Star Wars Blasters In Blender

all right so let's make some x-wing blasters in blender I've got my x-wing model over here and what I want is to have little shapes little cylinders firing out of each one of these guns so I'm gonna hide my x-wing real quick we don't need that for the moment let me move my camera get that out of the way I don't need that yet so what I'm gonna do is make a plane and this plane is gonna fire all of our particles and now I'm just gonna rotate this plane and it looks like x90 that's the way the x-wing is facing and what we want is just to let's call that a meter nice and simple we're do the particle thing at the plus making a particle setting College blasters alright so let's see first thing number I'll just play it see what we get we get nothing right so we have to set the start frame now my start frame is always 1,001 for reasons not that interesting I'm gonna set that to the full length to this thing so we get a bunch of blasters well not blasters we got a bunch of balls raining and out of this thing cool that looks fun let's go over here to the scene settings and turn off gravity because we are in space and now they're firing the bunch of things really slowly so go to the source well actually let's go to the number and make that something like 100 the housing is probably way too much within 250 frames so source emit from faces we only have one face because this is just a plane and that's what we want one face particles per face one and we can leave all the rest of this alone let's go back to the beginning start it up again so now your particles are firing from the center of this plane which is just what you want and so we have they're moving way too slowly so go down here in a velocity m'q that's something high 300 because we're firing like bullets here we go cool all right looks cool but doesn't look like a blaster yet so what we need is to make a cylinder make it you know I'm gonna switch this so it isn't flat it looks kind of weird make the cylinder the radius nice and thin this isn't that important to get this exactly right that maybe four vertices we don't need that many I'm just gonna make 10 because it's just gonna be moving so fast you're not gonna really know and that's cylinder I'm gonna put that into a new collection and call it blast and then under the render settings here in the particles for your emitter go down to render as collection set blast as our collection and use whole collection that'll come up later as to why scale is set to point zero five by default I'm just gonna put it at one and figure out what I want later so let's play it cool we're firing bars looks terrible we need them to be rotated in the right direction they're not right now so let's grab our cylinder and which way X maybe X 90 will that do it yes that does it alright so let's let's hide this for now this is probably making a collection because we can hide the source cool we're firing that now one thing let's go back into here I want to turn this on it's in the middle of this which is kind of strange it's gonna be firing like half of it at the beginning and it's kind of a waste you can move it up so that it always fires the whole thing like this but I don't really like that doesn't feel very clean to me so what I prefer to do I'm gonna go up here to the top view and I think that's it's up hold on yeah that's the right direction and I'm just gonna move it up and then let's go to object set origin origin to 3d cursor the 3d cursor is at the very center which is where this is I mean the 3d cursor is there by default so that just feels cleaner to me I don't know if you need to do that it seems to work either way but I just like it more okay so we've got that looks cool except if you rotate this pointed at something else well that looks terrible that's just weird I had this problem one of my little Star Wars shot I did before and it drove me insane trying to figure out why that was and the reason is that we need to go down here to rotation under the emitter settings and turn that on and that allows it to be rotated I guess in alignment with the emitter I don't really know just know that it has to be on but now it doesn't look right at all that looks weird so now these settings I don't know if any of these are I don't know what half of this stuff means I just kind of push the bugs until it worked let's turn our blast back on and rotate our cylinder let's do 90 on the Y does that do anything no all right turn that off back to our emitter let's turn the orientation access to normal tangent which I think will work all right not quite but go back to our cylinder 90 does that do it no that doesn't do it maybe this one will do it hey look that did it see every time I do it it seems to be different or I just don't remember what I did whatever it doesn't matter that seems to work turn that off real quick go back to our emitter let's rotate it hey look at that we're shooting blasters isn't that fun okay so we've got a functional emitter here great let's give it some color so not the emitter sorry go back here to our cylinder give it a new material just set it as emission because we're just emitting light from it and make it red but not perfectly red a little up there from red because I'm gonna turn it up really high and what I want I'm gonna turn this little evey ish thing on go over to my Eevee settings just because it'll be faster and turn on bloom and that way you get this nice glowy thing with a white-hot core doesn't have to be entirely white-hot you can set this how you want some too I like to put it down a little bit so it's kind of getting there maybe 30 there we go it's bright but not overwhelmingly it looks like it does in Star Wars they have red glows with a white-hot core like a lightsaber or a blaster most of the time so turn that off cool look at that that's rad I love it okay turn this off because it's a little bit much okay good time to save let's turn on our x-wing okay here's our x-wing okay so what we want is to put this emitter at every one of these guns so it's going to the front view grab our emitter and just position it until it's right right up in there and it's a little big but we'll deal with that in a minute and we'll turn on wireframe quick and just stick that guy right in the middle there it looks a little big so I'm gonna go over here to the emitter settings and change the where is it render needs a scale until it's small enough to fit in there okay while we're here you know what let's turn off the show emitter we don't want that to be visible look at that you got it right there inside the barrel let's move it up so that when it fires it's kind of emerging from there it's a little big so again make the scale a little smaller and we can probably build a little bigger so it's like the size of that now it's gotten a little shorter because I changed the global size so I'm gonna go back into my blast and just grabs a cylinder and just scale it so that it's a little bit longer on that blue axis whatever like I said Z doesn't matter okay back to this view so now we've got one blaster firing out of there cool let's also go into the emitter settings under viewport display turn off emitter you really don't like seeing that emitter okay cool look at that we got a nice blaster I like it so we want four of those so I'm gonna go back to the front view grab my emitter and I'm gonna hit shift D an escape just so it doesn't move around all weird and then I just gotta go in there position these okay so now we've got four blasters set up but you'll notice they all fire the same way it might be kind of hard to see so I'm gonna turn this thing on we save before blender crashes OH which it tends to do okay yes make that'll easier to see so now you've got all these blasters but they're all firing exactly the same way which excellent blasters can do according to the 90s x-wing games but that's kind of not fun so what's better and also okay so you could go into each one of these and duplicate the emitter settings and change whatever you need to change to make that no no maybe the seed but you know what it's a lot easier is to just shift select all of these hit ctrl J to join them and you have one object with four faces and because we set a source to be one particle per face then it just picks a random face and fires from there each time it's cool right I think it's cool maybe you don't think it's cool it is alright looks great look at that almost there well you'll notice they're not really emitting any light on the x-wing there so because these are emissive you could just turn that way up if we go into cycles and hopefully that won't take too long so while we're here actually let's also go into the emitter and bake this I'm gonna make it a little easier to work with so we've got one firing right now and it's maybe putting a little bit of light on there so you could go into this the surface of there or the yeah the surface and crank up the strength to like 300 or something and they start getting it there but the one thing that's gonna make your core really really hot and white and you may not want that and then you're also gonna have to turn up your diffuse samples really high to get this to not be so noisy so I'm gonna leave that at 30 which is where I like it and instead because we set up the emitter to use the where's our render settings because we set that as whole collection all we gonna do is going back into that blast collection and add a light I'm gonna add a point light go into my light settings make it red that can be pure red and turn this way up to five hundred or something look at that it already looks cool so let's hide our blasts now well we're in cycles those can be kind of hard to see but you got that now it's also go back into our cache and delete the bake bake it again look at that that looks pretty cool at least I think it does what's going on there let's go back into here let me see what's going on with this being a little weird I'm gonna delete the bake bake it again let's go into Evie and see there we go so this is one of the secondary advantages of using a light instead of the admission is that you can see it in Evie which means you can get a nice viewport preview of what your blasters are gonna do that's not enough light is it let's give it more light let's make this a ridiculous number let's make it like a thousand that's 110 enough said enough for you computer there you go look at that cool ass red murder lights I love it now you might notice sometimes that it's not quite hitting where you want it to so you can move that light along here and it'll change where it sort of you know is on that cylinder go back to our emitter delete the Bakke and look at it again looks pretty cool one thing I want to make sure I do I go to the cylinder under this little where this yellow square thing is and go to visibility and turn off shadow I think that helps to not block the light at all looks cool all right I love it let's turn off that collection again so that looks great so let's move on to rendering I'm gonna put my camera little control all zero look at that that's not even widescreen what am i doing amateur 1920 by eight one six or whatever you want to do doesn't matter and let's just lock the camera to this view so I can move it cool all right moving on to rendering I'm gonna use cycles to render this because I like cycles it lets me do motion blur all kinds of other cool things real quickly in here I'm gonna turn render region on some not wasting power of my computer all right so there we are now I like to turn on motion blur for blasters what that'll do is and if I open up the loops that's not what I wanted come on there we go and open up the image at a derp go under here to render result shift home to see the whole thing and let me just change some render settings here there's a lot of images in this thing so I like to use persistent images and save the buffers I don't know if that's the right settings or not but it seems to be fine I'm gonna leave this at 128 it doesn't really matter I'm just messing around here so if I do a render so that looks cool but you don't see the actual blaster the way you do in the viewport that's annoying I paid for a blaster so the reason for that is where your motion blur is positioned I find that if you put it on start on frame you're gonna have a better time uh-huh look at that looks cool right I love it all right I'm gonna set my the render resolution to 50% just because we don't have a lot of time here I'll turn to render region back on okay that looks rad right okay so I like to separate the blaster into a separate render layer from the rest of the ship so that I can control things like I'm gonna put a glow on it and I may want to control the intensity so what I'm gonna do here is I'm gonna call this layer x-wing and I'm gonna make a new collection call it blaster and then I'm just gonna hide that in this collection and then make a new one copy settings and call this well let me turn that to solid so it's not trying to render the whole time okay call this last stirrers and then turn this on and turn I like to put my lights like my scene lights like this sunlight that I have in here I put that into a collection so that if I want to I can just turn it off and that way we have these two layers one which is the okay real quick not that quick whenever you're ready there you go so we have our blasters and then we have our x-wing cool so when we hit render what we're gonna get in theory is that in we have our x-wing and then we have our blasters so with that in mind see now so we can switch between them blasters x-wing really cool right it's same just in case I'm going to close that guy up I'm gonna open up the compositor get rid of that guy it's nodes and shift home now you might be thinking why don't use a backdrop for this I don't like using a backdrop I'm like having nodes on top of my image it's really annoying to look at so I'd keep the render result over here and it's more the way I'm used to doing things like in nuke so speaking of nuke when I did this shot originally I did it in nuke nuke is where I'm most comfortable but you can easily do this stuff in the blender compositor it's just not how I did it so I'm gonna shifty this render layer like that blasters look you can see it right in there and I'm gonna put a mix and I'm just gonna mix this one in call it make it add so now it's adding that to that pretty cool right and then put a nice little glare I don't why they call it glare everybody else calls it glow you guys want blender calls it glare whatever gotta be weird blender make it fog glow let's make it high cuz we're ballers make it mine look at that that's cool I think that's cool maybe you don't think it's cool but I think it's cool look at this oops look at that guy pretty cool right I like it so that is just about everything for doing blasters um I want to show you one other cool thing let's go back to our 3d viewport if you would please there you go one little cool animation thing while we're here you want to give random movements to a spaceship for one thing forgot to do this let's grab our emitter and make it a child of the x-wing so that when it moves that moves with it we're gonna want to go into here and oh we didn't bake that okay if you had baked it you want to you want to delete that bake because now that it's parented to another object it's gonna need to be in a different position the whole time so let's go to our x-wing i'ma try this as quickly as I can because I don't want this tutorial to get long and boring oops my graph editor okay let's grab our x-wing let's make a I make a make a keyframe for location and rotation doesn't matter where it doesn't enter what you're not really using it for that you're just getting it in there so it shows up in the graph editor hit n go to modifiers go down to noise there we go actually make sure I select a specific axis so let's say Y location I think that's the one I want noise that a little bigger let's make it like 30 and 21 I don't really know what these numbers mean I just do them till they look right to my eye so actually I'm gonna go over to here and get myself out of the camera so that I can very quickly see what I'm doing that's not nearly enough strength let's make it one no that's not the axis I wanted at all okay let's try Z noise hey look at that it's going insane it's like on a bumpy road well that's not quite what we're after let's do 30 and point 1 and it's not quite enough 1 sure that'll work for our purposes so we see we get a nice little bobbing up and down motion as if the pilots kind of slightly compensating for spatial distortions I don't know uh so let's copy that and let's grab the let's say Y rotation don't know which ones which paste it oh look at that I'm gonna change the phase and maybe make that a little bit less make it like 0.5 maybe less than that 2005 mm-hmm there you go let's make a point too so you can see it so now real quickly you've got all you've done is make one keyframe set some parameters and you've got a nice little human error looking cool thing in here I'm gonna say before I mess something up yeah look at that you got blasters you got random motion going on I love it well I think that just about does it we made blasters in blender goodbye

Channel: Samuel Hall

Views: 16,623

Keywords: blender, 3d animation, star wars, blasters, rendering, compositing

Id: D3JpsHhiq6Y

Length: 23min 3sec (1383 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 27 2020