Metaballism: Metaballs as Swiss Army Knife

think nine years or so professionally since four years and I often have this thing that I try to use things in a way how they're maybe not thought of by the developer so just using sometimes shaders to do actual modeling or like weird stuff and I want to talk with you about meter balls because they're really really odd phenomenon and they're really handy for motion graphics and even for more things so what are those things let's see what we're going to talk about its what a meter BOTS Mullis it's not going to be too in-depth because I'm not actually understanding too much of the technical side then some basics how to use them in blender yeah how to bring things together to a more complex project and then from there going even more complex and doing advanced rigging techniques we're going to look at base measures for sculpting with meter bolts and then a quick look into how to fake fluid simulations with meter bolts and rigid bodies there's also small downside but later on to that so what our meter bolts so hope you guys have used meter balls before just a quick hands up oh yes you know what I'm talking about who used it in a recent project there's also quite a lot of people amazing and I said you're also listening to what I say and there anyone who doesn't have a clue what I'm talking about right now yes amazing so just real quick these are meter bolts in their most natural form bla be moving things and that's also one of the definitions I thought Shoji Scott Olin wrote a nice SIGGRAPH article about this in 1999 I was 8 years old and so that's way back and there's from the same year another article about meter bolts and saying like meter buzzes known as some blobby objects are a type of implicit modeling and implicit modeling just says that you just define parameters for your object so you have the center of the object and the radius and you're not actually saying where the vertex point sits on the model on to the basics of the usage and Landa with this meter boss it looks like that you just have the meter object into your scene they can be animated or they can be static and as soon as you add another copy of the object you will see you get this nice wielding action so every time a meter ball goes into a close proximity of another object they will intersect and have this nice wielding movement also you can see this again so again it jumps together these are already animated parent but animated by hands we will later look and how we can improve that meter BOTS also have different types so when you add a new meter ball you can change between the capture a ball plane ellipsoid which is not regular and then the cube and the cube you need to turn the views so you can see it's actually a cube to get this view of meter board with the red and green ring you actually need to go into the edit mode so yes meter balls have an edit edit mode and these allow you to further change your meter bolts and also give you this nice options to change the stiffness parameter ball or substract even meter balls from each other the next thing we need when working with meter balls is grouping so usually when you start out with this and you add a capture and the plane and another ball they were all behaved in one block so they will all go into the one same object and this will look like this but maybe we want to have two objects in our scene and we want to have two blobby objects that don't interact with each other it's quite simple we just use the name of the object and give it a new name so all the meter objects with the name meter ball singer will be the parent and then we have children of that or no children in a higher order but in a meatball order with the dot zero zero one dot 0 0 2 this will always act as the slaves and they will blow up into the same object so with the knowledge of that we can already have 2 characters that are blobby but not wielding together texturing and colouring and yes that's possible I was first not sure if it's even possible because I try to put a texture on and then you get automatically generated UV you can then in cycles use the generated color to texture coordinates or the object coordinates but there's also a handy trick to actually move a color just parts of your object and this is by using at least in cycles gradient textures or other key texture types to with which you can already change the texture and the render of view thank you over here it's just a small example but we can also introduce a texture coordinate phone and empty so here in the scene there's an empty and as soon as I put the sauce also this is not working so to the cycle steps if you use the texture coordinate for a different objective will not show in the material view but we can see you in the rendered view that we are now able to change the appearance of the texture and the origin of the texture coordinate by empty and knowing that we can parent things together in blender we can also parent this empty to a meter ball and control the color of this meter ball over a whole scene animation and character again bringing things together I'm always talking about this character I'm going to show you a small character now that's just with the basics of parenting and blender so set parent and said the color parent and then we try to go further from that yeah parenting good parenting helps everyone not just you but also the people around you and the small character I came up with this chicken Dov type of thing and for now it's not moving correctly because the colored head did not move with it but if I parent everything together I can move the actual chicken and the head will stay dark and we can also animate it real simple the animation of that will look something like this not really animated just as a preview purpose of what we're doing here the we have different kind of meter groups or the legs and the facial parts are done and one group the other group is inside of this body mesh which can deform and any mate but we can also use this in a more advanced case case and this would be advanced parenting which is rigging so we just introduce the pointer of this thing so we just introduce this kind of armature into this object and we're not parenting things onto each other again but we're parenting to it a control object having this control object now we are able to do more complex hierarchies and we are able to store the animation of the things into one armature animation which is handable by an artist so and applying this to this complex character I've talked about we rent with this kind of chicken which maybe could also play another role than the dweep series and you get this real articulate character you can have then these simple AI K rigs which work quite well with this you can then also scale the meter BOTS we have an ice close and I'm just scaling the another meter ball inside of the ice to double scale and then the ice will blink and also I can then just render this oh this is just for a preview purpose so the legs are glitching a bit but in general you can see that it's actually a viable tool to create a kind of character of course it's a stylized character but you can take this really firing at lots of detail with this because you always get a tessellation on the fly of the meter objects to show another quick thing inside of blender you can also do it further and Jim Morin hi you call it the drumstick attack I guess you can actually pull out the drumstick of the chicken and I modeled this chicken from meat aborts and it's like regular pose and then taking the chicken leg out of the chicken it actually looks like a chicken leg which is quite interesting to me another thing we get we get like nice details when the chicken leg moves I can actually behave quite nice when it's closing and opening which is hard to get from real topology yeah and then a really huge chicken it's this one here which also found on the SIGGRAPH website which was done by Mehta race and I think if I understand the blogpost right this is made from millions of meter objects that put together with a plugin but I'm not quite sure how they did it they at least did it with me turbos which is amazing to me like the whole dinosaur so guys go crazy with this like you can rig some characters that are moving in their shape so you can change the shape while they're animating you can create a database of characters that can be made from one base mesh and you can switch the proportions you can do really a lot of this you need to figure out the way when the arm gets too close to the body but that's up to you if you want to keep it or take it as a artistic glitch so for something completely different you can also use the meter bus for scout based measures which is another thing I found out in my workflow so I'm a really bad box modeler when it comes to base messages because takes me more time to do this rough base mesh then actually sculpting so why do they use meter balls for this it's I'm can sketch the volume and really think about volume and on the fly I have edited of tessellation so I can change the resolution of my base mesh how detailed it is from really slow reload to really high I can wheel parts together really easily so I can have even a library of noses from characters and just drop them onto each other and they will wield perfectly and they will have one watertight mesh and again like with the characters I can even do variations of one character really easily and then if I have done the base mesh I don't need to go in and actually sculpt or box model something new but I can just add parts and do variations of this one character actually try to record lots of these life editing sessions I did four tries and I hit record in one session and this was this and it's not even the best one but on the concept art of romanza menko you can check him out on arts station just to give props to this amazing artist I try to do some scouts just to preview our base meshes how this can work and what you can see is that in most of the time working in one side view and then the volume gets more or less added automatically and I can play around with that later on then also adding the holes of the gnosis by subtracting a metre ball which is also possible to already add detail while actually doing this models of this special artist I found out it's really interesting to do like already hair texture with the meter ball so you don't do just the volumes but you can also start to add details and when it's done it can look something like this and these models are quite high poly to render them out for you as a graphic but you can also have them really low poly and have enough space for your own interpretation of the creases so now you're stuck with a metre ball right so what to do with that you cannot edit it fixers you cannot edit the sculpting so you need to convert it to a mesh but this is rather easy what I recommend you to you is just to save the file as a meat about state and then as a edit state and you just press alt + C and create a mesh out of it and you can start editing the next second also symmetry is locked into my blend of version and of version and then but wait there's more so we're now created a character a base mesh for sculpt but we can also fake fluids with this and I actually this is the one where I brought the most practical example and I just show you really quick how it works so I have a rigid body object that is behaving in the scene and I'm just have this rigid body object right it's a fear that's colliding it's rigid and it's not really fluid like but I can go there and parent meet a ball to this one object and can make lots and lots of copies of this one rigid body object and I start to get something like SPH fluid simulation just and really simple and stupid but it's really easy to edit as an artist because rigid body objects are quite easy to understand for us we can push them around we can make walls where they bump off we can say them to be damper we can say them to be like really bouncy and we can really nicely art-director fluid and this is exactly what I did with the last year cycles demo real for the just intro graphic I actually wanted to do like a real fluid simulation for that but I'm not really proficient with the field simulation tool and I didn't know how to actually put things so I was rendering and rendering and rendering like faking then again and I didn't have the really fast workflow doing these meter bolts I was able to really control the look of what I'm doing by simulating the spheres in a quiet I would say it interactive way so when I added the meter balls they would actually be more or less in real time on my machine I could change the simulation and there's a mosquito and I had like ii just had a real good feedback of the whole thing wrong direction yeah there's a downside and there are multiple downsides of this and i already talked with reality about that coming to the characters you would need to find a really good art style for these characters so they don't suffer from this wielding so if you have characters that are really human and articulate and they have their arms by the sides this will wheel together and you have a weird look maybe this is what you want maybe this is not what you want if it's not what you want you should look into a different kind of grouping or then going back to a mesh object what is another huge problem you won't get motion blur on the meter boards so this comes just down to the way deformation is handled not in blender but in general you will have constant deformation on all objects and you will not be able to get a real motion vector out of this metaball object so what you get is a usual camera motion blur so if the camera moves around the thing you would still have natural motion blur but the water the particles will still be hanging without motion blurring that's also a kind of art direction if you do the art direction that it doesn't need this kind of motion blur it's okay if you actually need it really important you need to go back to pixel motion blur which works without using the 3d data or you upsample your animation render it at double fps and then don't sample it again which is hard on the machines but not hard to do exactly also there's a small wish from me to the developers maybe if we could export a meshed version of Mita boats into a lambic that would be amazing because afterwards we could import this mesh version with like the whole animation as a lambic file and you would be able to add modifiers on that you would be able to do changes on a frame basis and all the perfect things you get from a lambic files but I have no idea how expensive or like an Workforce Hawk how hard it is to do that actually yeah just I'm running not out of time I'm much too quick so I'm just going back and show another thing no that's the wrong direction just going to show something again which I may be skipped a little and this is the is it it's the actual rigging of the thing so with this chicken I actually was able to use mirroring of the not the bone structure of course that but also the meter BOTS so you don't need to worry when mirroring the model about the negative scale or anything when you just sit s minus one so this is a nice thing you can still do mirroring quite nicely and it's also helping defining the volume when doing the scouting and just a small thing about this thing you're just seeing one meter bar and this comes back again to grouping so the master of your meter ball system needs to be to be visible to make the mesh show up in your rendering in your viewport but you can also go into the viewport and disable all meter balls at slaves and just the master will there and show you the complete mesh but because if you wouldn't do that and if you would show our meter balls at once you would have the problem of your viewport being super cluttered with sphere lines that are not actually needed for your ya character and design I'm just going to let this run through again and then I'm also done so if you have any questions and are and you are here at the blender conference feel free to poke my brain there's maybe more that we can do with it and there's maybe more you can do with it and can really apply it to a real project I'm really happy to be able to be here and to share my experience with blender and with the tools with you and come over pick my brain ask me questions after the talk because now I just make space for the next guy and he has some preparation time because my talk was a little bit shorter than thought also if you need me on the web at sugamice you find me anywhere from the blender claw to twitter to youtube you name it come by say hello why thank you [Applause]

Channel: Blender

Views: 68,581

Rating: 4.9685502 out of 5

Keywords: 2017, amsterdam, blender 3d, open source, conference, bcon, presentation, talk, blender, de balie, 3d, metaballs

Id: PP14rVhgX9M

Length: 20min 8sec (1208 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 06 2017