna want to find something you're going to unclick relative offset click object offset and then click empty so now this empty is going to be controlling the offset so if I do this bring that Z rotation on the empty there it does its thing and then I can just bring up that count and now we have a nice really cool circular array and then you could take the empty still to control all the stuff that's happening and that's how you make a circular array the reason why I took time in the middle I mean the beginning of the video to do this because that's gonna be a big thing we're going to do I won't have to keep repeating and explaining it so this is the concept all you have to do is hit tab move that so if you want to you know move it back in so all you have to do is hit tab bring it out to wherever you want making sure that this world origin I mean the other the origin point is right here in the middle allowing the empty to be able to move it so that's how you do that really simple really fun and super powerful so I'm gonna make a new scene and let's go ahead and start designing this guy so first off we're gonna hit shift a and go here to the circles we're gonna go to this add circle thing down here and give it 85 on the vertices and on the fill type give it in gone okay so now we have this fun stuff going I'm gonna hit s5 to give it a nice scale hit tab and we're gonna go over here to the inset faces and we'll do something hold on something like this bringing that thickness somewhere around this range and then hit X faces all right so what's super cool about this is we if we go here and we click alt you can get this whole thing and you can just move that in and out so very simple there we're gonna go ahead and get a solidify here and make give that a pretty good thickness and we're gonna add in a bevel very cool stuff and then you can go here to the to the limit mode angle on the limit mode right here and then you just bring that offset make sure you limit the motors on angle giving you way more flexibility on the way this bevels so we're just gonna give it something right around this range and then what I'm gonna do just quickly get in my IKOS fear I'll hit tab and we're gonna subdivide this guy bring up the smoothness bring up the cuts shade smooth so now we have this I want to actually go back to this one and bring it in to be right about there control a apply scale and we'll bring that offset back here and then bring down the thickness so now we have this actually kind of want to make it a little bit closer to here now what I'm gonna do is I'm going to duplicate this I'm going to bring it up a little bit and then bring this part back just giving this a section here and then we're going to do it one more time I'm gonna bring this up and then I'm gonna bring this back and that's how we got those three circles right there to do their thing and then I'm gonna take this guy I'm gonna hold alt and click on the outside rim and just bring it over all one click the outside rim it has to bring it way back so it's not in the way of our camera so now we have this fun stuff going on now we can need to start piling in some detail here to do that so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna hit H on this to hide it just to get it out of the way I'm gonna get a cylinder here and then I'm gonna give it 85 vertices I like that never it's a good medium to keep it nice in a round but not super high poly so I'm gonna take this guy bring it over here for now but we're gonna bring it back to the middle when we're done here I'm gonna hit our y 90 just to point it where I want it to go then I'm going to go to the face select and I'm gonna go here to inset faces do this and I'm gonna hit e to extrude it in right about there I'm gonna hit I to inset it again and then extrude it out something like this inset extrude it out and then one more so inset and then extrude it out a little quite a bit longer and then on this one here I'm just gonna extrude it out on this one here I'm just gonna move it out so this is our first little asset I'm gonna give it a bevel really quick I mean change the limit mode to angle and then we're gonna give it eight segments bring that offset back into something like this shade smooth so what I want to do here is right here on the location X put it back at zero making it back here to the world origin I'm gonna scale them down alright so now that our little tube here's in the middle I scaled it down on my hit ctrl a and apply all transformations here I'm gonna hit tab hitting a just to make sure all the faces are selected I'm only gonna do this once and then the other circular arrays I'm just gonna speed through it very quickly so I'm gonna bring it all the way here in edit mode and I'm gonna go ahead and add my array so now he's there I'm gonna go ahead and get my plane access empty there's gonna be quite a few near the end so I'm gonna name it tube C for tube controller I apologize if you can hear any of the construction going on outside they're redoing the the pavement and I really need to get this video done so unfortunately apartment sounds so we're gonna go back to the array uncheck relative click offset I mean object offset click tube C and then we're just going to take this tube here and bring it to the right or the left and then we're going to take this here and bring that count all the way up so let me explain the the sort of thought process of what I'm doing right now what I'm doing is just down here I want to add a lot of detail that's the goal adding detail so first off let me scale this first off I'm gonna scale this down something like this so yeah right now the goal is to get detail on tell the reason for that is you want to make this portion down here at least from my design make it look pretty busy because that's what's really gonna draw the eye to this section is making it look nice and busy so this is some of the detail I'm adding right now I don't like the spacing it's a bit too much so I'm gonna bring that count down something like this and then we'll bring the tube and bring it this direction so I can get some space because we're gonna add another asset right here so let's go ahead and make another really cool hard surface thing we're gonna get in a cube we're gonna bring it all the way over here hit the period key I'm gonna hit tab hitting control and bringing that up to the bottom there and then and then I'm going to scale it down scale it forward I'm gonna hit tab here force off apply scale I'm gonna add two loop cuts here so one here one here we're gonna go back over here and make this guy come down a little bit just like this and then we're gonna go ahead and start subdividing this so I'm going to actually just add some more loop cuts so right here I here right here and then I can start actually in setting some stuff one of these guys just again to add a good amount of detail to this apply scale add a bevel and then um you know bring that offset to something like this give it a couple segments and then we're gonna go back here on that X give it a zero alright so now we have some really fun amounts of detail here I'm gonna go ahead and bring this guy forward like this so he's not intersecting with the side that much okay now we have this fun stuff going on here what I'm gonna do now is add one more thing so I'm just gonna get in another cylinder and then I'm gonna make it really skinny so let's do something like this make it really thin all right cool and then we'll just bring that depth in just a little bit here you all right so now we have this will bring that circle back in and now what we have is a really cool amount of detail which is super important to bring your eye pointing to this area of the scene so what I'm gonna do is quickly set up my camera here shift a get my camera I'm gonna control alt 0 snap it to view and the what I'm gonna do is use the instead of I'll go to the camera um the camera settings here on the green making sure your camera is selected I'm going to perspective to orthographic i'ma hit G to kind of move it around the way I want i'ma hit R to give it a really cool this is something you see quite a bit in sci-fi is having this kind of orthographic angle view here I'm gonna go more to the top here snap it to view maybe bring a little bit farther this direction again control a little bit can speak control alt 0 snapping into view and then now we have a really cool thing going on now let's go ahead and make a really cool plasma ball so let's go here to shading I'm gonna hit the period key we're gonna click new and then I'm just going to go to the scene world scene lights we're gonna be using some emission so I'm gonna delete this principle again we're in the shading tab clicking I'm gonna get the mix shader' here because we're going to be adding two nodes here we're gonna add an emission node right here and a transparent so let's get this transparent B SDF plugging these two in right here and I'm just bring this guy up I'm gonna get in a color ramp so we can crunch the stuff going behind it so we're gonna have some fun with a Voronoi so shift a add a Voronoi just right here if you have the node Wrangler add-on enabled hit ctrl T becomes a blender by default get the object and get the distance here and we're gonna change this right here on f1 to distance to edge and that's going to get that classic crackle so we have this going on what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna flip the color ramp so that we can get the right thing to be crunching through so just like this so now we have these guys I want to make them all Electrify looking and all that stuff so we're going to be doing some editing on the vector line right here we're gonna get the noise I'm gonna get a noise texture to add that Electrical look now it's just too much we're gonna bring the detail up to 212 so we have this now we have the electrical look but it's too much so let's get in a mix RGB and what this is gonna allow us to do is if you get this object to coordinate on color to it allows you if you bring the factor 2 here it's like only this and then if you bring this factor here you only get this what it's doing is it's mixing these two together so we're gonna get something right around here now here's a really cool trick if you want to animate this plasma ball go from 3d to 4d and you can animate the W and it won't change the scale and now you get this really cool animation of a plasma ball let's go ahead and get that transparency enacted so we're gonna go here to the shader box here are we're gonna go to the shader box here we're gonna go to settings if you are in the Eevee and render engine you need to change it there if you're not and then we can go here from blend mode to alpha alpha blend and what that's gonna do is now we have that transparency enabled in cycles it does it by default and blender you do have to kind of enable it so I'm gonna back here two cycles I'm going to go ahead and change it to a nice blue I'm gonna go here in the emission change it to a nice blue will go here two cycles to see how that's acting and will give it I think a strength of around 50 so that's really going to brighten up this area what I'm gonna do now is I'm going to duplicate this guy scale it up just by a little bit and then I'm gonna go ahead and delete this material click new we're gonna give it a little bit of roughness bring up the transmission and now we have a really cool glass material and I'm gonna turn off the AI dee' nosing for now I don't not a big fan of it and then now we can use this glass and create this really cool effect here bringing bringing the roughness down a little bit and so it gives it this really cool plasma ball effect right now it's just too noisy too muddy we're gonna go ahead and start fixing that here so let's go ahead I'm gonna hit the tilde key go to the top let's go ahead and start adding those rings so that's gonna be with a curve a circle curve if you go to the wireframe you can see it right there the orange we're going to go here and bring the resolution and the render all the way up to 64 and then I'm gonna go back here to solid view and bring to be kind of right right about here and then let's go to the geometry get the depth up so right now he's too thick for my liking my hit apply scale and I'm gonna bring the depth down kind of like right around there I'm gonna go to the rendered view and then I'm going to add an emission material right here emission give it a strength of 50 and we're gonna give it a nice blue just like the plasma ball I feel like the plasma ball isn't blue enough let's go back to shading and make it very blue something like this maybe closer on the teal side I'm gonna copy the hex and paste it on the Bezier circle we just made so now we have this craziness going on we'll fix that later it's much too blue for my liking but we only we're only dealing with two shaders here so let's go ahead go to the top I'm gonna hide the camera let's go ahead and duplicate this guy some more I'm gonna scale them up here to be right there I'm gonna bring him up to be right about there let's see how that's looking we want to start just getting these rings to start lighting our area to get a better look and a better point of view to bring your eye to the subject that we want to bring your eye to so we're gonna bring this say right up here go to the top here and just bring him to the edge so that's cool I like that bring it to the rim let's see how that's looking that's it alright so now we have another ring happening here it's starting to look really really cool a bit too much again let's go ahead and start adding some metallic materials so click on this stuff make it metallic make this guy the same metallic material we just made making all of these the same a metallic material so now that all these are sharing the same material we're gonna go back to shading and quickly make some nice roughness for the light to interact with the shading so let's go ahead and we're gonna get in a Musgrave mus musgrave hitting ctrl T with that node Wrangler get here we're gonna take this guy and we're going to get a color ramp we're gonna get a color ramp here and we're gonna plug the color ramp into the roughness we're gonna plug this Musgrave into the color ramp now the roughness is doing some weird stuff we're gonna bring dimension down to zero detail all the way up and then we're gonna read this black portion and bring it closer to something right here and so now when we check out the lighting and how its interacting with stuff it's just it's too much nicer and much more even which is what we're looking for you can see how you can see the ground that's just an issue with my solidify so we'll just bring the thickness all the way down like this and now we have that fun stuff so now we have a simple procedural material playing with our lighting here just having some fun let's go ahead and make one more asset to go in a circular pattern around here you all right so now I made just a little bit more detail to go here on the back I mean on the this flat portion because I just didn't like how flat it was again we're gonna add that metallic material we made for everything we're gonna check out the lighting how's it looking it's pretty cool I'm a big fan of it I'm gonna start placing a few more of these Bezier circles here around just to bring your eye to the spot that I want it to go which is of course this big plasma ball so I'm gonna bring it right and I want to intersect with these tubes here let's check out how that looks starting to look really really cool I think I like the amount of circles here I'm gonna add one more duplicate it and then I'm gonna bring it I want it to intersect with these guys so I'm gonna bring it up making sure that it is interacting with them in the spot that I want so right about here is where I want it to be and then I'll bring it in just a tad bit and that is the final portion of this spot that I want to do what I am gonna do is take this guy here and bring it in because I kind of want to get these two guys because I want to scale these guys up a little bit they're not big enough in my opinion all right so I just wanted this circle to be a little bit bigger because it's not really pronounced enough now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna get a point light here right here and bring it just to the surface of this I'm gonna again copy this color control C copy the color of this point light change the point light color right there control V I'm gonna bring the strength to a thousand and then we're gonna see how that looks in terms of lighting the scene now the scene is much better lit my only problem is this color it's way too blue one thing I want you to notice is how washed out it looks just the details not showing because everything's do bright I don't wanna bring down the brightness what I'm gonna do is get this metallic material take the base color bring it down and you can see how much of a world of a difference that made it just improved it by a milestone and that's what we want so now we can see this is already looking like an incredible render I'm a big fan of it what we can do what I'm gonna do is bring my camera out just a little bit something like this and we're pretty much done you can bring that Bezier you can bring that point light up a little bit if you want to just spread out the lighting a little bit just like this but for the most part this render is finished it is gonna take a little bit to render it is kind of a low light scene you're gonna want to use some denoising so go here to the little looks like a bunch of cards turn on turn on your denoising data go here to compositing click use nodes I'm at shifting get a viewer get a viewer here plug that there we're gonna get the D noise right here plug that there we're use nosey image noisy normal noisy I'll bet oh and then the last thing we're gonna do is plug the image to the last composite I'm gonna give myself here on the composite I mean on the render I'm gonna give it 400 samples it's quite a bit but you're gonna want to use that alright so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna render this and show you one more thing to add some glow to your render all right so the render is done we're back here in compositing I'm just gonna add some glow so GL which is the glare node we're gonna pop that right there but that's gonna do is add all this craziness we're gonna go from streaks to fog glow and of course it still gonna be a little bit too much they're gonna bring our mix down just to minimize the strength of that effect so something like this and so now if you hit M to mute it you can see how much better it looks with some subtle glow and now we're done what you need to do is plug this image here into the composite to give it to the final render we'll go here to rendering and now you're finished you'll just go to image save as and you're done so that's how you make this really cool sci-fi plasma ball effect you can animate it if you want to spend the time and render this it's quite a bit of a heavy render but I think it'd be worth it to render it I'm gonna be sending it to a render farm because I just don't have the time but this is how you do it really fun thing hope you learned something and thanks for watching

Channel: Ducky 3D

Views: 123,360

Keywords: Blender, Beginner, Blender tutorial, Blender Animation, Blender Loop, Blender Animation Loop, Blender 2.8, Blender eevee, Eevee Animation, Abstract, Blender Abstract tutorial, Blender Modeling, Blender Enviornment, Blender Easy, Blender easy tutorial, Blender cycles, Blender 3D, b3d, Blender Guru, Remington Graphics, Intro to Blender, CG Geek, Olav3D, CG Cookie, Midge Sinnaeve, Gleb Alexandrov

Id: 8hvGa7OPNhI

Length: 22min 54sec (1374 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 27 2020