Quick jellyfish in Blender 3D (Blender tutorial)

hi everyone here's a quick tutorial on how to make this uh jellyfish uh it's not particularly detailed um it's more of a just sort of a background thing really so first we're going to do is add in a uv sphere go into solid mode with that and then into edit mode tab and then if you press alt z uh this will toggle x-ray and that will allow us to delete any vertices hiding behind and what i'm going to do is i'm just going to basically use this to make the top shape so i think i'll delete these maybe one more just to here and then holding alt and clicking that will edge select all of these and what i want to do is make sure proportional editing is on which you can um use o on the keyboard shortcut and then if we scale it down what you'll see is it's going to start pulling all of them in a bit as it gets further away so we just sort of want i think that sort of a shape really what you want to do before anything like this really is go and look at a bunch of references um which i've already done on things like pinterest or whatever so once we've got our rough shape here i'm going to come over to modifiers add modifier and subdivision surface that will just smooth everything out a bit and then and also give us a more geometry which we'll need in a second and we'll go shade smooth with right click and we're going to add a um displace modifier this one here this is really good for just adding randomness um without actually having to model any geometry so what we'll do is if we go to um add a new texture here click new you see it's going to go um odd and then if we go over to our this button here this will take us to a texture because what we do we now we've we've added one we need to edit basically so if we go show the texture and then up here type we're just going to change this to i think clouds and you see it's gone mental so what we want to do is we want less a we want less of it in terms of how it's affecting the geometry i can't say that word for some reason and also um how often the the pattern is repeated so what we want to do is we're going to change the size and bring it up to basically as big as we can go and that already looks better i'm just going to turn off x-ray again just so you can see the geometry of it there and um so once we've changed the size here go back over to the modifiers and what we're going to do is we're just going to change how much it affects our geometry with the strength here i'm just going to bring this down you can play with this you know find something you really like and what i'm also going to do is just going to edit these this bottom ring here you'll often see your jellyfish they kind of have um little parts or poke outs or almost evenly so what i'm going to do is up at the top here select checker deselect and you'll see that basically well does what it says checker deselect i'm making sure that my um proportional editing is still on press g just press z i'm just going to give it a little bit less just something like that just to sort of give it um this sort of ridge at the bottom here and we can add if we want another subdivision surface to smooth these out afterwards um but it depends you know where is this going is this going to be in the background and you you know and you want the silhouette or are you going to you know are you going to be a bit closer that's when you sort of mess around with that in extra little bits so that'll do just for the top just for now um and what want to do now is add the the sort of tentacles now you see with the with jellyfish they kind of have this big sort of mass of um sort of tentacles in the middle and then a few sort of skinnier ones out on the side so i'm going to start with the ones in the middle and to do this i'm going to add in a a plane so shift a mesh plane and what i'm going to do is i'm just going to delete well first of all i'm going to move it over to the right so i'm going to press gx 1 in edit mode um not that it really matters but uh we'll delete these uh vertices and so we're just left with two vertices one edge and then what we're gonna do is uh add a screw modifier which is there it is uh and make sure if you've rotated this make sure that your rotation and scale are set um that goes the same with these you'll find that your displacement modifiers will go wrong things like that if your scale and rotation is not right so that's right this one's right and what we want to do is we want this to go down basically so if we use this screw um you you can see it's starting to go down while so it's maintaining a 360 degree screw and going down minus 8.5 meters so this is also a bit big so what i'm going to do is come into edit mode select these two vertices and just scale them down and i'm also going to bring them just off so they're in the middle here then i'm going to select this one but and bring it in and what you'll see is now my the this the actual sort of the width is is a lot thinner which is what we want now this is too much so what i'm going to do is i'm going to bring the angle down and the screw amount oops way up and also bring that down ah see now this is what i ran into before now what this screw is doing is it's working off of where your origin point for the geometry is so what we're going to do if i just select these and just sort of bring them a bit closer in to the origin point is that little orange dot there now i can have a much more of an angle while not going really far out so we'll bring we'll bring that up you know you can mess with this a bit all you want really um i'm gonna bring that just in a little bit more there we go that's a bit more what i'm after something like that really now what i will do is um i'm going to add a subdivision surface again afterwards here just so we've got some more geometry because we're going to displace these now so well before that actually i'm going to add a simple deform and what that's going to do is you've got a couple of options here and we just want this one taper because what we want it to do is is to get thinner as it comes down there we go and change the axis you can get some good results with all of these to be honest so it's worth just having a little look around i think that one's best for now and maybe just that don't worry about it getting too thin because we're gonna basically copy these so you know it will it will work um so once we've done that let's add a displacement because you you'll notice you can you could just stop here if you're doing um you know if it was really far away you could stop here but if you want it to be a bit closer you'll notice that they often they're sort of a bit frilly these parts on some of the jellyfish that i was looking at anyway so if we add in a um displace again here we go i'm going to add in a new texture i'll call this one tentacles i probably should have named the other one if i'm honest it's a bad habit of mine but you really it does help you out so much if you name everything as you go so again if we click this little button it will take us to our texture so we want this one um to be marble i think that's what i use now you see that is way too much so this one we just want to mess around with the side a bit and also bring this way down there we go something like that it just just adds a bit of randomness just which is really important i think for for making things look a bit more i mean this isn't going to look realistic but just making things look a bit more believable um so once we've done that i'm going to add one more display so let's tidy these up these little arrows just to keep things neater add another displace and go new again this little button take us over and i want to change this one to i think it was this and then whack the size right up what what we've done is that the first displace adds sort of smaller deformations or displacement over the um down the tentacle whereas this one is going to be more larger sort of shape so you see and i can mess around with this a little bit just to get something that i want um and that'll do so i'm going to add another subdivision service but again if you if this is just a small thing in the distance don't worry about it so much um just neatens things up a little bit and you could also add a solidify modifier as well one of the one of the things i was doing you might see in the thumbnail this is a lot more jagged i actually used to a lot more of this one but it was i had solidified it and i was adding subdivision surfaces and it was getting quite overly geometry heavy for no reason really um so there we go that's our tentacle and what i'm gonna do is i'm just gonna shift d um and rotate on the z axis which is r z and then again and what we'll do is we'll just go into the screw modifier and we'll just change the screw length uh a few times on the different ones just again it's just variation it just makes such a difference just having that and you could go in um and maybe change the the deform factor a little bit um be careful if you change any of the displacement ones though because if you change the actual texture it will change it for all of them but you can change the strength and stuff individually so there we go that'll do for now just just as an idea and then like i mentioned earlier they often have these sort of thinner sort of tentacles out on the side here so there's two options for that we can either just copy one of these maybe shrink it down and put it they sort of come off this sort of underside here um so press seven to go top view and then we're holding down alt and the middle mouse button that'll let me switch around and i'll just add a couple of these on here this is one way of doing it the other way of doing it is you could add curves so if you add in a curve and then draw and give it a bit of thickness it does look a bit neater but again it depends how far away you know you're gonna be so that'll do for now obviously this is really rough you know if you want to you know you can spend a bit of time making these look really neat you know again if you want to add in more geometry depending how close you are with more subdivision surfaces and and adding though you know really messing with these displacements a bit more uh you you can sort of take it to the you know upper level if you like so that will do for the the simple jellyfish uh now let's go and add in a um material so i've made this sort of bioluminescent one again it depends where and what this jellyfish is doing in your scene what do you want to use it for if you you know by luminescence looks cool but maybe you just want something a bit simple and you know transparent but we're going to go with this so i'll um i'll remove it and make a a fresh one so let's go new sorry if you come over to the material properties and click new uh let's try and do what we're saying uh naming things this is jellyfish so what i'm going to do in my material editor here um first thing if you're using ev make sure in the material properties you come down here and tick screen space fractions and you'll also need to come up to the render properties and and turn them on here i don't know why this isn't on as standard in eevee but if you know you just need to do that really if you want to use any sort of transparency or anything like that so what we're going to do is we're going to mix the principled bsdf that's here with an emission but first what i'm going to do is i'm going to add just turn the transmission all the way up on here you won't see anything because there's no light um the transmission basically makes things clear but ev doesn't really like clear materials that much you know you can't see through that at the moment but that you know you need to mess with some other bits and bobs we're not going for a completely clear look here so next thing i want to do is add a emission shader so shift a searched emission i'm going to use a shortcut from node wrangler add-on here it's well worth again it's free it's part of blender i think you just need to go into edit preferences um and search node wrangler and just tick it and then what that lets you do is if you press shift and control and right click and drag that'll automatically mix if not you can just do shift a mix shader and what i want to do is i want to mix these two by the factor of using the fresnel node basically what this does if i add in a color ramp just plug that in here and again this is a node wrangler if you shift control left click that previews whatever node you click on you can see basically it just sort of catches the edges there's a mathematical thing for this but i ain't the one to explain that too unfortunately so what we can do is if we we play with these i think i want to flip these around actually and you can just sort of get it catching the edge and maybe you want to want it to be a bit softer than that really better just turn that there we go that's the sort of thing i'm looking for just around the edges and just in here and then if we mix our emission and our principal um oops plug that in there and because you know it's just still viewing but if you uh again shift control left click on here that will um that'll sort that out so now if we give our it's not really working how i wanted it i wonder there we go that's a bit better there we go so it just gives that sort of a bit of a glow but it sort of makes it look like there's more inside if you if you can see what i mean um and you can do more to this something quite cool and this is just how i use gradients in like all of my materials so if i go shift a and add a gradient texture and then this again is with node wrangler if you click on that and press ctrl t that'll add in the texture coordinates and mapping these this is just how this gets applied over your object so if gradients always seem to work best with generated what you need to do is make sure this is um put 90 degrees on the the y rotation that's just so rather than the gradient from going from like left to right or right to left i can't remember what it is from default this will now go from um top to bottom if we add in a color ramp plug that in here and then just maybe future a little bit green just a little subtle change pink i think they they're quite often but you know this is this is stylized really um and then i'm just going to add this uh material to the rest of the tentacles and really quick rather than going on here clicking on it and add the material i think that was the last one i made add material what we can do is if you just select the ones that you want that don't have material on it or a different material and then shift click on the one with the material that you want if you press ctrl l you'll see this link materials come up and then that adds your material to all of the others i spent so long clicking added materials you know until i found that out um so there we go that's it really like i say you can take this further um but there are loads of tutorials out there for like really detailed jellyfish but i've just i was making one the other day and i was like why is it so difficult i just want a simple a simple jellyfish basically um so that's it what you can do is just parent these tentacles to the body so if you change them move around so if we just shift drag select these and then shift click the top and and then press ctrl p and then we can parent these to this so now if we move this to rotate it or if we want to scale them you know that sort of thing and that's it so there you go uh this is you know one of the early videos on here so if you know if there's any feedback or whatever please do let me know in the comments anything you'd like to see um that'd be sweet so thanks a lot cheers bye

Channel: Ali Hoff

Views: 5,244

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Id: Nm4fEI7JqC0

Length: 19min 39sec (1179 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 16 2021