Morphing Text to Particles in Blender

welcome back to my second Channel you might have watched my recent tutorial where we make this particle transition effect I think it's pretty cool but I wasn't super happy about the final result of this tutorial but I have had some other attempts that I'm quite happy with so this for example which is a microphone that turns into an email and then I have this effect which I didn't finish the render but I really like this um this violent vibrant color changing and then it also works with text so you can have this line for example and then it turns into this text now the readability is a little bit difficult on this one so I thought for this deep dive video that I'll try and do a transition text version of this effect usually in the other tutorial I did use icons which I think is a really powerful technique so you can just download an icon from I recommend feather icons.com simple beautiful open source icons you can download all if you like and I also recommend Google Icons or yeah you go to Google fonts and then you click icons they have a bunch of stuff here you can change the weight you can fill them yeah you can set it to rounded yeah there are a bunch of customizable things you can do with these icons and then there's another icon site bootstrap icons these are amazing they're also open source I can highly recommend checking this out although they come with an outline let's download this April let me show you so in blender if I were to import this from bootstrap SVG airplane look at this they come with this stroke right so this is not ideal if you want to turn this into a force field like we did in the other video because if you turn this into a force field and you set it to curve it will be like a double force field right so you'll have to sort of you'll have to delete this and then you're stuck with this weird thing but in comparison if you have uh I think yeah this is the thumbs up I used in the other video look at this here you only have the line itself so this is not filled which is a lot easier to work with when you turn this into a force field because then every part of this Curve will be a force field so that's why I can recommend feather icons for this tutorial but if you just want great icons in general I can recommend get bootstrap which have really nice quality and then if you just want a bunch of different ones I can recommend Google I don't really like the design of some of these but yeah you didn't comment from an icon review video although it is important for this deep dive channel that we get to just explore every single uh distraction you know I feel like that's important that's the whole purpose of this channel because if if I wanted to get views I mean I'd I'd just make it shorter you know the goal is not to get views let me just tell you that it's the goal is for me to just have a good time on my computer and you're welcome to join okay so we are in blender version 3.5 I want to make a text object and I want to turn this into the particle emitter no I don't I want to make a line yeah that's what I did for this one I wanna we wanna start out with just a line and then that is going to transition into a particle simulation that's that's a really cool effect actually so let's uh just make a plane and just make it like narrow like this and then this will be our particle emitter so let's go to particle properties and click this plus icon and let's do the same stuff that we did in the main Channel video so let's set the frame end to one lifetime to 250 velocity to zero and Source let's set source to random instead of jittered because we will be using this plane yeah and then under scene properties let's turn off gravity so now let's make a text object you should write something here or something clever oh it should be something awfully clever that I had prepared but I don't really have anything so let's just write transition and I want to change the font so let's go to Google fonts and I want to search for food gas one yeah this one I really like this text so you want to download this so I'm just going to go to fonts yeah this one a trick I like the useless hide the particles you can in edit mode when you've selected the text you can hold down alt and you can adjust the kerning so if some of these fonts have a little bit weird kerning you can make it look a little bit better it's not that important but you know it's uh it's the little things now this is currently filled with a bunch of different vertices I guess but we don't want that we just want the text stroke sort of so let's set the fill mode from both to none and what's really cool is that this is a vector object so we don't have to convert this to mesh so throughout this effect since we're starting with this line we can always just turn this text into something else we can make this say whatever we can change the text after we have done the simulation even so yeah this is a really cool non-destructive particle simulation workflow so let's turn this text object into a force field so let's go to physics properties force field and let's change the shape from point to surface and then let's set the strength to -5 okay and let's increase the flow yeah this is also a pretty cool effect let's make the particle smaller viewport display for now we can add the an actual particle object later look at this I think this is a pretty cool effect just this they're just working around I mean this could be cool by itself but I want it to be a little bit more violent I want to have like a turbulence force field that works its way through and sort of explodes the text and then it settles let's animate the force field power of this text object first so I want to start out at a value of zero let's go to frame 20 and then let's insert two keyframes here and let's go to frame and let's do frame 40. let's do strength of minus 10 and a flow of 10 and let's have a look yeah that's cool and now you can see these are sort of living they're sort of moving around like that but I wanna I wanna to make them stop so let's uh open this up and let's set it to graph editor let's select the force field and I'm by the way to zoom like this I'm holding down control and middle Mouse button so let's move to frame 60 or something and let's set the strength back to zero a new keyframe and then on frame 61 let's turn this both to zero so now we should hopefully have a little bit more of a yeah hmm nothing's happening here what why are they moving so they keep why does it keep going this doesn't really happen I'm not sure how much time I should spend doing this figuring this out but I mean okay so that works it seems to be that we just have to make the flow longer what it still just moves like that I haven't really seen this before this just behaves differently than it usually does I guess I'll figure it out later okay so now we have this basic animation where the particles transition from being a straight line to sort of crawling up on these letters and let's try and increase the amount of particles so let's set it to ten thousand okay nice so here you can see these are the keyframes that we currently have this is the amount of flow and this is the strength so the flow is a little bit difficult to explain but it's sort of like drag in the air so if you have a lot of strength and the flow is set to Max then the particles will sort of always move at this speed of the strength if that makes sense but if you have no flow then the particles will accelerate and decelerate more I guess it's difficult to explain but if you start playing around with it a little bit more you'll understand yes I want the strength to hit fast like that and then I wanna the flow to go away as well so yeah I might end up with something like like this okay yeah for some reason for some absurd reason that I've never seen before we have this movement I don't know what it is huh I actually think it looks a little bit cool let's keep it like that yeah let's keep it I don't want to argue against the simulation Gods okay so let's add a transition here so that this straight line just doesn't immediately start crawling up on these letters so to do that we're going to use a force field called turbulence and let's place it over here and in the physics properties let's increase the max distance yeah so this is the same Principle as we did in the other tutorial but it looks a lot cooler when it's a straight line so let's insert a location key from here and let's go to frame yeah 28 and then over here so insert another location now you can see the keyframes here and if you like you can press T and then linear so now it will move linearly we just have to make it stronger so first let's enable global so we have a better pattern here and then let's increase the strength yeah this is really cool let's try a high amount of strength this is really cool I wanted to go faster we need some more particles so let's set the particle count to 40 000. oh yeah we can change the size of the force field so you can change the scale here to 0.6 oh that's really cool look at that this is such a cool effect and I want it to be stronger and stronger so let's start at 15 and then at frame 20 it's like 25. yeah look at that and then let's add some noise as well like a noise of two I want this to start sooner I want to transition text oh yeah this feels really Snappy and good I think I want to make it even more Snappy so we can increase the time scale of the simulation so let's go to particle properties physics integration and let's set this time step to maybe 0.06 yeah that is a lot we might have to take all the keyframes yeah so let's set the pivot point to 2D cursor the hotkey is dot let's go to the first frame and then press s and then X and then you can just scale down the entire animation yeah look at that transition and what's really cool about this is that now we can also add more after it's set transition we can go shift d and duplicate this and then it can say something else like maybe into and then when you select the object that says into you press a and select all the keyframes because G and x and then you can move this past so now it will say transition and then it will say into oh it needs to be a longer one transition into that's a short word you know into is too short we have to change transition let's do a particle and then it says transition so now it says particle transition oh my god look how fast it is to change that oh and then let's add one more particle transition using this is not gonna be possible but let's try it anyways particle transition using force field it's almost we just make need to make the full force fields one a lot longer I think we can do this particle transition using Force feeding off what if you just make it really long like this using force fields and then we get this thing at the end where it just keeps going oh wait we can just leave this up since it's the last one using force fields it's a long one but it does work and you know it's um it's really time consuming to do changes to the last one because you just have to run through the entire simulation you know it it reminds me of playing uh Line Rider if you play that game with the trackmania maps where you're always holding down one button it's it's the same kind of vibe okay nice so now we have our simulation and we're going to try and add some more particles here so it will we will actually see all of them so let's add the particle let's go shift a and let's make an icosphere and let's right click and set the shading to smooth and then press F12 I want to call this particle and I'm going to give it a material I'm also going to call this material particle I'm going to set the surface to emission so now you can also take this particle and press M and make a new collection and let's call this particle object you can see here now we have a particle object collection and we can hide this from the render View and we can also disable it so we won't really see it anymore so now we can select our particle system we can give it the particle material that's really handy and then let's go to particle properties render render as object so now here you can see we have nothing oh yeah if you go to set it to be the instance particle object yeah okay nice so now we actually have this object I want to do some changes to this particle now because this looks a little bit weird first of all I think they're too big so let's lower the scale and then let's say yeah I want to do some scale randomness this is basically the same thing we did in the main video by the way remove the show emitter from the viewport and also from the render oh and okay I just accidentally hit rendered view without disabling one feature which we have to disable yeah this sucks so hard but let me just show you what you need to do we're still just saying it just says updating lights up here yeah okay so now it's finally done it takes like 30 seconds or something but you have to go to render properties and under lights you have to disable light tree if you're rendering this in Cycles now look at this now this is instant now you can see the particles I wanna I wanna bake the particles so let's set the particle count to 60 000. so if you have a fast computer you can just set the particle number really high and just work with a high particle count while you're shading and stuff but if you have a slower computer you can just work with a lower number of particles and then you can just increase the particle count when you're doing the final render I just like to see many particles when I'm working you know I get excited and then let's go to cache and then just hit bake so now the particle system is baking so we can scrub through the timeline it will yeah it will be quite responsive look at this so let's add a nice material to this I want to add a camera first so let's go shift a camera and then Ctrl alt nump at zero and then just move the camera back so now let's split this down here and go shift F5 and then numpad zero so now we're watching this through the camera and then you can hold down Z and set it to render View and I recommend using the cycle Trend dungeon for this because we will be using a node which is called particle info node and this will not work with AV it essentially allows you to get attributes from the particles what I like to do is I like to use this velocity attribute because this is Vector data so what you can do is you can separate the vectors into x y and C so let's go converter separate X Y and Z and now here you can see you have the x-axis you have the y-axis and you have the z-axis and what's a little bit weird is that these have Vector data on the X Y and z-axis but they can move both ways on the x-axis for example right so if it's moving one way it's a positive value and if it's moving another way it's a negative value so what you're seeing here these black levels these are actually darker than zero so these are negative brightness values and that's a little bit tricky to work with because if you were to just add all of these together using a converter math then this is really weird because you still have these super dark areas so a super easy way to fix this is to just click the clamp button so now we're clamping this to a value of zero and one but what's unfortunate about this node setup is that we only have the positive X Y and Z values for the vector data or for the velocity data so what you could do you could set up I think I did this once where you do a math so if you take one of these and you multiply it by -1 and then you take a difference color if you were to do something like this yeah I think this is like the mathematical correct way let me disable these two so now if we're looking at the X Channel now you have both ways now you have the both positive and negative I think if there are some smart math people please leave a comment about how this works and uh that would be awesome but for now I'm going to just clamp this and get rid of the problem and also I think this looks better when you don't get the negative value so yeah that's probably a really long distraction but let's add a area light I want to place this right above make a little bit bigger stronger and now I want to make a diffuse Shader into an ad Shader so now the diffuse is added on top and let's set the background to Black okay and I want to make a colorful gradient so let's go ahead and add an empty object plane axis and I want to rename this to gradient controller and I want to move this to the right let's hide the light for now I want to add a gradient texture so if you have the node Wrangler add-on installed this one you can just select the emission material and go Ctrl T and then you select the image texture and you go shift s to switch type and let us set the texture to be gradient texture and we don't have any UV data for the sparkle system so let's change it from UV to object and now we can use this gradient control object we're placing this gradient controller at the start of these particles or over here is the furthest it's going to go and then we are using a color ramp as a reference so here you can see when I move the color ramp this is how far the particles are changing the texture right so we want this color ramp to be the entire duration of our particle system so to fix this let's move this all the way over here so now you can select the gradient control and you can press s and scale it up and scale it up all the way until we are over there yeah and then let's do a little bit more so now what we essentially have is that we have oh I think actually the yeah I think this uh display size lines here they are actually lining up with yeah that's cool of course that makes sense because it's one unit yeah so now we essentially have a gradient that goes all the way here so now what we want to do is we want to change this from a color ramp that is just black and white and we want to make this into like this rainbow color so the easiest way to make a rainbow color in blender if you ask me is to go shift a input RGB and you set this to be as white as you can so these colors are as bright as possible and then you select the color ramp and you press e here and then you can just click and drag and just draw a circle inside of this and it will map all the colors of the rainbow and this is really cool so yeah I'm not sure if that's a perfect gradient you can probably find a better one online but it's a really fast one so now we have this rainbow color on our text super vibrant colors and we can now connect velocity to the strength again and then I also want to make the velocity A Little Bit Stronger so let's go converter math and let's multiply this by five so now we have this and what's really cool is that we have the diffuse material so these particles are lighting up the diffuse material I just think this looks really cool yeah look at that this is a really cool look I think and also I think these particles are a little bit uniform so what I like to do is to use the randomness of the particle info node and then just add that yeah let's make some space here and let's duplicate this let's take the randomness and add it into this one let's do a multiply add yeah now you can see if you do if you mute this if you unmute this look at that now you got this sort of random strength in here but let's not do the multiply add let's just do multiply I changed my mind oh look at that yeah hmm that might be too much let's use a color ramp to just make this a little bit uh yeah yeah this is looking really cool so now we're starting off with this line and you know the light is too powerful maybe seven and then I want to add just the gradient background I always like to add gradient backgrounds I don't want the gradient background to be affected by the Light so I just um I'll just set this to be a mission and I want to set it to be a gradient texture and then I want to set it to object and then spherical and also let's make it a little bit smoother um yeah I'm not repeating myself a lot in this video so I feel but it's nice to have some rituals now let's make this weaker and the hair is the gradient texture I like to use let's do a still render and see what it looks like yeah it's definitely vibrant I like that I want to try and make the particle smaller and then make more of them yeah like that and I want to increase the randomness and I want to yeah let's do hundred thousand particles it's probably crazy but let's try it okay particle transition using force fields yeah that's cool now one thing that I think I want to do is that I want to disable the color in between the transitions yeah let me just keyframe I want to key from this value here we have a maximum brightness I guess insert yeah and then here we want it to go to zero insert and then five again okay and then another one so basically if you want to see here here you can see I'm basically turning on and off the strength of the brightness here just so it it actually turns off the light yeah this is cool so I was hoping I wouldn't have to do this type of manual work but in these simulations there seemed to have been a bug where the velocity doesn't really go all the way down to zero I think I've messed up some of the flow values of the keyframes but I mean that's okay I guess it's just uh I was hoping this was a little bit more procedural you know it's always sad to have to manually add keyframes to an animation like this now one thing I want to check is that I want to see if it's possible to add a little bit more Randomness so I want to select the turbulence force field and I want to add some more noise so now let's re-simulate and let's see this is a little bit exciting to when you're finding something that you want to tweak and then you just tweak it and you do another bake and it's it's like 10 seconds of waiting that's like that's the sweet spot because then you get to like take like a mini break and think about stuff critical transition using force fields and now let's just do a render and see the readability here yeah oh this is easy to read yeah poor field the D is a little bit weird Okay so yeah this is a little bit difficult to read I'm not sure how we can get more particles over to maybe this is risky but maybe right after the using the particle system goes back again like this I mean the particle system doesn't go back I mean the turbulence force field you're saying force fields it's not that easy to read if the D is still very very messed up it should just spend a lot longer I think let's try one more oh yeah perhaps that's cool yeah that could work let me see a how this is too now it's really difficult to read oh yeah I didn't change my mind I want to delete these keyframes at the end and then I want to just add just a general force field to mess things up and this is a global force field so I want this to be turned off at all times but then when we get to the using then it's going to be turned on set it to four and then it's on for like until here so now you can see this is like a force field is getting turned on and it just stays on for a little bit and then it turns off and I think the size should be not that big let's simulate and see oh there's something about the readability of the it doesn't really just it doesn't really spread out at all I mean I can read it now because it's such a bright background but when you have it in the rendered View is quite dark yeah it's a little bit too difficult oh and I forgot to turn it off of course no I did turn it off this has zero value why is this happening okay so there definitely are some bugs in the particle yeah definitely this is 100 a bug I'm you know see this the value of this keyframe is 0.000 but still it's affecting it yeah that's 100 the bug oh my God okay so I'm not going insane after all that's good perhaps it could just increase and strength them so we're like using force fields yeah and then it just yeah let's do that let's just uh keep it like this so we're we're embracing the bug we're not letting it win that's how uh that's how we'll cope with this that's actually a little bit of a relief because I thought I was going crazy earlier when I was trying to figure out why the particles were lighting up but it's it seems to be a bug where if you're using the flow at the max level and then you're turning it off again then yeah something happens I don't know what it is okay so let's have a look particle transition using force fields yeah we're definitely gonna fix this a little bit I wanna take the force field the turbulence force field and I want to just make it so it just becomes stronger and stronger and to do that you can just duplicate this first keyframe take this one and duplicate it like that and then select everything go shift e linear extrapolation so now it will just keep increasing so now let's make this hopefully one last time particle transition using force fields oh okay so here's the thing that I was uh oh that's really cool this little twister let's have a look at the bug that I was really struggling with earlier here you can see it just when you press play these are supposed to stay perfectly still because right here there are no forces in the entire project file that are affecting these particles but still they're moving around like this and they're not allowed to because when you have the flow set to Max and you have the strength set to zero that should be like a hundred percent dampening effect so this shouldn't really be possible so that is why the Shader picked up the velocity from this one as well so here you can see that it looks like it's lighting up because there is velocity here but it's not supposed to so that's why we ended up having to manually keyframe this yeah now it all makes sense because there seems to be a bug that just doesn't really respect the that I'm setting the strength to zero but that's okay I think the end result is ending up being quite nice anyways and I also want to add some depth of field to this so let's select the camera and let's zoom in and set it to depth of field distance and let's do something really narrow like point one no we have to do 0.01 oh no that's too much yeah it has to be 0.1 look at this is this starting before what there is a noise look at that so this is super bugged actually because this turbulence force field that I added now the last even if it's set to zero the value is 0.00 is nothing this value is off look at this it's still affecting the beginning of the animation before this other force field moves over and this other force field has a max you know the this Max impact radius is supposed to prevent it so this is like this is good but here you can see unlike frame seven we have definitely have some force field motion here now this just makes me so sad this I wish this bug wasn't there it ruins the effect a little bit that this is supposed to be like straight line that goes like this but then it just that's a little bit unfortunate look at that this movement over here perhaps I should learn the simulation notes when that comes in a few weeks okay so I'm in the compositor I'm just going to add my default glare setup and I always use the same setup by the way so you can just take a screenshot yeah I really like this one so here's the glow setup that I always end up using I really like this okay and I'm actually going to render out in exr this time because you know if it crashes it does but yeah I hope it doesn't maybe I should use the B render on I really like that because then you get like an estimate that how long is left yeah so I'm going to render this using B render on which is amazing and now we will also get an estimated time remaining okay 11 minutes 12 minutes okay so the render is finished it took 14 minutes let's have a look I like to use this panel let's just open this as a clip and I just like to click pre-fetch okay huh oh I regret it I regret the end I 100 regret adding this force field at the end but that was surprisingly Snappy yeah I like that I think that was pretty cool actually except you know except for the end that is stupid I really regret just look at this it's the most uninteresting ending ever it's like who cares about that but this first part yeah this Shoop chew yeah I think this looks really cool it's a little bit fast but I think it's uh I think it's a really cool way to just transition text I think there are some readability improvements and also when I'm looking at this I have this I'm using my iPad as the second Monitor and when I'm looking at it on the small monitor yeah that looks really cool so that's it I'm happy you watched my deep dive let me know if you have any suggestions to what the bug could be where the particles kept moving even if all the force fields were disabled I will be changing this studio setup in the near future and I might be able to do some more recordings then so uh yeah the days of this studio is it's coming to an end I'm really excited about the new studio I'm gonna try and do like a proper setup so it looks really nice and I should be able to stream and record videos a little bit more and that would make room for more deep Thai videos so let me know if you have any suggestions to techniques that you would like me to go deeper into or just explore further so yeah I'm looking forward to see what you can create this is a pretty cool technique I think but yeah that's it thanks for watching and I'll see you later bye it's still blanket season in Norway by the way and I'm starting to wonder if it's a blanket country

Channel: Polyfjord Deep Dive

Views: 13,078

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Id: A0-5X8Eco_g

Length: 29min 58sec (1798 seconds)

Published: Fri May 12 2023