Particle City - Blender 2.81 - Part 1: Generating The Particle Buildings

and welcome back to this exciting tutorial we're gonna be taking a look at using blender to create a city scene with a particle generator and trying to imitate something that looks like it's from the Bladerunner universe let's do it alright so here we are I've got these images up these are taken from the Blade Runner films we've got this one here from the most recent and then the these here from from the classic very very high quality JPEGs here we can do it tutorial on how to render out images that look this great at another point in time but right now we're just taking a look at it for reference so these are the models that were used from the the first film and you can see they're pretty cool this is we're gonna imitate it sort of these blocky city structures different towers and just random bits and we're gonna try and use the the land the atmosphere sorry where'd it go this kind of a look as well like the lights and stuff but I want to bring it into the daytime and add this sort of orange dust storm look I think it's pretty cool reminds me of my home Australia where we get these crazy red dust dust storms that blow in from the outback and cover Sydney and make everything look like the world's ending it's pretty spectacular doesn't happen often but when it does get you camera alright cool so let's jump into blender this is blender 2.81 so the exciting new version that's just released if you're watching this you know really close to when I'm making it and it's brand new but if you're watching this in like 2030 yeah I hope you're using a new version anyways let's get started so we'll start off deleting everything and let's get a plane into our scene this is gonna be the base of our city and let's get a camera it's kind of silly we just deleted a camera and then we're making Ewan but old habits die hard I'll jump onto the view here click on lock camera view and I'm going to now I'm gonna widen up my cameras field of view - let's try try 24 to start and I want to get it into a two three five anamorphic style frame size so to do that I need to get my trusty calculator out and I'm gonna multiply I want to keep 1080 so we'll keep the height at 1080 so 1080 x two point three five boom - 538 that's the number right one so 2 5 3 8 now we have a movie that's how easy it is to make a movie by the way okay welcome to 24 frames a second again cuz that's the cinematic standard and I think it looks nice and let's let's scale this up even more and I'll grab it on the x value just drag it forward so we're really just taking advantage of our frame and I might scale it on the Y a little bit just so we don't have those corners that's pretty good alright I hit tab to jump into the object and we are gonna subdivide or you got it typed there and then week that's pretty that's handy anyways you type subdivide to get to it and we're gonna pull the little boxes down here and I'm gonna increase the number cuts up to 10 that's fine and I want to let's see let's undo lock up the camera to view and let's jump up to here won't have like a trench that kind of comes through the scene but we might need more subdivisions for that so let's let's just subdivide one more time that should be enough and let's jump back into our view and I'm gonna get seed to get my brush selection tool if used the the roller on the mouse wheel you can use that to select I need to make sure I've got faces one thing that's annoying when you have this this brush selecting on you can't actually like interact with anything else until you hit escape so that can hang you up if you're not used to it okay so we're back to faces and I'm just going to select these and I might send it off this way like that maybe and maybe to one that goes off well that's that's way too much hold down shift to get rid of get rid of bits light escape pull out of it and rip out of the camera and let's do one like this I might make it a bit smaller this way maybe just like a random one there and a random one over here connect it up go all right jump back in our camera see again I hit 0 up and I'm in brush mode I hate that okay now let's it e to extrude and G to grab and Zed to restricted to the Z plane and I'm gonna drag all these guys down some of these might be interesting if we go up instead so now my at my middle mouse button I need to get a new Mouse it's sticking so like every now and then and just kind of totally will lose control and you know that's that's gonna be annoying for you but I'm hoping you're not gonna notice all right G and Zed bring it up jump back into our view because we're not really gonna see that on me this would go wider and I'll do maybe one of these I'm just gonna extrude this didn't bring it up like that I grab a few others grab it up just so we've got like tiny variations again I'm not making towers like this yet this is this is what this is the surface that we're going to be putting our particle system on so all right that's cool that's great start okay so next thing we need to do is create some of these little city squares so to do that let's get organized I'm gonna rename my plane to city base and I'm gonna put it in a new collection called which we call this call it city and I will create another one here called which we call this see tiles okay now in city tiles we go ahead and hide the city and city tell us we're going to make a couple of little miniature little miniature city blocks basically if you remember in that that photo of the model or is it there these like little square things they've got last lots of nice little intricate detail there's a couple of repeating shapes this will be what we need do to you know build up our build up our city so let's let's subdivide this actually you know what we could be even quicker with this if I jump out of edit mode and what we can do is I'm just gonna create some cubes scale this down and grab all Yanks not just what I'll do is we'll just just create a bunch of these guys Oh even better sorry I just had a brainwave if we could we could use a particle system on top of a particle system this is genius okay so what we're gonna do is we're gonna create a little mini generator so let's list elite that and we'll do that and let's let's select the little object that we've created let's go over to particles are going to create a new particle system and this one we're gonna call a city block generator just go chin and I want to produce it on the yeah the face face is cool and I want to do do it all at once so usually frames start would be the big frame where it begins to emit and then frame end is the frame it stops emitting and then you how many 1000 here is sort of spread out over this whole period of time so we're creating particles that are kind of you know flying all over the place for that period of time but I want a mold to generate right at the start so I could say frame frames start zero and frame in 1 and what we're gonna get with that is basically thousand particles in one hit ok let's turn off gravity and everything so physics I'm gonna say where's gravity again I can never remember all these things live velocity well I'm gonna turn off velocity so we don't need any velocity it's I'm gonna be shooting them out at all and I could just say no physics yeah that'll do it and what we're gonna do is let's create another cube and I'll grab it on the way over here and just leave it like that for now we're gonna make this our particle so if we go down back to this object go down to render and where it says halo we're gonna select object and we're gonna select this object so we can do that a couple of ways we can just I drop right in you can also find it up here and drag and drop the name and that's gonna create all these little cubes on our on our surface here now let's uh let's start changing things up I'm gonna change the scale randomness I'm gonna max it out and I'm gonna make my scale bigger and I'm going to decrease the number of particles so you can see we can use this to kind of like use it like a tool to sort of manufacture a bunch of random different city blocks so now if we change anything to this it's gonna affect all of these guys so what we can do is one thing we can bevel this so just bring up our bevel and have a little a little bit like that and then maybe let's extrude the top and scale it down and then extrude and grab it up so we're getting these cool little tower things and let's scale it down again [Music] all right so that's nice and you know we could create a couple of different buildings so if I shift D on that and grab it over here and then let's say go to our transparent mode and box select all of those and grab that down and then maybe extrude this one out on the X and that I got a totally different object and then what we can do is we can we can put both of these into let's create another collection we'll call this buildings and we'll grab this one we'll call this building one and building and both of these guys will put them into this this collection and then what we can do is on our plane where we have the building itself selected we can instead of using the object we can actually switch to collection and then we can select buildings as the collection and now it's going to use all of them so that's you know that's really cool so we can create a couple of these and as long as they're in this collection then actually then they'll just continue to continue to add into our system so you could see it already updating over here so let's scale this one maybe on the said scale it up create some like platform things [Music] and then maybe let's see let's create another one like to a variation of this one grab it on the Y bring it out I'll just keep stacking these out it's pretty cool all right little mouse button this if we increase the count of these up really start overlapping and stuff and we're gonna get just a ton of cool little cool interactions like that okay so all right so here's my idea so what we can do is we can take the this is the city tiles we'll call this one our generator what we can do now is we can iterate using the seed so we can iterate on the seed to create all these different variations of these buildings so the more these that make we make the more they'll just continue to add in to this so I'm gonna make a couple of more of these just some random shapes and sizes and then what I'll do is I'll then show you how we can iterate more of this so just give me a moment and I'll jump into it you well the origins down here so it's see it's got that gap between the base and the origin and that's how you get it elevated like that that's something to keep an eye on wherever the origin is is gonna be where it spawns from so if we want to put the origin at the base of everything we can change our view to [Music] orthographic just to make it a little bit easier to see and then what we can do is we can actually in each of these switch to vertex mode it select one of the base for Texas or even two of them f3 and cursor to let's see snap cursor to selected and that will put it in between whatever you've got selected so we could select all four of the base points anyways then what you can do is you can go to we can go to that's right it's in the actual object so object and origin set origin origin to 3d cursor and that will put the origin wherever you've got your 3d cursor so that's a really cool little really cool tip I'll switch back to transparent if you don't switch to transparent view when you're trying to select things you'll select like a look if I yeah I do that it's only gonna select I'm sorry so I'm gonna select the front to vertex is the one that it's ones that I can see so let's go back switch to transparent mode just like those guys and three snap cursor to selected jump out object set origin origin to 3d cursor I'll just do that for all these alright so I've done that now for all of them so now if we come over back to our little cityscape you should see that things are now let's transfer interview out things should be resting more on the plane as opposed to sticking out underneath it gosh it's sticking mouse buttons driving anything else cool that one's still floating a little no son space is there just a bit weird alright I think that's good now the next thing is so we want to make sure let's box select all these guys grab on the y-axis just to drag them out of the way and we're gonna focus in here on this and the sort of generator we're going to use that to generate all these different cool city tiles if you like those towers are showing up way too much so let's let's remedy that we're gonna select all these ship select the tower shifty grab Y oops we also had that selected somewhat believe that now we've got twice as many okay so one thing we can't do in blenders we can't nest particle systems it's particle systems so I can't use this particle system and then you make this a particle to then generate it on our land we actually have to do another step in between that where we turn this into a separate object so to do that just make sure everything's moved off to the side again so you're not selecting an accidental I'm gonna make sure I've got nothing selected and I'll go to my Djinn object and we're gonna be doing is affecting our seed so change our seed a little bit till we find a shape that we like and then what we can do is right up here in little wrench icon we can click convert what that does is it doesn't get rid of our generator object it's still there but it creates all this other stuff every single particle now is its own object now one of the things to be careful about is these objects are actually connected to these objects so in blender there's this thing called making link so you can make links between objects and the gist is basically you can create two objects and link them together anything you do to one will happen to the other one so for example if I was to create a cube and then duplicate it and now grab one of these vertices it's not gonna affect this cube they're not linked there are two separate objects but if I click on shift-click both of them and hit f3 and then type in make links [Music] there we go slip link we're gonna link data and it's call these different things we can link we can link the modifiers the instance collection and we're just going to go object data and so now if I effect one of these you can see it's now affecting both so they're now connected and I can get into trouble if you're not careful II don't really think about it and you're not looking at both objects at the same time you can end up making a lot of changes so if you want to break the link between two objects like this so that you don't have you know the the mesh data being equivalent what you do is you want to go to make single user so by making something a single user you then select all the different things that apply and now if I affect that you can see it's not gonna affect this one anymore so that's how that works so because we've we've generated all of these have been created based directly off of these they're still linked so I'm pretty sure ya see it it's affecting not just the ones in our particle system but also the ones that we've we've created so if we go down to select our generator and grab it on the y axis drag it out of the way you can see what I mean if I grab those vertices so what that means is now is if we merge all these together into one object which is what we're going to need to do it will also merge these guys one of these will be transformed into this which we don't want so we need to break those connections so I'm just gonna deselect everything box select all these objects they've just been created so let's break links so let's let's go to does it make single user selected objects and yep well that's fine now we should be able to shift select just these guys and hit f3 and join bingo alright so now it's a single object so this can be our first particle to put onto our main beek landscape layer so let's grab it I'm gonna move it just out of the way again and this one will grab my back and let's create a different seed value so we get one that compared the two can me but we can do things like have less objects that's kind of cool like is this a nice small kind of low to the ground one so let's try that we'll go back up to here convert and then grab why we drag our particle system out of the way select makes everything else is selected from select are our new buildings have just been made f3 and we're going to make single user again selected objects there we go and then select them again and f3 join yeah we've got our next particle object so we're just gonna turn these out don't need to make too many I'm just gonna make a couple just changing up my settings and looking for cool shapes that look you know markedly different another thing we can do to create variation is to come over here and it's a simpler method than you know multiplying you know duplicating objects and stuff we can also just use this use count feature that's underneath the collections so if we click on use count we can find individual bits so let's say we want to you know decrease the number of towers let's figure out what's our tower called it is a cube Oh two very specific I might rename that tower yeah so that we can find it and then let's go back down to that point there it is Tower so I can go 0 and now we're not gonna have any towers in that one or you know I could go way up and spawn a bunch of them so um I might I might do one with that so let's let's see increase more of our objects cool then we got three you know distinct buildings and we might work with that for now so all this stuff we can go ahead and hide so we've got our individual buildings we'll turn those off and our city tiles I'm gonna move our generator to a I'm gonna create a new collection actually and put our generator into that and we'll call this generator so we can find it nice and easy so city tiles will now have our four distinct city tiles so now if we go back to our city base we can hide City tiles and go back to city base turn it on jump back into our camera now we can make some magic by selecting the particle system creating a new particle call this a city block MIT turn and go down to say no physics again and no odd turns off velocity force no okay no velocity and faces that's all fine for now we want to start on frame zero finish on frame one let's turn our particles up we'll try it with mm whoops mm there we go and then let's go down to render and select collection and our city tiles there we go nice and very tiny so what we can do now is increase the scale of all of these and till we get kind of the right height and then back up to the top here and we're just gonna increase the number until we fill out our our scene it's looking really sweet I'm gonna turn off this selected view just we get a better sense of it now you can see the towers are completely taken over let's go back down so with count we're gonna use count and let's turn off I think it was the first and third one let's let's turn them all off and we're gonna find the ones that don't have towers so that one's got towers and that one's not rendering which is interesting okay there's one on towers that's one without towers as well okay cool so let's turn these up and this one as well so that we're just minimizing the number of towers we get and there we go now our trench isn't really working out very well because we've got you know the things are spawning along the side they're not angled correctly but we can we can work on that but overall I think this is a really good start you can kind of see where this is gonna go let's let's take a look at what this would look like in a render so if we switch cycles actually we just do Evie probably and throw a light in our scene and add a sunlight and give it a coal angle it's super bright and give it that kind of orange hazy look now you can see we're not gonna have any textures on these buildings yet and things are looking pretty sweet so this is as far as we'll take it today but what we'll take on next is we'll start you know correcting things like the the canyon not really working this this is horrible-looking bit and getting some materials on these particles and starting to build out that atmosphere so that we can really really have some fun with this super cool system that we've built find a cool angle and really make it make it come alive this is fun this is so cool this may be from the side do a little Death Star trench fly that's how we should end this one oh that's epic anyways hope you learned something cool I learned a few things cool out of this tutorial and drop some questions and comments in the comments below feel free to like and subscribe if you want to find out more as I continue to put these up and yeah like I said I'm continue to coach just continue to make these thanks so much for the encouragement those are you taking the time to let me know you enjoying these really means a lot to me I'm not planning on stopping this at all so it's okay even if we've got just a few views and just a few likes if you really into this channel don't worry if you don't see a lot of people engaging with it yet cuz I'm in this for the long haul and I know it's just gonna take a while to get a big audience so right now I'm just happy to you know have the people that we've got so I hope you enjoyed it and I will talk to you in the comments catch later [Music] [Music]

Channel: CBaileyFilm

Views: 47,223

Keywords: blender 2.8, animation, computer animation, blender tutorial, animation tutorial, computer animation tutorial, after effects tutorial, sci-fi animation, how to use blender, particles, create a city

Id: APHWd08X_mk

Length: 29min 11sec (1751 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 02 2019