Make a Ghost Cloth Simulation in Blender: Full Tutorial (Motion Capture + Simulation)

[Music] what's up guys it's Brad from light architect in this video I'm going to show you how you can create a creepy ghost style horror effect using motion capture data as well as basic class simulation inside of blender this effect is super simple but can be applied and adjusted in a lot of different ways for your various projects depending on what you're trying to create [Music] anyways Guys Without further Ado let's get started here we are inside of blender as usual the first thing we're going to do is delete everything in our scene here and I'm not going to be doing any 3D tracking in this tutorial this is mostly just going to be the simulation process for cloth as well as importing that motion capture data to move around under the sheet for the class simulation so the first thing we're going to do is gather that motion capture data and import it into our scene so I'm just going to go to miximo.com here and I've just logged into miximo and we're just going to choose some motion capture data that we want to work with so you can choose any animation that you like there are a lot of different good ones here I think so I'll just search for crawl here we could use Like A Zombie Crawl this could be interesting that actually could be a really awesome one to use with a sheet cloth simulation over our character so we're gonna go with this but obviously you can choose anything from the library here a few things before we download this you can adjust a few of the settings here one of the main things you're going to want to check so you can animate this on your own and loop it is the in place option so go ahead and select that and now we can just animate this ourself and loop the actual animation of the motion capture data so this looks pretty good now I'll just go to download and we'll download it with skin and we'll download for 24 frames per second with an fbx format and go ahead and click on download here and we'll go ahead and choose where to save it here just create a new folder here we'll call This creepy ghost sheet tutorial and then we'll just save this motion capture data in this folder like so and now we have that motion capture data to work with and we can import it inside a blender so now we'll go back into blender here go to file import find fbx and now we'll go to where we saved our motion capture data so we have our Zombie Crawl fbx here and one thing I want to do is select the automatic bone orientation option here so go ahead and check that and yeah this should be pretty good go ahead and import it and now as you can see here we have our motion capture data for our character now you'll notice that our animation stops around frame 120 here so what we can do in order to keep it going is we can just Loop the animation so select your Armature with the motion capture data on it then go to graph editor make sure all of your different parts of the rig are selected here and then go to channel extrapolation mode and then make cyclic and now you can see our animation is looped over the course of our timeline and you can see if we go back into 3D viewport mode we can play through our scene and we'll actually continue after frame 120 and just continue looping you can see how this could be useful now we can do if we wanted to actually animate this character we could press shift a maybe add a empty to the scene maybe a circle rotate this on the x-axis 90 degrees and this will be like our master control for our character here and then we'll select the Armature and then shift and select our Circle here press Ctrl p and then parent it to this object so now you can see if we play through our scene we can actually animate our character over the course of our timeline with this empty here so we will actually animate our character with this empty here but before we do that I want to show you guys how you can create your own character mesh rather than using the default one that miximo has imported into our scene here so go ahead and delete this really quick as well as our different joints there so now we just have our Armature in our scene now you could use the character mesh that makesimo imported there for you but there's some intersecting geometry there and the way I'm going to show you guys will allow you to use any 3D mesh of your choice so I just want to share with you guys how you can parent your own meshes to this Armature here so I'll select the Armature go to our object data property settings here and then go to rest position and now you can see this is our Armature at its rest position so we can now sculpt our own mesh or import a mesh of our choice and then parent it to this Armature so for the sake of this tutorial I'm just going to create a custom mesh out of spheres and just create a little Sphere for each of our bones here so go ahead and press shoot a go to mesh UV sphere and I'll just scale this down and I'll make this like the Torso like so and I've actually done this in another one of our tutorials as well but I'm just going to kind of generally create a character with these uh various Primitives so I'll go ahead and go into edit mode and press shift d with our vertices selected and grab this move it for our head element like so and then I'll just duplicate our various spheres here to create the arms of our character where our Armature bones are and depending on how accurate you want to be you might want to import your own 3D model and kind of mold it around the Armature or you can do what I'm doing right now and just use some basic Primitives like the sphere here so I'm just kind of duplicating the mesh here and placing it where the different Armature bones are so I'm going to go ahead and fast forward through this part but this is the in general concept here and then I'll show you guys how to parent this mesh to the Armature itself so that it will move accordingly all right so now we have a basic little character here and we've lined it up fairly well to our bones here I guess we need to move these a little bit back actually to line them up with the arm Armature so select a few of these here I'm in proportional editing mode so everything kind of moves around together so it's a little easier to dial it in here but yeah this is the general concept our Armature is lining up fairly well here but again feel free to be more accurate with it and I'll just go back and do object mode and now we have our basic character and I will select our 3D character that we've comprised of our spheres here I will rename it we'll just call it character mesh and now I'll select our character mess I'll press command a apply all transforms and then I will press shift and select the Armature and now press Ctrl p and parent this mesh with automatic weight to our Armature so go ahead and select that and if you've done it correctly then when you select your Armature and go back into our post position you'll notice that our 3D character model should follow the Armature that we've imported our motion capture into the scene with and so now we can select this mesh by itself here and we can go into the physics properties Tab and then we'll enable it as a collision object so that when we add our cloth into the scene it will actually Collide and interact with our moving character here so you can play around with these settings if you like but the default settings should work pretty well so I would stick with these unless you get any issues with your claw simulation so at this point it's time to now create our class simulation itself and maybe before we do that actually I want to animate the empty controlling our entire mesh here so I'll just go to frame one here and just drag our character kind of a little bit back here press I and add a location rotation and scale keyframe and then I'll just go to frame maybe 100 for a total of four seconds then I'll just drag it up here like so press I again location rotation and scale and let's take a look at what this is doing for us so just a little kind of crawling animation here which is quite nice and then maybe I'll also go to our graph editor and go to channel extrapolation mode linear so that our character keeps moving past our animation keyframes and now you can see it just interpolates those keyframes over the course of our entire timeline and yeah this should be pretty cool so now it's time to actually create that class simulation so let's get started I'm just going to use a very basic plane for the base of our cloth but feel free to use any manifold mesh that you'd like so I'll just press shift a add a plane to our scene and just add it above our character here gonna make it a little bit bigger than our character like so just make it as close to the character as possible without actually touching any of the masks from our character itself so something like this should be pretty good maybe move it a little bit over and now since we're going to make this a claw simulation we do need more than four vertices as you can see here we just have four vertices comprising This Plane here so I'll go into edit mode here and select all of our vertices then I'll go to Edge subdivide and then we'll just subdivide this quite a few more times so whenever you're creating a cloth or soft body simulation or even rigid body simulations you often need more vertices on your mesh so that simulation can be calculated accurately because really the simulation is going to be calculated for the vertices of the object rather than the flat planes itself so we need lots of vertices here I'm going to go ahead and subdivide it one more time maybe a few more times here obviously the more subdivisions you add the more it's going to take up simulation time and processing power in your computer but that's just kind of a trade-off you need to deal with depending on your machine so I might just I'll keep it fairly large here but nothing too crazy all right something like this should be pretty decent not really detailed but I think this should be good once we add a subdivision service modifier on top of this so I'll go with this for now go back into object mode I'm going to relabel this sheet and now let's enable cloth physics for this object so before we do that actually I'll press command a and apply all transforms just so we have a more accurate simulation based on scale in our scene I'll go to our physics properties Tab and enable cloth physics for the sheet right off the bat if we play through our scene you'll actually see we have a pretty decent looking class simulation so this is actually working pretty well however we are getting some issues here where it's falling through some of our mesh so we need to dial in a few settings here to get rid of any glitches we might have um so the first thing I'm going to do is I actually like to use some of the presets here so you can see we have a variety of different cloth presets that we can choose from and I'm going to just use the cotton version right here which is just going to set some corresponding stiffness and damping values based on how cotton reacts in the real world now one of the biggest things you can do to make your class simulation more accurate is to just increase the quality steps parameter right here so right now it's at five I might just increase this to 10 and a lot of the time you can just crank this up and it will give you a much more accurate result and get rid of some of the glitches that you might have depending on your stimulation now of course the higher you put this the more processing power you will need as well so there's a little bit of a trade-off there alright so this should be pretty good one more thing I want to enable for our Cloud physics is under collisions I want to enable self-collision so in other words we want the cloth to act actually calculate collisions when it interacts with itself so go ahead and enable this and another thing you can increase is the quality parameter of the Collision itself so I might just increase this to four just to make sure we don't get too many glitches based on our first bake here and yeah this is looking pretty good for a basic setup under cache I'll change the end of our simulation time to maybe 150 and then I'll change the end of our timeline to 150 as well and yeah I'll go ahead and save our project real quick and save that and right before we click bake I do want to add a floor to our scene so our sheet will actually interact with where the ground would be as well so I'll go ahead and press shift a We'll add a plane to our scene just scale this up a bit and then I will enable Collision physics for this plane and I'll go into edit mode and for a more accurate simulation I'll just go to add subdivide and subdivide this plane as well a few times just for the sake of accuracy so this is looking pretty good I'll select our cloth one more time and I will scroll down to the cache tab here under our physics panel and click on bake all Dynamics and let's see what we get all right guys so we are back and blender has baked our claw simulation and it's looking pretty cool here you can sort of see the individual faces so we could have subdivided our sheet mesh a little bit more for a little bit more accurate result however I am going to add a subdivision service modifier to clean up the look of our mesh a little bit and give it a little bit more of a smooth feel now one thing I should mention when it comes to claw simulation is you do often get a lot of glitches so I did get sort of Lucky for this specific simulation I'm not seeing a lot of glitches in this specific case however I am noticing here if we kind of scroll through you'll notice that the hand of our character actually goes through our cloth mesh at a certain point so sometimes you get glitches like this that happen and there are a variety of different options you have to try and troubleshoot why the issue is being caught so a few things to consider here just so you guys have something to work with if you're getting some more severe glitches compared to mine one of the biggest things you can do just to kind of brute force your way through any glitches is to just increase the quality steps of the cloth stand relation itself so you can see I've increased mine to 14 here I've gone all the way up to 20 or 30 and that often gives us a better and more accurate result without any glitches you can see here if I scroll my mouse over this setting you can see that it makes the quality of the simulation steps much better however it also will need more processing power from your computer so you can increase the quality steps another thing you can do is bring down the distance for your object collisions so you can see I have mine at .0015 and by bringing this number lower you're just going to get a more accurate result when it comes to the cloth colliding with other objects that are enabled as Collision objects in your scene and then the third thing regarding the actual claw stimulation itself is under self collisions you can also decrease the distance required for self-collision to work as well so again the lower you make this the more accurate your cloth is going to interact with itself in your simulation so those are three different things you can work with within the claw simulation itself to kind of troubleshoot any glitches you might have I do think the number one thing is probably the quality steps and actually I think I forgot to mention here you can also increase the quality of your collisions as well so this guy right here under collisions you can increase this number as well I think that increased this from five to ten so that's one more thing you can play around with to get a little bit more accurate result finally a few more troubleshooting tips if you're getting any issues regarding your animated character mesh one thing that I've noticed that helps the cloth to interact with this object better in case you're getting any glitches is just increasing the thickness outer parameter here a little bit I increased mine a tiny bit and got a little bit better result and yeah I got a little bit better result when I did that and then finally a really weird one that I've also noticed works is sometimes blender just needs you to scale up the scene a little bit and I don't know if this is just a glitch in blender but I have noticed that sometimes if I just select all my objects and just scale it up by two or three I've noticed that the bigger the objects are oftentimes the more accurate that simulation assuming the transforms have been a applied to each object in your scene so just keep in mind that simulation can have those glitches I'm going to put a list of possible glitches in the description below as well as the troubleshooting solutions that I've personally used to get better results inside of blender so anyways guys we have a pretty cool claw simulation here now let's kind of clean this up a bit and apply some textures to it as well to get our final result so go ahead and select our class simulation sheet here and we'll go to the modifiers Tab and you'll notice that we actually see the individual faces on our sheet here which is not ideal as we want it to look much more smooth like it's actual cloth so an easy way we can do this is just going here to our modifiers Tab and just adding a very basic subdivision surface modifier and I'll just increase the levels viewport to two and now we're getting a much nicer result and finally we'll just go ahead and go to object and then shade smooth and now this is looking much nicer and there you have it that is how you can create a pretty awesome looking cloth simulation to finish off this tutorial let's just go ahead and add a material real to our sheet here so I'll go ahead and turn off subdivision surface for now just so we can play back everything a bit easier I'll select our sheet and go into our materials tab add a new material then I'll click on use nodes I do want to switch our rendering engine to cycles and go back to our materials Tab and for our base color I'm going to use a image here and I have this image from textures.com that I'm going to use just kind of this dirty cloth image so I'm going to unwrap this onto our sheet so I've saved that on my computer so I'll go ahead and find it here it's just this guy right here open this image and I'll go ahead and select the UV option for our sheet in our material tab we'll call this sheet material and I'll go into edit mode and select all the vertices on our sheet here press U and just smart UV project here and we'll go into UV editing and as you can see here it's unwrapped our plane fairly nicely now I'll just scale our vertices on our texture here like so I'm going to try to be pretty quick here with my materials just for the sake of this tutorial so that should be pretty good go back into layout mode and check out what it's looking like so we have this basic sheet here if we get a little forward this is looking pretty cool again we haven't enabled subdivision surface yet but I'm liking the general look here so now to finish off we'll just add an hdri so I'll go to our world properties tab We'll add an environment texture open up a basic hdri into our scene like so and now I'll go to our render properties tab make our film transparent then I'll select our ground plane here and actually make this guy a little bit darker so I'll add a new material here make this guy a bit darker I'll go to our object properties Tab and I'll make this guy a shadow catcher so now it's only going to render the Shadows from our cloth here and then since our character under our sheet here is just comprised of these rudimentary spheres here I'm just going to actually turn off our character from being rendered as well as our Armature and now it's just kind of this ghost effect where we don't actually see the character under the cloth itself but the cloth is moving so it's just kind of a creepy Vibe at this point which could be a really interesting effect so we could add a light to our scene as well maybe like a sun lamp kind of give it a little Edge light strength maybe 10 warm it up a little bit yeah and yeah let's select our cloth here re-enable our subdivision surface in viewport mode and give it a quick look and there we have it that's a pretty nice looking claw simulation I'll go ahead and render this out with a camera so if you want to render this out all you have to do is just add a camera into your scene so shift a out of camera choose a position for it and then of course under render properties we can adjust our render settings so I'll probably just render this guy maybe 32 samples I will enable denoising Advanced enable that seed stopwatch for some noise variation I will add some motion blur just for fun maybe 0.15 on the shutter and this is looking pretty good I'll go to our output properties tab now we can choose where we want to save our render so go ahead and add this here we'll add a new folder for it we'll call it ghost cloth Sim render except and yeah to render this out as a PNG sequence just go to render and render image and blendable Export your final animation anyways guys that is it for this video it was helpful as always feel free to leave a comment if you have any questions or suggestions in the comment section below let us know what you'd like to learn next on the channel subscribe if you're interested in more visual effects and simulation content and I'll see you next time [Music] foreign thank you

Channel: LightArchitect

Views: 9,572

Keywords: cloth simulation effect in blender 3d, blender 3d cloth simulation tutorial, how to animate cloth in blender, lazy tutorials, best blender 3d channnels for vfx, live action vfx in blender 3d, filmmaking with blender 3d, cgi with blender, creepy horror shot in blender, lightarchitect viral youtube channel, insane computer graphics, insane vfx tutorials 2023, ian hubert, peter france, scary videos, satisfying renders, super scary trending tutorials

Id: PY6ST4ScARE

Length: 19min 18sec (1158 seconds)

Published: Mon May 01 2023