Make awesome music driven animations in Blender!

so yesterday i finally made something that i have been wanting to make for a long time and that is a music driven animation in blender and man it was so fun and it's actually very easy now i've watched a whole bunch of videos on how to do this because i learned it yesterday and i'm going to show you some tips in this video that i didn't see anywhere else so prepare to have your mind blown especially if you like music because this is going to be awesome so first we're going to start by modeling a triangular tunnel piece then we're going to use the array modifier to make it really long and then we're going to use another array to make a bunch of them and eventually if we get this elaborate in this tutorial we'll make a triangle of triangles which makes for a really great scene now the cool thing about this project is that it is all in blender ev right here which means it can run very quickly real time rendering they call it although it's not completely real time but it's almost real time and in fact i was able to render about two frames per second last night and the whole animation that i did was like 6 000 frames that's the longest animation i've ever rendered in my life and it was just going through frame by frame it was really cool so i love evie for stylized stuff like this because if you're not going full photo realism but you're going for you know techno art or concept art or something you know stylized and interesting like this then it's great so let's get started on the modeling let's make a new blender file don't save changes all right with my default cube already deleted because i'm just that ahead of it that's saved into my startup file by the way so we're going to start with our first shape which is the triangle hallway so shift a mesh and choose cylinder now down here in your little options window type in three vertices voila we've got a triangle so let's size this up and flip it on its side so s10 enter now it's big let's flip it on inside so if we look up here in this top little gyrocompass we see that our red line is the x axis so if we do r x 90 and enter voila we have it on the right direction now for some reason i want it to face along the x-axis because that's what i did originally i think so r z 90. there we go and if we press the number one or actually number three we get a straight on view this is an equilateral triangle so all three sides are the same length which is what we want let's start shaping it so we can add some textures and bring it to life with a music file and i'll show you where to get it for free all the textures we'll be making in this project by the way will be procedural so no image textures needed so tab into edit mode go into face select grab this first face then i'm going to alt click and move over here hold shift and select this other face so that's a multi-selected delete and delete face now we've got an open tunnel great let's go to edge mode select this edge that edge and this edge by the way holding shift again to select all three control b to give it some bevel hit okay right there hold alt and select this side and then alt shift select this side when you hold alt and select one edge it grabs a whole you know edge loop i guess i'm going to press e enter let me resize my window here to give it some more room so select the individual origins right here and press s and you can scale this down to make kind of a closing uh piece on the end so there we go i'm good with that now let's press e enter now we have an extruded edge here that we haven't moved yet it's just sitting there we're going to select median and scale on the x to give it a little outshoot piece right there because that's going to connect to the other tunnel pieces that are all you know toweled almost infinitely into the horizon using the array modifier now go back to edge select and let's grab these edges that we created with the bevel there we go six edges let's bevel those so ctrl b and there now let's grab our face select mode and grab these new faces we made and these are going to be where some of our lights are going to be placed they're actually not lights they're emission materials so with these six new faces selected press i and we get a small inset face so i want it to be pretty skinny that's going to be the yellow lines that i had in my original and that's good now before we deselect them let's save ourselves some time let's start adding our materials so make a new material in the materials tab and name it base it's going to be the the basic you know starting texture for the actual larger parts of this tunnel make a new material name it yellow wow i misspelled i've never misspelled yellow before in my life yellow and then here with these faces selected click assign that way this yellow material which is not yellow yet is stuck onto only those faces whereas the base material is on everything else before that okay so we can deselect these by pressing alt a or option a on a mac let's make some more light pieces grab these uh kind of connecting faces right here four five and six there we go so those faces and those faces and let's do another inset so i make it you know maybe a little bit thicker there we go with these faces still selected make a new material name it blue and click assign all right so that's pretty much all there is to it right now we can add more materials if you want to add more likes but you don't need to be too busy sometimes simplicity is the best uh solution for complexity so it's going to look complex when we start using the array modifiers and all that other stuff so let's start making the basic materials so let's expand this to get our shader window up here all right now as i say in every video we don't see the nodes for some reason so press the period key and voila it centers them for you all right so for the base we're going to use the brick texture so shift a search brick right there move our bsdf out of the way shift a mix shader right there shift a search transparent not translucent transparent and we're actually going to plug this into the top slot slot number one whereas the bsdf is on slot number two and we're going to use the brick as a mask basically to make transparent squares so grab the color from your brick output and put it in your factory input let me zoom in here it's not confusing there we go see that all right now we need to give this thing some coordinates because it's kind of weird and stretchy so with the brick thing selected ctrl t will give you automatically a texture coordinates with the mapping and this only works if you have the node wrangler add-on enabled which is awesome very helpful little little add-on uh let's use uv there we go now by default these faces all have their they're already uv unwrapped but they need some help because we've been modifying them since they were created so tab and edit mode a to select all you for unwrap and smart ev projection okay that did an okay job except for these weird pieces right here so let me go to our uv editor and see how this is looking yeah the triangle's got some some funny angles naturally so i'm just gonna grab these faces individually and see if i can kind of resolve that real quick i want them to be you know on top of each other facing the right way so let's see if i do u smart uv i project with that oh yeah there we go that's pretty sweet now there's these weird corners let's see if it'll unwrap these together smart ev ah nice 90 degrees now they're a little bit big oh i forgot this one up here uv smart there's six of them press a up in here to select them all and if you scale them down the bricks get bigger kind of strange but that's just how uv unwrapped there we go so they're all the same there's no weird angles i'm very happy with that cool let's go back to our shader editor i actually want the bricks to go like long ways so we can just rotate it by doing this well not that one no that one z prepping 90 and enter sweet look at that we just rotated the whole thing and i'm going to leave the scaling how it is that's a pretty good like size for the scale and again this black and white data is coming from the brick becoming a mix shader mask and it's making part of it transparent part of it not transparent to do that let's go to our materials tab of this mesh by the way select it scroll down oh we need to be in um evie there we go materials tab blend mode most annoying part right now about blender is that in fact you have to do this every time and even in cycles which it's not visible you have to go to eevee change this and go back to cycles i don't get that and on my planet tutorial and other ones that i use transparency that's always a problem that people run into so i'm trying to do a better job of explaining it so now we have actual transparency and it looks all right let's try some other modes blind uh hashed kind of noisy clip is a little rough oh we've got we've got um change our color too to pure white there we go because this has like a duotone brick we don't want that we want colors one and two to be white and then the mortar which is in between to be black so let's try blend i'll do a clip because i'm not really doing anything partially transparent it's all yes or no you know on or off so cool now let's set our camera in the right place so press the number three for a straight side view and then press ctrl alt zero if you already have a camera in your scene and voila the camera is slapped into that that view let's make sure it's right in the middle which it's not so alt with the camera selected press alt g to reset the location right there i feel like this triangle needs to go a little lower to be truly centered so i'm uh yeah i'm going to move the camera up so gz maybe right about there let's see whether you press zero it goes into your camera view zero goes back out so let's press zero to go in your camera view g z and then z again to move out there we go so i want this to be like totally symmetrical which it's not so cheesy cheesy there we go it's it's pretty much symmetric right there okay that's good enough so let's get it inside the triangle so gzz right and also let's make our camera a wide angle camera so go to your camera tab change your focal length to anywhere with anything between like 10 and 30. i'll do 15 gzz uh yeah real dramatic for these vj loop type videos um wide angles are fun because you just get more perspective you can see more in your scene and you get this really dramatic you know fly-by-action where it's just like zooming through stuff cool now let's uh add some duplicates of this by using the array so we can see our little tiny camera right here i'm going to scale this up so it's easier to see scaling your camera doesn't affect your view by the way cool select the mesh go to modifiers tab go to array we don't want to go that direction we don't want to go that direction or that direction so negative one on the z that's because we have this thing rotated remember we rotated it twice cool let's add maybe like 10 of these there we go all right now let's make some lights inside this bad boy so uh i'm going to move my viewport camera in here and i don't need a grid so i'm going to click on this overlay dropdown and turn off grid there we go i don't mind the x and y thing but i don't care about the grid on the floor there's no there's no need for a floor grid right now also we can make our viewport a little bit wider by going into their in menu view and make this maybe like 35 maybe 30. there you go alrighty so let's go to our materials tab click on yellow period up in the note editor to find our notes there they are delete this guy shift a search emission it on in there super simple make the color you guessed it yellow turn the brightness up to about five well it doesn't really matter because music is going to be animating let me zoom in this is super tiny music a music file we will get in a minute will be animating the strength parameter up and down to the beat of the music next go to our blue delete the bsdf shift a emission now some of you more experienced users are saying the bsdf shader already has an emission you're totally right and i'm just stuck in my old ways so sorry okay i like it simple sweet that looks good to me something you can do to add a little bit extra depth to your scene is go to uh these large faces on the outside shift d duplicate them and then use the median point to scale them out from the middle point right median is the middle so blender's saying oh there's the point right in the middle is literally like in the middle of this triangle we're scaling them all out like that but be careful because look it will actually extend your array mess with your array so once you have them stretched out and large scale them back down individually so their individual origins scale it down and they could be smaller than you know the ones that they came from cool now let's play with the uv scaling of this use the editor these three rectangles right here are the rectangles i have selected one two three so press a up here and then scale these oh i don't know down yeah let's scale them down to make the bricks larger the cool thing about using your uv is because we can control basically the scale of this brick on every single face individually so this face is that large but this face is smaller so the bricks are actually larger that just gives us some more variety when our camera is zooming through here we're going to see bricks on the outside that are at a different placement and it'll look really cool all right now we're going to add an hdr for the sake of reflections so shift a search env environmental texture open find uh i prefer a milky way or a space 360 panorama because it just looks the coolest in case you can't see the reflection during the final render we don't want to see like buildings and street city streets or anything we want it to be space so that looks good now this is going to show up in the reflection but i don't want it to be visible in the final render so a cool trick to only let the hdr be visible in reflections but not in the final render is this shift a search type in light path here shift a mix rgb put that here and color two to be black so here's here it is is camera ray yes or no plug it into mix so this means that the camera is only going to see this black color right here whereas the renders and the other reflections are all going to see this image right here very nice trick and i like that a lot cycles has a check a checkbox you can turn it off in the render but you don't have that in every right now so we got to do this little trick so let's do a render and see what this looks like f12 pretty sweet wow i'm impressed and yeah i can't see the galaxy behind there but i can see that there is something going on inside here there's some nice reflections going on that looks cool let's go back and fix a few things i have a light in here you can just delete that light because we're not using any light objects in this render kind of like with my last video with the uh the dreamscape with the cubes there's no lights involved and that's kind of cool so let's make this uh these these bricks more metallic so go to materials select your base texture go back to object here's the bsdf so again transparent is for the mortar right the gaps in between the bricks whereas the actual bricks are this guy and we can color them if we want like that looks pretty cool actually red it's nice kind of scary orangey red um but let's make them shiny metallics to turn up metallic turn up specular turn down your roughness maybe not all the way because it gets a little crazy do some blur let's render that ooh cool so play with the amount of roughness if you have a roughness up high it's not going to be as shiny so find a good medium point that you like oh man that looks sweet so that's it got let's do dot three that looks nice got a nice metal blur to it all right now you can use procedural textures and lines like i did in my final project to offset this reflection to give it some more variety i'm not going to spend time on that in this video because it just takes too much time so let's get rid of this slide in panel by pressing letter in oh before we do the animation i actually need to show you where i got the music from so there are tons of copyright free music on youtube did you know that well now you do you know how to find it use the search feature wow type in copyright free and then whatever you want guitar music piano synthwave my personal favorite of mine especially for this kind of video synthwave is really nice now we're looking for an individual song these are all mixes which do list the names of the authors in the song so if you find a song you like in a mix look up that specific song make sure it's still copyright free and you can use any number of shady websites to download the youtube as an mp3 to do that again use your search feature type in youtube to mp3 and there's a bunch of websites that do it it just gives you a download right there and you can download the mp3 file the song that i used is called cruising the night sky by us technox and this is his official youtube channel it does still say that it is royalty free so i've got a total clear conscious and guess what posting this on facebook or youtube no problems at all because there's no copyright so you won't get taken down so once you download your mp3 here's where the cool stuff happens that i've never heard anyone talk about ever before and you're gonna love me for this trick especially if you like music and you know mixing and things like that you can separate your mp3 song into separate channels did you know that yes using machine learning the website that i used to deconstruct my audio file was this one so it's melody.ml click on upload mp3 select your original song and it's going to upload and then the ai software on the server i assume is going to be deconstructing it into these of different channels it gives you a vocal channel drums bass and like an other one you see oh here it is vocals drums instruments and other now it's processing it if you put in your email it'll email it to you or you can click download right here once it's available if you want to use more mainstream music which you won't really be able to post you know publicly see on facebook or youtube you'll be able to find some actual original stims of professionally made songs just type in your favorite name song or maybe an artist name and then type free stims or stim download and i don't know you may find like a some kind of contest or website or someone through various means has managed to find the original tracks from the studio and you can use those in this type of video as well so here it is it's done so click download and inside of that zip file will be the four different audio files here so they're labeled bass drums other and vocals so if we listen to them real quick here's the drums track cool you can tell there's no synthesizer there's no melody nothing let's try the other track got some synthesizer here some rhythmic stuff about the vocals channel there's no there's no vocals in this song so we got this synthesizer sound as vocals and the bass there's nothing much in the bass channel and let's animate this dang thing all right we need three windows open to do that we need the graph editor to actually do the animation part which don't worry it's all automated and then we also need to view the shader editor so let's do another split up here right there right there make this top one the shader editor so we can see the actual material and and create the keyframe okay so here's how the magic happens i'm going to do this in a step-by-step process and this is a basic step you're going to repeat over and over but you need to do it very carefully or it will mess up and you'll be very confused so step number one select your shader that you want to animate the strength parameter number two go to frame number one right here step number three right click on your strength and add insert keyframe there it is now you need to actually select uh that keyframe by default keep sometimes keyframes are not selected but you have to actually select it or find it now it's selected and here is the meat of this video go to key big sound to f curves now you got to find your sound i'm going to do drums and over here on the right you do have some settings from lowest frequency to highest frequency so if you want to just get the bass maybe do like 0 to 200 or 300 and then you know other sounds are above 200 300 hertz and up so i'm just gonna try to get the kick which is the bass drums so zero hertz up to 300. you can leave these things how they are and click bake sound to f curves it's going to think for a second and there we go look at this here's the bass drum if we play this file right now there's no sound so let's add the sound file and then we'll come back to adding the other keyframes for the other parts so change one of these to the video sequencer go to frame number one right there you can use your arrow keys by the way there we go frame number one add sound and then we're gonna add the original track not the separated tracks but the original right here with everything added so add sound strip and there we go now we can press play now look at this these guys are actually offset because it looks like i wasn't on frame one when i added this so let me redo this even i make mistakes go to key big sound f curves drums enter there we go now it's it's where it needs to be so press play [Music] oh yeah sweet if you find that these values are not jumping up high enough you can enhance them by going to the modifiers i press the letter in by the way to get this guy go to modifiers remember you have to have this keyframe selected and add the envelope click add point and now you can drag up the maximum to enhance the maximum and drop down the minimum to below zero or you know right at zero that's up to you so this can really help you tweak uh what the song is giving you and give you a stronger signal for these emissions see how it's brighter now watch this bring it down it's weaker yeah so i like to go up to around 10 that's a nice brightness yeah it's stronger let's do the blue one okay so click on our blue material we need to get back to our shader editor here we don't need this sequencer anymore there it is click on the node go to frame number one because that's where everything's going to start number one right click on the strength parameter or whatever parameter you want to animate press insert keyframe now with this keyframe selected you have to select it go to key fake sound to f curves and let's do drums again but let's change the settings let's make it from like 500 up to 10 000. that's everything up above that range there we go maybe it's the hi-hats or the snare i don't know maybe this isn't working how i think it should work honestly blender really needs to step up their settings for audio i think there's a lot more that could be done with this feature right here that really is not that complicated and of course i say that because i'm not a programmer so forgive me if you are yeah it looks about the same waveform so this frequency cutoff doesn't really do a whole lot in my opinion maybe it cleaned it up a little bit actually press play and see what it does the blue one is a lot cleaner it's just up and down whereas the yellow one kind of flickers [Music] let's click on the yellow keyframe it's uh right here it's kind of got some noise maybe because those low frequencies i don't know so that's interesting like i said earlier if you're able to download actual individual tracks from a real professionally produced song you'll get a lot more variety in the sounds they will be like actually truly separated instead of just frequency separation which as you can see doesn't really work here if you make your own tracks just export every track as an individual audio file you know the hat has one audio file the snare the bass the synth all that stuff and you'll have a lot to play with to make a very dynamic and interesting animated scene let's add one more layer of colored lights to add some more interest to the scene node editor up here click on the base material let's get rid of the graph editor for now we don't need that and we're going to add another emissions layer to this guy actually let's just let's just use this so shift a search let's do a varianoi and let's plug in distance into emissions here and then we're going to animate this emission strength so let's go let's add another let's add another node which is the color ramp shift a search type in ramp this will allow us to have a lot more control over the values that are coming out of it let's do this for now so now we got some polka dots don't really care for that personally let's try chubby chev oh yeah this is a great one for techno lines awesome so one cool thing is we can animate the emission strength by the song right jumping up and down but we can also animate the 4d w parameter i don't know why it's w so instead of a number type in hashtag frame times.01 let's try it. look at that as the frames move this thing is animating i'm going to turn on this volume for you guys just for this recording from one i just put it at dot 75 hopefully that'll be that'll be fine now let's animate it to the actual song so we click on the strength parameter uh we're going to right click and do insert keyframe now let's get back our graph editor there it is make sure that we actually have the keyframe we just made selected which we need to find it this is in the base material so base all your base are belong to us there's the keyframe um i think i need to move it back to uh one so that the music will start on one so it's at frame 169 so watch this with this keyframe selected i'm going to press g x negative 169 enter and it put it back to zero so g x one let's zoom in and make sure it's on frame one because we want everything to be on time frame one there it is awesome all right now we can add the music so key big sound f curves and let's select a different layer let's do um bass okay and there's this weird choppy sound wave here which is kind of like a staccato and let's make it stronger so press letter in modifiers add the envelope and cr add a point and then increase the maximum which is this right number bring down the left number it's going to bounce up and down all over the place make it pretty intense cool remember when you go below zero for an emission shader it's just black so unless you want lots of black to give more space in between the blinks um then you know keep it above zero or you can let it go down below so it'll be more you know downtime with that with that bright emission shader so let's press play flickering it's stuttering moving with the music let's move it down even more yeah i feel like that is really more pronounced let's go to this inside tunnel view see what this looks like [Music] oh beautiful and every re-iteration of this new voronoi pattern is totally random it'll never repeat and i love that okay for procedural textures all right so i think i'm pretty happy with this let's move on with this project hope you're having fun so far and i think this one shouldn't fry your computer as much as my last one did so sorry about that all right so let's press number three to get a flat side view or back view whatever and we're going to make some copies of this then we're going to flip them upside down all right now we're going to make a whole bunch of triangles to fill in those empty gaps in between these squares see there's like you can see the gray so we're going to fill that in so press number three add another array modifier here and this is the correct direction so let's do i don't know six of these and then let's um alt d this to make a cloned or a linked copy so alt d enter and then r 180 let's just kind of eyeball it place this right there and then let's turn this copy down one oops wrong direction we're going to make a triangle of triangles right there alt d again r 180 enter this right here turn the array down alt d enter r180 enter place this right and you can do you know any kind of pattern you want there's there's no rule for what i'm doing right now it's just kind of creative license and a little bit of ocd when you have enough of these you can do some really cool camera flying motions like i did in my original that zoomed through all the triangles let me show you what i mean by that so i'm going to get a camera view on one screen which will be the top one zero and now with the camera selected watch this whoa we can go in between them it can go through the walls and actually i'm not even inside the triangle yet there you go now three down here i'm controlling the camera with my g key see it gets this really cool in between get some really great kind of negative space shots and then you get a lot of wall and you know that perspective effect and as the camera is moving it's going to be flying through this so there's two ways you can do that to make your camera move with very little effort first you can animate your camera and have it slowly you know moving through uh the tunnels you can use that with keyframes or you can use my um hashtag frame trick i know it's not really hashtag i know it's i don't know what it is it's a driver or something [Music] where you can animate the actual shapes here and have them fly around the camera that's actually what i did in my original so to do that you just select one of the tunnels go to your properties and we need to move which parameter is it no is it z no is it x yes it's x so click on the x number sign frame times one i don't know how fast this is gonna move that's kind of fast let's do.5 and you just need to copy this to all of your all of your shapes okay so let me go to object mode there's a little easier to see this guy paste oops i got to do a number sign intriguing interesting it doesn't copy the number sign so number sign paste frame times dot five this one paste and you can see they're jumping ahead that's because this is reading the frame number which is 138 multiplying it by 0.5 and giving that as the x coordinate and i love this trick so much and animating stuff i have animated you know you can use you can use this on rotation on node parameters anything really but it just remember it's going to continue to increase until you know forever so look my triangles are moving but my camera is not it's right there see my camera now once you run out your animation's over so you either need to rotate your camera around and once you run out of triangle it's over but you can rotate your camera around like this and then have your camera move around and go back catch up to it now you can do camera cuts and have it jump back inside the triangle there's a lot of different things you can do to um you know get rid of that that problem all right i'm going to try something that i didn't do in my original and i'm going to add some actual displacement modifier and animate that so there's actual movement inside this tunnel so i'm going to hide these i'm going to solo this mesh right here by pressing the forward slash edit mode okay so i'm going to select these outer floating faces and i'm going to press i for inset i'm just going to make a kind of square in the middle of them that's not messing with the uv so that's good and with these faces still selected go to little triangle thing here go to vertex group make a new one and click assign now a vertex group is just kind of like an easy way to re-select faces you can use vertex groups in all kinds of different ways we're going to use them in a displacement modifier we're going to animate that modifier so let's get out of edit mode with tab go to your wrench add modifier add a displace modifier that looks terrible in your vertex group select group cool okay now what if we do negative oh that looks nice look at that it's all uniform and we're going to have these kind of jumping in and out hopefully won't look too erratic and crazy um to the music so we need to animate the strength parameter here so put it at zero let's get back into our animating mode so we need graph editor open go over to frame one use your arrow keys to get to individual frames i've got my graph editor open on the top with my mesh selected i'm going to go to my displace modifier and you can click this little keyframe button right here uh animate property which is it's the same as right clicking and doing insert keyframe now over here we've got cylinder action and then strength for the displaced modifier cool now we need to make sure and select that keyframe go to key big sound and let's do the vocal track and let's see how this looks if it's too noisy i may do some frequency cutting yeah it's a little wobbly let's try it again without changing the frame i'm on it's still i'm still on frame one do the same thing again select it and let's bring this up to 500. see how this looks oh uh there's no there's nothing on this channel until later in the song so there it is and it's jumping up to only about not even 0.5 so that's not enough i'm going to add the envelope again add a point and i'm going to drop my maximum let's see i need to make this inverted so there we go so maximum is enough negative number and minimum is uh you know where it needs to be so let's see i need to figure out where is zero oh zero's up here okay so zero is there it's going to drop down to a lot and i need to play with these little minimum maximums to get them just right because it's jumping down to one so let's see when it's really pulsing around what it's going to look like i'm going to go normal view i'm going to actually attach my camera to the mesh so that it won't it won't move around so let's rotate it back i'm going to with the camera selected select my mesh control p for parent do that second option there we go so now no matter where this thing moves the camera will stay with it let's jump ahead to where the new instrument comes in oh it's because my uh end point is not high enough that's probably the problem let's go up to 3000 jump over here where they're all going [Music] see that you can see it [Music] jumping [Music] very cool i like that a lot um i have only so far really animated emission uh strength so i haven't really done any motion to the sound you can of course do all kinds of stuff scale rotate position um you know there's just that really the limit is your imagination and how much you want to play with uh play with blender there's so many so many possibilities so i hope you enjoyed this video i hope i blew your mind like i promised earlier and i would love to see what you guys make with this please be sure to subscribe to this channel like the video comment let me know what you learned if there's anything i didn't explain very well then let me know and i'll do my best to clear that up but thanks so much for watching and have a great week [Music] you

Channel: Daniel Grove Photo

Views: 30,391

Keywords: music animation, music video, sync music, blender music, music visualization, blender animation, procedural animation, tron, synthwave, electronic music

Id: 2FRwyhp6tho

Length: 37min 46sec (2266 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 09 2021