This FREE Blender Addon Is Crazy

hey so in this week of further exploring what is and isn't possible within blender I discovered a new add-on that I really want to share with you guys and kind of talk about because I think it's super cool it's also free um it is this add-on I found it from this video here by Alpha magenta uh came out about a year ago which is I believe around the time the add-on got released it's called differential growth data was made by this man right here Boris and I'm not gonna say his last name because there's no way I say that right um I believe he's just a one-man team working on this so the differential growth add-on actually mimics cell growth in real life and I'll maybe try to break that down a little bit later um but this is It's a super cool very unique uh type of add-on and it's one of those things where I think the use cases for this are only as limited as you make it I was able to use it here in this animation uh as the kind of Flowery growth in the background by the way the breakdown for this whole video is on my patreon link in the description down below we can talk about that more towards the end of the video but I've wasted enough of your time let's get into this so first thing you want to do you're going to want to go to the GitHub page which I'll have linked down in the description and you're going to download the source code you're going to run and install it you know edit preferences add-ons just like you would install any other add-on and then we're going to start with our base mesh we could start with really any base mesh however this add-on really only functions best when it's manipulating edges so if we were to take this Cube and then inset here we have these edges along the outside if we select all of those and go over to our vertex group select assign make a new vertex group for them right now we can start to manipulate just this with just this plane we can actually create the the basics for a lot of effects if You tab over into your object properties menu you will see that the differential growth add-on is in here it functions more like a script something I'd recommend is if you haven't already come over here to your settings to your system and make your undo steps 256. it's a very helpful tip from the tutorial that I showed at the very beginning of the video and you'll see that as we click differential growth step down here we are running the script each time we click it so we'll see subtle growth and as we kind of spam this we could see that it starts to manipulate and after a certain point you can see that it starts to take off in other directions and it's subdividing and splitting and we're getting this like very organic weird looking shape now if we control Z all the way back to where we were before I can kind of break down some of these uh settings on the side over here now I'll start with the very first one we have our split radius our split radius is kind of a limit on how big of an angle can be between two edges before it splits them and Subs divide subdivides them so while you're growing if we switch over to wireframe mode here and we start spamming this you can see that these are growing in like in line with each other but at a certain point they start to split away from each other and that's because they exceed this split radius so if we were to take this and Mark it to say 0.25 it's going to start splitting at a much smaller radius and we get much more geometry going on right now personally I wouldn't recommend this till we start getting to the end of our shape but this is something you could do from the get-go and you can kind of let it do its thing and you do get some really kind of a corally looking effects here let's go ahead and control Z back to our default area so while we're still in wireframe view here if we look now we've got our repulsion radius and what this is is how far away our steps are going to grow each time we run this uh this step so if we change this from its default one to like 0.25 and run this you can see that we've got substantially less growth happening next we've got our step size and this is going to be how much it grows on each time we run this little bit of code if we crank it up and then run it you can see that it can really go crazy that one's definitely very situational on when you want to adjust that I find that the the 0.1 like default uh number there works pretty good next we have our forces we have our attraction factor which is pretty simple when you run your step it's how attracted to itself the object is repulsion is the exact opposite how far it's going to push each other away the noise is going to be you know how how Jagged how how kind of displaced the mesh is going to be when it forms our noise scale is how big that displacement is going to be and our seed just changes our scene but something else cool in here is our growth Direction Factor so if we were to spawn in say a sphere an icosphere whatever it doesn't really matter as long as it's an object we can then take our little eyedropper tool select our icosphere and set this to one and maybe like 0.5 for our pulsion radius and then our growth Direction Factor if we set this to like two maybe you'll see as we click this we're actually growing towards our sphere and the more you click the more it's going to go up there you're gonna get the same kind of subdivisions you know we've got it set very uh low right now so a little mesh but yeah the object will grow towards another object the only things that I'm not so sure on are our base factor and our shell Factor after a couple days of playing and reading up on this I just wasn't able to find out a ton of information so for the most part I've just left them alone but yeah now that we've gone over the basics of how the add-on actually works let's go through and make something with it um we're gonna go over how I made what is in the thumbnail for this video now how I did that was with a circle and then I went into edit mode I pressed e s 0 to bring our faces into the center then you can just right click wireframe select this m and then at Center oh um but make sure that you're in the vertices selection mode not Edge selection mode otherwise your sphere is just going to disappear um so yeah at Center and now we've got uh I forget the word for this for the life of me I can't remember what this is called but we're going to select our outer layer here and we're going to extrude up and then we're going to scale out and this outer layer now is going to be what we select for our vertex group so again just select assign and then with all default settings again just kind of Let It Go Crazy for a little bit you could really just keep spamming this for like a very long time before you start to get to what you're seeing so yeah for this one we're gonna do the same thing we're going to leave the basic settings we're going to drop this down to 0.5 and then this one down to 0.25 run a few more steps here until we're almost touching you really don't want them like interacting with each other it kind of breaks the immersion in my opinion so get them close but not touching or intersecting if they are you can play with your attraction your repulsion you can control z a few times you know mess around with some of the settings here and for our last actual to drop these down to point one again until we can get those little fine details in here and now we've got these like weird again like leafy corally underwater type thing now same steps as before we're gonna throw a solidify on it and then throw a subdiv when you either solidify play with the direction that you want it to go because the mesh is so close together there's going to be clipping here and there with it so choose the direction that causes the least amount of clipping without disrupting your shape so now we have our subdiv on and we've got a pretty similar shape going on to what was in our thumbnail so let's set up a basic scene real quick I've not shown this I don't think but to make these little backgrounds that I do it's very simple you drop in a plane you throw a little Loop cut here you know Center it wherever you want it doesn't really matter because you can kind of readjust it drag this end up here select this Edge and then just bevel it and now you've got this like shaded backdrop that you would see in like a photography studio or on a film set there's a word for what this is I don't remember what it is it's been a long time since I was in school I also haven't really shown my my default lighting setup at all uh or at least I haven't explained it I generally like to use area lights um because you can control how harsh and how soft they are very easily I like to do one side light and kind of crank this up depending on the scale of our object here that's super important we're fairly large so we're probably going to be somewhere around like the 1500 Mark there and then we're going to duplicate this kind of make this more of a flat light we're going to place this just slightly off to the side that has our main light on it and you get this kind of like newer style of like advertising lighting you'll see this type of lighting a lot in like newer Tech commercials and things we're gonna set our camera to something like a hundred millimeter something that's got like very close up you know feel to it very very claustrophobic I guess and throw in rendered View and we can see that our lighting is about normal we might have to play with it a little bit you know drag this forward maybe play with our angles depends on our mesh and where our shadows are falling I'm also going to make this top light a little bit bigger and a little bit brighter maybe something like 2500 just so it's a little bit more washed out along the tops there but we're keeping some of our inner Shadows all right so next we are going to work on our Shader for this Shader on this isn't super complicated but I did play around with it a little bit I went through a lot of of variations with this during the testing for this I played with so many different combinations of shape and light and color and putting it on certain objects there there's a ton of possibilities all right so first things first we're gonna drop in a color ramp up here and we're going to connect this to our mapping node get rid of that image texture we do not need it but we are going to drop a noise texture there and then we're going to plug our color ramp into our output here all right so let's play around with our colors first actually and we're gonna do with some pastels I think I've been really feeling like pinks and oranges lately so we're going to start with that so you can see that we're just kind of like we have this like mix going on right now if we switch over into our material view we might be able to see a little bit better where our noises actually interacting we actually probably crank this up or down a little bit oh we're also we're plugged into UV we need to be plugged into generated that's my bad um default sometimes UV I'm not sure what makes that happen usually if it doesn't have a UV it won't default to that but sometimes it does so you can see we've got our noise kind of moving around in our object here which is only making a slight difference but that's fine for the moment we're going to add in some more colors here maybe like a a red here and now you can see this is definitely making like a very big difference um maybe in between these we had like a yellow but like maybe even like more like of a yellow orange and then here at the end maybe like a a light blue now here you can kind of play with your noise values until you get something that you like in the original I was at uh like 5.600 and then like negative 17 negative 20 maybe I'm not exactly sure what the exact were for this right now negative 17. it doesn't look as good on this object so I'm actually going to change it up uh maybe something like this I I quite I don't quite like how like small that is I don't want to be a bit bigger like this maybe so then we're going to come over we're gonna turn our sub surf up and we're gonna play with our Sub Surf radius now if you don't know the way that light penetrates an object is what's causing your subsurf in an object and these values are Roy G Biv your RGB what is being bounced back at the camera right so typically something good to keep in mind is that it bounces back the opposite color of what you're putting in so if our surface of our object is red the light that's going to be reflected back at us is going to be a blue color so we're going to play with these values till we hit something that we like sometimes it's definitely better to do this in rendered mode you get a more accurate representation of it um I typically like to kind of crank the first one when I'm doing warmer colors and then the second one always brings out like an egregious amount of yellow so if you're going to use it I would go light with it and then maybe we bring in some of this like pink and blue I kind of I'm kind of feeling I know we just set everything up with warm colors and now we're immediately going towards like colder tones but I kind of like it so yeah something like this is where I'm sitting right now it might be different for your object depending on you know what you've done with it um we're gonna lower our roughness just a little bit it's you know somewhere about a quarter of the way through and then we are gonna actually we're gonna just snag this noise texture from up here and we're gonna drop in a bump we're gonna go color to height and then normal to normal switch back over to material mode so we can view this just a little bit easier and now we're going to crank this all the way up so like 110 is probably a good value somewhere in there and we're gonna play with our roughness and our detail change our roughness all the way to one and then our Distortion we're gonna turn up a little bit more but not too high because you start to lose some of the detail and if you're using denoiser it'll kind of get eaten up a little bit anyways something that almost looks like skin is what I'm kind of going for here like a little bit like swirly skin I guess from there we're gonna paste in my custom glass Shader which by the way can be found in the description Down Below in my Discord it wasn't my gumroad but gumroad keeps removing my project files I'm not sure why I'll talk about it a little bit more at the end of the video but yes the Shader is available for free in my Discord now what we're going to do is we're going to snag these guys here and we are going to plug these into a mix Shader we're gonna plug both of these guys into our Shader and then our color into our factor and then our Shader into our surface now give it a second it's going to kind of lag for a minute loading in this Shader um what we're going to want to do once it is loaded in is dropping a color amp right here and we're gonna try to find our line where they are mixing at which I'd say right there looks pretty solid and now we can play with our noise scale here and we can kind of change where it's going to be glass and where it's going to be our kind of sub-surfy plant material I don't want too much glass I just kind of want a hint of it so maybe even towards where we were when it first came in would be nice switch over to rendered mode and see what we're looking like right now I want a little bit more glass than this so let's move around our values here and see if we can bring out some more glass it's definitely more glass there okay so we're gonna open up this node group and in here are our three colors and we can kind of manipulate these to fit our colors a little bit better so let's change uh maybe the blue let's go more towards like a purple somewhere in here a lot that's very like fiery so maybe we don't go quite there we go to like this kind of like in between yellow and green and then we change our green value to something more in line with where we are something like that and as you can see it's very very noisy already we kind of play around with our bottom value too if we want to we can even we can kind of go a more Clear Tone we can go more red whatever you're really feeling this is just changing our fraction of our glass which does make it less realistic but we're not going for something that's based in our reality I don't think I've rendered a little preview image here and I honestly I think it's fine I think this looks pretty good um we can play with our lighting a little bit I think some spots are a little too flat some spots are definitely being hit too hard by the side light but overall I think it's like a good place to start from there you just drag it into your editing software of choice whether it's Photoshop or Lightroom or after effects and you you play with your colors you play with your noise and you end up with this render that is so free so I just wanted to say thank you to Boris again here at the very end for making a wonderful free add-on that is super accessible and allows people to you know kind of continue creating this generative art style within blender it's Super Rad um again it is linked down in the description below so please go check it out speaking of making things more accessible for people that want to create I'm going to be no longer using my gumroad I'm not sure what the issue is but last week when I uploaded They removed my project files and I had to put them back up again um they removed like the files within them but the project file itself stayed public so I was getting DMS saying hey there's nothing in this there's nothing to download I'm not sure why this is happening but I don't want it to happen again so going forward for all the videos that I make the project files will be available in my Discord down below and those project files will always be free if I'm making a tutorial on something you can always have the project file however I am kind of trying something new I opened up a patreon page and by no means do I expect anybody to go through and pay for this if you would like to that would be awesome and it would help me a lot kind of pursue this I'm not sure that YouTube is something that I'll pursue full time as I have a full-time job and other engagements but this could help lead towards a road where that's possible and that sounds fun so on my patreon you can find extra things each week whether that's new project files or just kind of like a basic tutorial or whole new things there will also be a breakdown of this video that I put on my Twitter yesterday where I'm gonna upload a four-part series just breaking down each and every seen so that it's readily available project files will be available on my patreon just stuff like that sorry I don't want to talk a year off about giving me money but yeah thank you to Alpha magenta for making the initial video on differential growth and I'm realizing while editing this that Alpha magenta is boris's YouTube channel so thank you to Boris for making this kind of funny that I never noticed that but uh yeah thank you guys so much for watching I hope that I was able to help you kind of learn something from this and I will see you guys again real soon

Channel: atti

Views: 176,653

Keywords: Editing, animation, #3d, #blender, #render, #b3d, #abstract, #scifiart, #surreal, #3dart, #design, #mdcommunity, #renderzone, #illustration, #adobe, #graphicdesign, #artdirection, #octanerender, #behance, #styleframe, #motiondesign, #motiongraphics, #houdini, #satifying

Id: x1wZtN_GSk0

Length: 16min 52sec (1012 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 15 2023