Make Epic Abstract Animations With EASE | Blender 3.0

hello guys and welcome to another blender tutorial today i'm going to be showing you guys how to make an abstract fracture animation we're not doing a simulation this is going to be all animated by hand but it's super simple and the whole process really is very beginner friendly so i would definitely say this is okay for beginners as long as you know the basics of blender now i'm going to be making this blend file available on my patreon and if you guys want to check out some of my skillshare courses that i've recently made you can go ahead in the description below go to my skillshare stuff it's all going to be down there if you guys want to check it out but um enough of that said i hope you guys enjoyed this tutorial and definitely show me what you guys make when you're done with it so with the default startup scene in a blender we're just going to hit a to select everything and then x and just go delete so we're going to delete all the default objects we're then going to go to our add option by going shift a and let's just go over to the circle options let's just add in a circle and let's just tab into edit mode and what we're going to do is we're going to select the circle off to the side here so in my front view it'll just be this one here so if you hit one on your number pad to go to front view just make sure to select this vertex here to your left and once you have it active you're going to go control i or command i it's just going to inverse the selection you're going to hit x and delete so all you're left with is this one single vertex here and then we're simply going to go over to our modifiers and let's just use the screw modifier to simplify this workflow so we're going to go over down here under the generators let's go to the screw modifier so here you can see it's wrapping it all around here and here you can see it's 360 degrees which is what you would expect for a circle and here's the iterations and here's the steps all that sort of stuff but let's just start with extruding the vertex up on the z so with that vertex active we're going to go into our front orthographic view and we're going to go e to extrude and we're just making the foot of a glass so don't over think it just go up something like this e to extrude a little bit and just make a foot so if you want to go online and look at some references feel free to do that but for me i'm going to really just keep this as simple as possible okay so we're just doing this in our front of graphic view so let's just go up maybe like that um you don't have to make it too high it doesn't really matter because we're gonna be seeing the top um primarily so i'm just gonna i'm just hitting e by the way and then clicking um you could probably use some of the draw tools to do this as well but um just make a glass shape you can make it whatever you want there's a many many different styles of glasses out there but i'm just going to maybe make that a little bit smaller so you can see there that looks pretty cool i think i might just go back in edit mode and just increase the size of this foot a little bit okay that looks a little bit better so now what i'm going to do is i'm just going to also select this bottom vert and let's just give it a fill in here so we're going to e to extrude and then z or x so we're going to shoot actually on x of e and then x and then e x again and we want to get it close to there but let's come over here and just enable merge and if we go g x and just move it close just until it kind of just touches okay and we want to just merge don't go too much but it should automatically merge if it's really close and we're not going to use a solidify modifier so let's just select the first vertex at the top here just hit z go into wireframe and once again i am in my front orthographic let's give this some simple thickness i'm just going to get e to extrude and then e to extrude back down and i'm just kind of following the previous vertex extrusions on the outside really guys don't over think it just keep it simple and as you start getting to the base here you want to kind of start thickening it a little bit because this is kind of what you'd see in real life in a glass and then just extrude till that point touches there and there you have it they have a little bit of thickness in the base and let's just go now and give that a subdivision surface modifier and let's tab out into object mode again and look at that looks pretty cool so let's go over to our screw and just apply it so we've applied it and let's go back to edit mode let's just test to see if we select the bottom vertex if that's actually just one single vertex that's all merged properly and then select this one down the bottom and that's all good as well cool so now we're also going to have to think about applying our subdivision surface modifier so if you're happy with the current subdivision level go ahead and keep it i'm just going to bump mine up to 2. it's a bit of a nicer look and if you you know feel if you're afraid about applying this modifier and then you want to go back and make changes just do a duplication by going shift d and then just move that duplication to a new collection so if you need to go back you can just you have nothing to lose but for me i'm pretty confident in this i'm just going to go to the drop down i'm going to apply it okay so now we have our glass here and by the way if we're going to be doing cell fracture stuff if you've really scaled this in object mode by any amount just make sure to go ctrl a and just apply it at scale that's going to be important so let's go shift a and let's quickly add in a plane and let's just grab the glass itself let's go s and just scale it down just a bit till it's about that scale to the plane then go control a and apply the scale just so we kind of have a rough idea of what my skin's scene scale is here and yes you could use the measurement tools but we don't have to be that precise just kind of roughly have it like this i'm going to grab the plane down here and just scale it up a little bit and now let's grab this glass and let's hit f3 and let's type in here cell so just c e double l and just click on the quick cell fracture and um oh yeah by the way if you want kind of like a double material effect where it's got one material on the outside but inside of the cracks that has another material we actually have to before we do the cell fracture so let's just quickly just hit escape let's just quickly go to our materials this is important so select the glass and just go over here to your materials and let's just call this outer and then let's just click the plus again and let's call this material inner okay make sure that the outer material is on top of the inner so the top one is going to be the one that's outside and the inner material is going to be when it's inner so let's select the glass again it has those two materials and now if we hit f3 again just type in cell go to the cell fracture and now we can just simply come down here to this mesh data option and just bump this material up by a value of one and now we're going to be able to have that automatically happen so as far as the actual simulation here i'd like to set the source limit to 120 the bigger you put that the smaller the particles i don't want to go too small because i kind of think bigger chunks work for this it gives us it's a bit more visually pleasing but completely up to you if you want to put a little bit of noise i i went to something like point one i'm not going to go over all the details here but i do like to just leave the random as it is here the source limit i'm not going to really touch really you could just leave it as default but just taking that source limit up to 120 is the main thing and adding a little bit of noise so if we now go ahead and click ok it's just going to do this thing here don't touch anything it's just going to take a few seconds and once it's all done you're going to see it's going to have your original model left behind but it's going to now have all these little fragments that you can that you can use and there you see it's just happened like this now now you can see we have a ton of these little pieces here right now while we have them active so if you hit g you can see they're all active by default after the simulation just quickly hit the m key on your keyboard click new collection let's just call it frac for fracture bits okay so just go ahead and click ok and now if we go over here to the top of our collection just come to the frac layer and just drop it down so it's a bit smaller and now we can remove that out of the way right so it we can hide those fragments but let's select the original here which we could use later again if we want to do another simulation let's just hit m go new collection let's just call it old or junk whatever and just go okay and then come here and just untick it we don't need to see it so let's go to our frac and bring that back so these are all our little fragments and remember i was telling you about the materials you can't really notice it but if you go to your click on any one of these shards go to the outer material and let's just quickly go down to our viewport display and let's just give it a color just so you can see the difference and if i were to actually select one of these and just move it out you can see in the inside we now have that second inner material so i'm just going to click on the inner and just as a viewport display i'm just going to make it red so you can kind of just see it easily okay so that's kind of what we have there now those materials are in place and we've done our fracture operation simulation thing whatever you want to call it so now let's add up a little camera before we get into animating out our little shards so you can just find any position that you like in the scene and then just go shift a and just go to your camera options add in a camera and you guys already know how it works if you have a camera just hit control 0 or command 0 to go into that camera that's active and with the active camera if you hit g and then click your middle mouse button and just move your mouse back you can zoom hit g to pan double tap r to rotate on the spot you guys kind of already should understand that so just placing a camera about here go to your output settings and let's make it 1080 by 1080 and i like to go here to my focal length or my camera settings and i like to change the focal length to 125 that's going to give us a really very shallow view but that's kind of what we want to go for and if you need to just move your camera active hit g middle mouse button and just zoom it out just a bit more so completely up to you how you want to approach that but something like this looks pretty cool make sure to save as you go right because anything could happen so now let's do a little bit of animation so let's just go to our end frame value i'm going to go with 110 frames and this is not a loopable animation i didn't feel the need to make it loopable if you guys want to do that feel free to do it so i'm going to select a few shards so i'm going to go maybe over to frame one and i'm just going to select a few shots i don't want to select them all at the same time because i want it to be a little bit random so just select a few so i'm going to select about three of them and on frame one i'm going to hit i and i'm going to insert a location and rotation keyframe and then i'm going to come to frame 50 and i'm going to go to my top view and i'm going to go g and just move them out and i'm going to individually select some of them and just spread them apart and then just double tap r and just give them a bit of random rotation okay like that and then make sure they're active all three of them come to frame 50 hit i again location rotation now let's go to frame zero hit the spacebar and you can see we have that okay and uh in fact let's just grab this keyframe with those freestyle active and just go g and just move it to 90. i think that slower look is a little bit better cool now grab some more random ones okay maybe these ones here hit i maybe in frame 20 hit i insert a location rotation and let's come to frame 100 go to the top and then g just move them out and then just individually select these ones move them out a bit like so don't be afraid of a little bit of rotation that's kind of cool and make sure you know which ones that were so it's this one this one okay so this one this one and this one and i think this one here okay so those were the secondary ones and then frame 100 we're going to hit i and insert the location and rotation keyframe so now they kind of follow shortly after so let's have a look at that go to frame 0 hit this space bar and let's see that animation okay cool so the timing of that is looking really good so let's just now select all of these shards here so all of them together and let's just go to the very last frame which is frame 110 and let's just move them out just a slight little bit and hit i insert location rotation so just say i have that little bit of okay that looks kind of weird so just with them all active just select that end one hit x and delete keyframes so i don't think we need that so let's just keep selecting random bits i'm going to select maybe some of these ones here maybe someone's here and then we go to frame 30 i'm going to hit i insert a location and rotation keyframe and let's come over to frame a5 and go to your top view and then you can just kind of move these ones out randomly but make sure you keep note of which ones they are okay so these are going to be deferred ones that come out and make sure you give them a little bit of rotation something like that to keep things exciting and that looks good so now select those guys so have them all active and frame 85 we're going to hit i and insert a location and a rotation so now let's have a look at that so we have our first ones secondary ones and then those third ones kind of came out okay and you can kind of layer that up as much as you want just make sure you kind of keep track of what's what and what's happening so i'm also going to select some of these ones on the inside and i'm going to go to frame 23 just a little bit of an offset i'm going to hit i insert location rotation come over to frame 110 and i'm going to move them back we move one up be creative with it just move them out rotate them like so make sure you select them on frame 110 then hit i and insert a location and rotation so let's go over to frame 0 and go into a camera view hit the space bar and look at that pretty cool now this you know looks a little bit stiff towards the end it's not very fluid so what you could do is you can select individual ones and kind of offset them individually just so they don't all kind of start exactly at the same time and that kind of little bit of random offset will really help make things look a little bit more pleasing visually so that's a cool little trick and you don't have to use any sort of constraints to do this procedurally which you could do and i have done it like that but this kind of way it's just you know relatively easy way of kind of doing the same thing and it's beginner friendly so just randomly making little shards go out like that okay so once you have your animation in place make sure to save and then we're just going to get into some of our lighting and camera stuff so let's just once again just select our camera and let's just move it just a little bit more center and we wanted this camera to focus onto a point so we're going to go shift a and we're just going to add in an empty and let's just go g z move it up and then s to scale it and let's just bring it a little bit forward so about there they're going to select that camera and let's just go to our constraints add object constraints and let's just go to track two click on eyedropper and then select that empty so now if we select the empty and we move it you can see that camera only follows to empty so we can go to frame 0 with the camera active we're going to hit i and insert a location keyframe for the camera then we can go to frame 110 and with the camera still active we're going to go g and just move it up like this and g middle mouse button and just move it in and then hit i and insert a location keyframe so what we're going to have is this sort of thing happening okay pretty cool and another cool thing about having that there you can select your camera and you can't really see it right now but if you go to camera settings and you enable depth for field go to the drop down and you select that empty as a reference object you can then come to the f-stop and make it something low like 0.7 and it'll be sharp where that empty is but focused out of focus in different regions which kind of adds to the appealing effect of this animation so now that all that's in place let's just obviously go to our render engine and i'm going to be rendering in ev so or cycles so i'm going to change it to cycles and if you have a gpu make sure to use it but you know you can do it on a cpu it'll just take a little bit longer and we're just going to go over to our under sampling and denoising so if you have blender 3.0 which i recommend you should have just go to blender.org you can get it there probably still under experimental last time i checked but it is stable enough so you're just going to go under the noise and click on a render and let's just change that to optics this denoiser is really going to help us so we don't have to set our render samples up to something crazy so even the default 128 should give you relatively decent results but i would still recommend maybe 200 at least and then putting the denoising on top of that but that's going to be much more processor intensive it's going to be a longer render time so do keep that in mind so for the tutorial sake i'm just going to keep it at 128 but as a general rule the higher you set that the more you're going to be looking at render times but with newer versions of cycles like cycles x um those times are coming down quite drastically okay so enough has been said make sure to save so we've got our engine there established let's add in some lights so we're gonna go shift a and let's just go to our lights and add in an area light g z move that area light up and i like to go with a strength or a power of 90 watts and i'm going to just increase the size of it to about 2 meters and i know this isn't real-world scale so don't worry about it but i'm now going to go shift d to duplicate the light move one over to here so kind of just off to the side of the camera if you go to your top of a graphic view by hitting seven just kind of like coming in from like almost a 45 from where this is then shift d bring another one over here rotate it in and if you get zero to go into camera view then control b so control b will allow you to click and make a limp limit the rendering to the camera viewport and now if you hit z and you get rendered you can see here that's our lighting so it's looking pretty cool so what i'm going to do is just go to my world as well and just make sure that the world color here is more in the mid-range with the value there and we'll mess around with the lighting in a little bit but let's just select our floor right let's just go over to our shading workspace and let's just go new give it a material let's just call that floor and just so we can kind of get a bit of a contrast so if we go over here hit z go rendered let's just give our floor a black color here and let's just make it metallic i think that really lends itself to this and just bring that roughness down okay maybe i'll make the color not quite as dark just more like a darker kind of grayish value for now but we'll mess around with that a little bit while it's more just to give us that darker contrast in the background so we can kind of see the magic happening with our material so let's select any one of these shards that have those two materials let's start with the outer and always make sure to save when you're working at this stage so this gold material that i made is very fun so we're going to go shift a search type in noise and let's just plug in the color into the base color of our principled and let's just make the scale here 21 and what we're going to do is we're going to select the noise texture and go ctrl t or command t it's going to add in these two extra nodes for us if you don't have that feature you have to enable node wrangler so go to preferences and just go over here and just type in node and make sure to enable your node wrangler add-on and then hitting ctrl t or command t with the noise texture enabled or i mean selected will give you automatically these two extra notes we're going to take the object and plug it into the vector and now that's the way we want to distribute it okay we can mess around with the scale in a bit but at the moment this color doesn't look right so let's go shift a search type in color let's use a color ramp and place it on this cable here and now we can use the values here to make two colors so i'm going to grab the white value drag it down let's give it a slightly yellowish color and then i'm going to drag this one up here and it's too dark so i'm going to make it a bit lighter in value and make it yellowish kind of orange golden as well okay now this isn't us trying to be physically accurate with the properties of gold we're just trying to create a cool look we're then going to go to the metallic slider here drag it up and then drag that roughness value down so at the moment you might think well that's still not looking that fantastic and i agree so you can always just mess around with those values a little bit and if you like the way this looks that's okay but what i like to do is just add a little bit of bump so i'm going to move these nodes over shift a search type and color get yourself another color ramp and then plug the color into here shift a search and type in bump grab the bump and then plug the color into your height plug the normal into the normal input of your principal shader and then bring that strength all the way down to point one okay we don't want to go too crazy on the strength and then you can bring up the contrast by bringing these two value sliders closer together and that gives you this kind of nice looking gold material if you will okay mess around of it look at references i just think that looks cool so i'm going to go over it so go ctrl s to save and now let's make that inner material and the inner material material is quite simple we're just going to go over here to our transmission make it all the way up to one bring our roughness down to a very low value click on our base color and i like going to make it slightly bluish that's something i like but you guys can totally make it what you want to do i just like that contrast so there we have our materials now you can take your lights and you can duplicate them and i think putting them at the back here a little bit just to kind of give a bit of room lighting um is something that really adds to this as well to just you know experiment with your lights and you guys know i don't usually spend too much time on doing lighting tutorials but you know i sometimes like to make them point lights and bring down the radius and then kind of use them that way but you know this is one of those things where um really you're gonna have to look at some different lighting styles out there maybe go to pinterest or something and then see what you know what you want to do you know maybe you can read some of the rules of different kind of lighting just portrait lighting and then there's lighting where it's more lit from the back so you know there's not any one thing i can tell you about lighting but for me just having these basic lights at the front and then maybe two or three little point lines at the back just to add a little bit of room lighting and just help some of these edges catch so it gives it a bit of contrast to the darker background to me that looks kind of cool okay so let's just quickly save and let's go to our layout and i'm just going to quickly drag for here until i get a section that i think looks cool render and render image and let's see what it looks like and this is also where we're going to see the optics denoiser kind of kick in and do its magic now you can see here we do have that kind of depth of field effect going on because we have that um enabled in our camera and it's actually looking at the position of the empty if you feel like it's too soft in the focus in certain areas and too sharp in others that's going to be a matter of adjusting that empty there but having the camera also tracking that empty kind of gives you advantage of also having your sharp point always in the middle of the camera if that's what you're going for which is kind of what i was going for some people might not want that to be how it's animated but here you can see we have a rendered shot and that's what our animation is going to look like so i think this looks pretty cool as a kind of like an abstract kind of concept and the noise here in the grain is pretty minimal and the denoiser i think does a pretty good job at it but um yeah so if you're happy with it you know make sure to save and you know how to export a video just go to your output settings go to your output folder you know select anywhere you want for me it's going to be the desktop file format you can simply make that an ffmpeg video or you can do image sequences and compile them in another software like adobe after effects if you want to but for me i'm just going to go with a video format and your encoder is completely up to you i like to go with an mp4 i think it's quite stable it does a good job and it's not the highest quality format but you know there are other ones to choose from completely up to you and you can add audio in here there are audio or video codecs for your audio down here so you can see audio codecs and there are some more settings here of quality you know mess around with that if you want for me i'm just going to leave it as the default make sure to save and now if you go render any render animation it should render out an mp4 to that selected destination okay so i've already done that so i'm not going to do it now but if you guys have gotten this far please make sure to make this thing here and if you want some more um stuff that i do you can check me out on skillshare there'll be some links to that in the description below i cover things in a little bit more depth a little bit more beginner friendly and the cool thing is skillshare allows you to have assets and blend stages that i can upload because it has that feature so with every course i do i kind of add all the different stages and the different blend files so you can follow along with the class and you can kind of do your own projects and it's just a little bit more hands-on a little bit more slower paced and has a few more resources but that's something you can check out if you get the time and you want to do it that's all in description below and i also have these blend files here on my patreon which you guys can also check out so thank you for watching this blender video i hope you guys have learned something as always and i hope it's been informative and i'll see you guys next time for another blender tutorial

Channel: PIXXO 3D

Views: 1,886

Rating: 4.9658117 out of 5

Keywords: Blender, Blender 2.83, Blender 2.9, Blender animaiton, Blender easy animation, Blender quickie, blender cg matter, easy blender tutorial

Id: OX3pmLK4Riw

Length: 26min 20sec (1580 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 14 2021