Simple and Fun Soft Body Physics in Blender!

[Music] hey guys how's it going my name is grant and I'm the host of armies and graphics and today we're going to be taking a look at some basic soft body simulations in blender and how we can make some really awesome looking renders using just some spheres and a cool course for it to go through so while this tutorial we'll be focusing mainly on the simulations itself we will briefly go over some materials at the end just to give you a good idea of how you can make this look really awesome so without further ado let's go ahead and start with a fresh blender file and get right into it all right so we have our scene set up just with everything in it we can go ahead and delete to solve I'm just pressing a twice and then delete let me turn on screen casting keys here as you guys can see what I'm doing so what I'm first going to do here is just to get our physics set up correctly I'm going to add a ground plane I'm going to scale it up eight times just so it takes up our entire plane here it's just the thing I like to do and next what I'm going to do is add a UV sphere now I don't want to change any of the settings down here even though this is a rather low poly sphere we could actually change these numbers down see what it looks like this sixteen and eight and maybe that actually that actually doesn't look too horrible so I'm going to go ahead and change these settings down to sixteen and eight down here if you didn't do that and you already clicked off your sphere I just add a new one and change the segment's to sixteen rings to eight that will give us a nice low poly sphere which should give us some pretty fast to simulations so I'm going to change the smooth shading on just so it looks a little bit better and we're going to move this up a little bit and we're going to go ahead and come over into the physics tab over here and what we're going to do is we're going to click this by the way if you don't see this a physics tab right here what you can do is you can click with your center mouse button you can scroll back and forth up here but you're going to click on the physics tab and we're going to go ahead and add soft body physics to our sphere and on the ground here we're going to change it to a collision object now if we go ahead and play our simulation right now you'll notice that our spirit is kind of chilled here in the air that's because this setting car this I guess feature called soft body goals are on basically it's pinning different vertices so what we can do here is uncheck this and it will actually fall and will crumple up at the moment but what we're going to do is we're going to go ahead and add some resistance and resilience of all so it bounces back up and it has a little bit more liveliness into just turning into a flat plane of glitchyness so in order to do this we're going to go ahead and open up the in our physics tab over here we're gonna go ahead and drop down the soft body edges selection and we have a bunch of different settings here we have pull-push damp plastic bending and length now what we want to do here is we want to change the push and pull up to 0.9 and what these will do is it's basically the resistance of the object to stretch or to compress so a good example of this in the real world would be thinking about a rubber band for example if you take a rubber band and you grab it by both ends and stretch it it has a little bit of resistance in it and that resistance is the number that we put in there for pull and the harder it is to pull apart the higher the pull number will be and that's what pull is and push is basically just the complete opposite if you were to take an inflated ball for example or a balloon we're try and push together the more resistance it gives the higher the number so if you have a really low number it's just going to squish if you have a really high number it's going to have a lot of structure to it so that's why we change these up to 0.9 to give it a little bit more resilience and then what we'll also do here is change the role if actually I'm going to leave the dampening at 0.5 but what that will do is it just adds a little bit of friction to the compression and release 0.5 is a pretty good number to start with plastic will determine the amount of permanent deformation so for example if you were to take a hammer and hit it against a foam block it would leave a permanent dent in the foam block whereas here to take a hammer and hit against a piece of really thick rubber like a tire for example the tire would just maintain its shape it would basically compress when the hammer hit it and then return back to its original shape afterwards so if you want the plat if you want that permanent deformation the foam like effect you want to have a high plastic setting but if you want a rubber like effect and a lot of resilience you want to keep that plastic at zero or another very low number you can play around with it if you'd like but for this kind of simulation especially with the balls you definitely want a low very low plastic number and then we also have Bend what bending will do is it'll add another extra layer of resilience and we'll look at the description here bending stiffness exactly that so diversities will be less likely to bend I'm going to change this all the way up to ten we might change it in a little bit depending on how our sphere reacts here but let's go ahead and play this now you can see it barely even bends at all especially if you look from side view you can see that it looks like the bottom comprises just a little bit right there and nothing else much so that means we obviously need to change our settings down so I'm actually to change the bending to eight instead of ten and still not doing much so we'll change push and pull down as well two point eight I always find it better there you go now you can really see it's starting to get a little bit of bounciness to it there I always think it's better to start with a high number and work your way down then a low number to work your way up because it's a lot more interesting and it gives you a better idea of what you're working with so I'm actually going to drop the bending all the way down to five and we'll see if this there you go so that gives us more of a squish there I'm going to change these down to push and pull down to 0.6 as well and we'll see we'll see there we go so now we're kind of getting that that squishy look that we wanted before it looks almost like uh now I want to I don't want to take a water balloon because it still looks a little bit more stiff than water balloon but you get the idea so what you want to do is you want to play around with these settings to pull push and bending as you want to play with dampening and plastic like here you can see with the plastic it kind of flattens it out on the bottom so that's the plastic does but if you want to play with those settings be my guest I'm going to find something that I think looks good which is just a little bit softer than this there we go so now almost looks like a droplet of water not quite but you can see like the jiggle of it I just love the look it's so satisfying and then once you find settings that you like what we can do is we can come up to the not the particle settings the modifier tab and we can go ahead and add a subdivision surface modifier on top of it and that'll give us the extra smoothness that we need in our sphere so it actually looks somewhat decent so the physics calculations happen on a very low poly model and then it evens it smoothes itself out later so now that we have this we can go ahead and either add more of these so if we wanted to stack these on top of each other we could do like three of them you remind you to have the same physics settings but watch what happens now we drop them and they all go straight through each other that's because they don't have they aren't a collision object so in order to make these actually collide with each other we need to go ahead and select them and turn on the collision in the physics menu for all of them or if you just if you haven't duplicated them yet just do it with the first one my phone's buzzing and now you'll see that they collide with each other and it looks like this one doesn't collide rni mine they're colliding they're just a little bit goofy with that and you'll see that the physics simulation speed slows down like remarkably and that is kind of expected considering that we're working with a lot of polygons and they're all interacting so there you go oh there we go is just a glitch that's what was happening so now we can see that our spheres basically bounce off each other and make a cool little falling I don't even know what to call it but there we go we have our very first sort of soft body physics simulation already set up and of course you can use different objects with this as well but remember the higher the polygon count the longer it's going to take to simulate so keep that in mind while doing this so I'm going to go ahead and actually create something a little bit more interesting for them to go through just using some basic geometry in blender actually we'll go ahead and model it just for the heck of it and of course you can add other collision objects as well for example if I wanted to add a sphere in here for these two kind of I don't know skim off those like this and I wanted to change it to collision mesh right here now these will balance on top of the sphere instead of going down to the other thing it will give us a different result from what we had before [Music] all right so I just finished building this giant course and my balls successfully run through the entire thing if we play this here we can see that it's basically a race to the bottom that was the general concept with this whole thing after I got started at least so we can see how they kind of go down I did change the physics of the balls a little bit more I mean a lot more squishy I dropped the push and pull down to point 4 and the bending down to four and now we can see that they happily roll along in a race to the bottom where they try and get into this little hole right here so we can go ahead and watch the rest of this just a little bit satisfying to watch it is a little bit slow so I'm going to be speeding things up a bit but it looks pretty solid at the moment and you can see they get stuck there but they figure their way through and we can see this ball winds even though it kind of almost gets shoved out of the bottom here I think it does slip down low yeah there you go so it does look down at the bottom and become the official winner of the race to the bottom and you can also see that I extended this timeline down here a lot and if you just extend the timeline the physical simulation won't actually go all the way to the end all you have to do is you have to make sure you're you're one of your physics objects is selected actually each fitted cob jekt you have to disk for you come down to the soft body cache settings in the physics tab and you change this end frame right here and in this case it's 2000 going to simulate all the way to 2000 but it ended around 1150 so there was no need to so once you have your simulation run and you have everything that you need and it looks good what we can do now is click bake all dynamics in the soft body cache and what this will do is it'll take every single physics object in the scene and bake it so that the animation will not change no matter what until we free the bake and it's important to do this because if you save this file close it and reopen it then all of your animation is gone and you've just got a bunch of balls sitting there or whatever you're using in this case so it's very important to make sure that you do this and it also reduces the chance of error and now you can see we're completely done baking the progress bar at the bottom is completely red and we're ready to move on alright so now let's go ahead and take a look at materials that we can use to create some really awesome looking balls I guess and we'll also go over something to put on the ground plane here this case it's ground rectangular prism so what I'm going to do is I'm going to first start off by creating a new material let's call this um ball Matt I guess ball material and what we're going to do is delete this diffuse shader and I'm actually going to use my shader here my PBR shader as you guys don't have my PBR shader already you can download it there will be a link down in the description it's hey hip complex Remington it's absolutely free you can download it using whatever you want don't even need to give credit uh but you can use this if you'd like to and what I'm going to do is I'm going to hook up the actually will add a glass shader as well first so glass and there we go I'm gonna spread this out a little bit more and I'm going to go ahead and mix these two together if you don't guys don't have a notre angular what notre angular basic allows you to do is hold alt and right click and well off we have them mixed snow it's a really neat add-on it's free and it's actually built into blender so I'd recommend enabling it so press Alt + right click you can mix two things just like that so we have these two mix together now and what we'll do here is we'll mix them based actually hang on this is supposed to be subsurface scattering my my bad there plus CC by the way that's important because it'll have an extra clear coat on top of it so let's go ahead and set up the glass material or actually you know our glass material is pretty much set up here all we need to do is change the roughness something small like 0.01 that way we can get the idea that there are some imperfections there even though there aren't necessarily actual imperfections now we'll come back to color on both these in a little bit but for now actually build asleep the color is white there but for now let's go ahead and leave the color on the PBR shader as red and we'll leave the surface roughness as 1 now what we're going to do is we're going to come down to the clear coat reflectivity here and change this to 0.1 and the clear coat roughness to 0.01 which kind of gives us the same effect that we had with the glass appear to give the those little imperfections now for the color what we're going to do is we're going to add a mix RGB note here and we're going to plug that right in the surface color we're going to choose two colors that are well than accent each other also will with like a purplish color here maybe desaturate a little bit here and actually will drop the value of that as well it's a little bit bright and then we'll choose a nice reddish pink colored very vibrant just like that to get some nice contrast in there and we'll mix these based off of a noise texture so if I plug the factor into there will leave the scale around five change the detail up to three maybe four I'll change the distortion up to eight for this example and now if we go ahead and switch into render mode over here we can see that well it doesn't look like much because right now we're using the the just as the surface color we need to plug it into the subsurface scattering color as well and actually for the time being we'll go ahead and just bypass the glass here and just look at the material itself so you can see there there's not much contrast so I'm going to see if I can get a little bit more contrast out of that drop the value this a little bit more there you go so now you can really see and not really but you can start to see VD a difference in between these two so now what we're going to do is we're going to take the noise texture and plug it into the displacement done here and the displace displacement is just passed through so we can pass it through over to here and you can see it's very very strong so I'm going to add a converter mask converter over here change it to multiply and change the strength to point two so it kind of kills a lot of that really harsh bumpiness you can change the point one if you want a really kind of smooth looking sphere however I like kind of having this distorted look and then we're going to go ahead and drag the glass back into this so now you can see that we have this funky-looking ordeal going on over here but we're going to go ahead and kind of solve this weird whiteness by mixing these via a frontal so for now I don't know what to call it but you guys don't know what for now Liz you should look at some basic PVR tutorials and it'll explain it pretty well blender guru did a good job of explaining it so if we plug in the for now we can see that it for one completely turns the thing to glass and just on the outside is where we have our our sub sort of scattering so I'm actually going to swap these so the glass is on the outside instead and I'm actually going to boost the IOR the index of refraction up to about to next what I'm going to do here is I'm going to add a color ramp converter just like that and I'm going to drag the black value up a little bit and we'll also drag the white value up a little bit and what this will do is it'll make the the sphere kind of have this outer shine to it so it looks like it's transparent on the outside of course you can play with these values as well if you want the glass to penetrate more inwards and then just have the ball in the center or we can move the white value back up and you can see the subsurface scattering kind of pushes outward and it's just kind of a neat effect that I like if you don't like is you don't have to use it by any means but let's go ahead and make a really quick material as well for the ground plane here we're going to keep it nice and simple here we'll add a new material called US ground delete the diffuse shader add a I'm going to use my PDR shader for this one as well so I'll add that again and we're just gonna hook up a dielectric to the surface we're going to change the surface color to just a little bit of an off-white just like that and well I already looking pretty good I might change the roughness of something like 0.25 or 0.2 I just give it a little extra roughness but now if we move this down you can see actually can't really see there you go you can see those very solid reflections of that's all we need out of this material it's just a nice simple PBR material that we don't have to worry about very much so this is the final render it looks pretty good if I do say so myself and of course there are a lot of little errors and stuff like the quality in the Alpha channels aren't perfect and everything like that but that's just because it was more of a demonstration purpose as opposed to being a full-on render if I did do a full-on render that was meant for something like YouTube I definitely would have put a lot more work into it and make sure it looks good but for the purposes this looks pretty good so when you want to thank you all for watching I hope you all learn something new and if you did be sure to leave a like down below so others know it's helpful and if you want to see more videos like this be sure to hit subscribe so you're getting notified when I upload new videos I am going to be trying to upload more often because I know I haven't been uploading very recently so hopefully that will be coming soon anyway thank you all for watching and I'll see you guys next time adios

Channel: Remington Creative

Views: 350,334

Keywords: blender, education, 3d, cg, cgi, pbr, tutorial, guide, how-to, remington, graphics, lesson, vfx, softbody, soft, body, physics, simulation, bounce, rubber, bend, rigid, rigid body, soft body

Id: 4gYsxqNJyu8

Length: 17min 21sec (1041 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 19 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/AwSMO]

I really really like this!

I have always been kind of lost with soft body physics, after all there are a lot of options to change.

This tutorial really helps because it provides a good base on which you can work. I also really love the material - I have downloaded your PBR and it is amazing to use, this material makes it even better. Just out of curiosity, why did you use a MixRGB node rather than a Color Ramp? Wouldn't it provide more options to mess with?