THIS WILL CHANGE HOW YOU USE BLENDER

so about a year ago I made this video here called God's Chariot it's just a short little mograph piece but in this video I did this simulation using ropes and if any of you have tried to do rope Sims and blender before uh you know that they're basically impossible without using a third-party add-on or something of that nature it's really hard to get good rope Sims and blender and I was like damn okay maybe I can make a tutorial on this this week and I started working it out and doing the tutorial again kind of learning how I did it but I basically realized that my tutorial would have been no different from the blender Secrets tutorial I would have had nothing new to offer and even though I've referenced a lot of tutorials in like the last few videos I've made I have no desire to steal other people's videos I if I don't have anything to offer the video I'm not going to make it right so I kind of scrap that put it on the back burner worked on a few other things until it hit me that the technique used in this video can kind of be used on anything and with a couple of tweaks to how blender Secrets performed this I was able to get basically anything to have soft body physics and if you know anything about soft body physics you know that they suck they're really not fun to work with so when I found this I was super stoked like okay there's a way to work with soft bodies consistently with more dense meshes and like it's just it's free it's not super intensive and you can use it on basically anything from what I've experienced so far so let's get started now we're gonna start off with something fairly basic a kind of simple shape that I used in that video which is a helix and first things first we're gonna do is we're gonna come to edit and then preferences go to add-ons and we're going to enable extra curve extra objects and extra add mesh extra objects um just have both of these on there they're super useful we're only gonna be using the curve today but I use both of them all the time so we're going to open up our little menu here and we're gonna come down to curve profiles and we're going to select Helix 3D now yours on default isn't going to look like this uh this will be set to 360 your entangle value go ahead and set that to 900 to get this shape here everything else you can just leave default for now we're gonna exit edit mode and we're going to come down here to our curve property section we're going to drop down our geometry Tab and we're going to come down here to our depth and we're going to change that to something maybe like this so once we have this up we are basically done with the curve for now we're going to come down here to convert and convert to mesh now you can see that we've got some some fairly light geometry going on but if we were to try to run just a a regular soft body Sim on this it would still take a while to calculate because softbody wants as little geometry as possible but we don't have to worry about that so what we're going to do here is we're going to press a to select everything and we're going to come up here to mesh under mesh we're going to click extrude and then extrude individual faces so we have something that looks kind of like this then we're going to press alt s and we are going to scale these ends in just a little bit so that we've got like these kind of they're almost like triangles these trapezoid shapes just so that they're coming outward like that and now you can see we've got the basic for our like scaly kind of snake shape going on so now that we've got this set up we are actually going to come back to our curve and under our curve profiles we're going to spawn in the exact same Helix 3D our settings should be exactly the same so everything should line up and with this selected if we come back into our curve profile and under our depth what we're going to want to do is extend this till it covers every single edge that is available on our original mesh now what we're going to be doing here is we're going to be using this outer curve kind of as a proxy mesh to simulate on so you really want to make sure that everything is covered if a vertices for my original mesh isn't covered the simulation won't work so with this one only one other thing that we're going to do right now is we're going to click fill caps so that it closes our end pieces there and then we are going to convert to mesh now our outer layer we're just going to call outer and our inner layer we're going to call Inner very simple we're going to do is we're going to select both of these and we're going to move them up just a little bit and we are going to spawn in a plane scale it up as big as it needs to be however big you want really doesn't really matter then with our outer layer selected we're going to come down here and we're going to select cloth and we're going to be doing the the basic cheat sheet which is soft body sucks so we use cloth Sims with pressure right everybody knows about this everybody's been doing it for years and for the most part you can get away with this kind of a thing unless you are working with a mesh that is super dense super weird like inflating this would be so hard it would not look right so we're gonna inflate our proxy mesh instead we're going to turn on our pressure there and we're gonna set this maybe to one to start and I actually I found this recently that if you set your vertex mask to something like one as an initial thing and here's like our basic scaling here just you see this as well and then you come down to Shear set this to zero bending to zero and then you do that under dampening for both of those as well you get a much more like jelly like uh soft body kind of simulation instead of just like a bouncy cloth I think it looks much more like soft body with those settings changed so now if we scroll down to collisions we're going to turn this base value up to 10 and our distance to zero we're going to enable self collisions turn off our friction and turn that distance to zero as well now with our plane make sure we throw a collision on and we don't really have to change any settings here you might want to turn up the stickiness value if you want but that's about all you got to do so we're gonna go ahead and click play and we're going to see that our end caps fly away I forgot that this happened so how can we fix this is actually pretty easy we just go into edit mode and we select these faces here and we're going to replace them delete the faces then go into Edge select mode alt click and then press F and you'll get a new face there do that with both the top and bottom faces I completely forgot that those are not connected meshes when you do this with curves something additionally that you can do is alt select both of these so that we've got both faces selected and just bevel them a little bit sometimes it can help with a little bit of the the kind of simulation that's going on here I'm actually I'm going to go one step further as well and I'm going to add a couple of loop Cuts in here by pressing I and not a ton just some to kind of match the the general geometry of our outside that way this like end piece when it's being simulated also has some kind of a like floppiness to it a little bit of jelly-like action and now if we press play those will not disappear we can see that our pressure is way too low but we've got some soft body stuff going on here so if we come back in here to our cloth physics we can tell that because we turned our vertex mask up to get more of that jelly like feel to it we're also going to have to increase our pressure from one so what I found works pretty decently is 10 to this to 10 you're going to get very similar looking results to a soft body so now that we've got this kind of setup let's do a quick bake up to maybe like 200 just so we have enough frames to work with and this bake should be basically nothing it's going to be very very quick and we're going to come up here to our inner layer and turn this guy back on we're going to come to our modifiers Tab and this is where the magic happens I've known about this for a while in the VFX world but I never thought about it from Motion Graphics and that is the mesh to format on and what the master form add-on allows you to do is take one mesh that is very low poly and use it as a proxy mesh for something that is higher in density it allows you to get away with these kind of complex simulations without actually having to run the simulation now it is a little bit more inaccurate you would definitely have a more accurate simulation if you were able to run the soft body on the original mesh right but sometimes you don't need all of those specific accuracies so if we were to come down here to the modifier and select our outer layer leave our Precision at five for now cranking this up by the way can really really increase the time that's going to take to bind I found that five works fine six is okay anything more than six is going to take a very long time to bind and it also does not improve the simulation that much in my opinion so with that set we're just going to go ahead and click bind now that bind is going to take a couple of seconds but it really should not be very long at all once you have it set to bind you can go ahead and click play and you can see that we have got this faux soft body simulation happening on a relatively high density mesh for something like this it also enables us to have a hollow mesh with the kind of like density and buoyancy of something that is inflated so it doesn't have to be sealed anymore and it acts like it is it acts like a balloon or something it holds its shape is kind of what I was looking for there could not find the words but from there of course we we throw our good friend subdivision surface on this with the sub Devon we've got this kind of like bumpy abstract snake-like shape and even with the subdiv set to two we are still playing in real time without ever actually having to Cache any of the data for this mesh and I don't know about you guys but when I stumbled upon this I thought this was so sick it's like it will actually change how I do some cloth Sims going forward I will just be using this method because it's so not intensive it's so free and if I need to change things I can run the the cache again on my outer layer which we saw takes maybe a minute and then update it rebind and we're fine little things like this I wish I had known about so much sooner but for now let's get to work on making this look a little bit better we're gonna throw a solidify modifier on this we're going to put it above our subdivision surface with this update on we're actually going to set it fairly low we don't want a ton of thickness we just want a little bit so that when if we have the camera positioned in a way that it can see into this entrance it's not just like an absence of mesh also for the final render I'll probably turn the subdiv up to three or four um just so we can get rid of a little bit more of this kind of bump that's going on here but I don't think we need to have it this High while we're working on it so with this basically set up let's get to work on the Shader which is fairly simple so first things first we are going to change the outer layer to kind of like a dark gray somewhere in like this vicinity and we are going to play with our Sub Surf we're only going to use a tiny tiny bit we're actually going to set it to .009 this is the the value that I used in my original render I'm just going to kind of copy it from there and everything in our subsurface radius we're going to change to one now what this does is it kind of cancels out all colors that are being reflected back so instead of getting like a red as you would get if you know you were to stick a flashlight to your hand and you could see the red under your skin you're going to get the same color as your skin being illuminated underneath and what that means is it's just going to show the subsurf but we're not actually going to have a change in color with that set up we are going to turn our roughness all the way down and we're actually going to increase our clear coat to something like this it doesn't make a huge difference but I find that during the actual render it makes it feel like it's got a little bit more of a wet coating which I guess hence the term clear coat I'm very smart now I'd like to think you guys know me pretty well at this point and it's time for the classic we are going to be throwing my glass Shader in here which is available for free both in my Discord and on my gumroad we're gonna drop in a mix Shader not a mix RGB but a mix Shader and we're going to plug this in here we're actually going to plug this one into the bottom and our glass Shader into the top I'm going to disconnect this for the moment just so we're not wasting uh like CPU power on it right drop in a color ramp a wave texture this is actually a very similar material setup to my differential growth video and we are going to connect these uh the texture coordinate and the mapping with the nov Wrangler add-on that's just Ctrl T by the way I don't know if the screencast picked that up but we're going to plug this in here and our color into our factor and then this into our surface output now you can see we've already got some really cool stuff going on here with this NYX Shader I really love mixing these kinds of materials together they just look so clean but now for the time of the video where I read off numbers like a robot for all of our values here they go as follows 8.4 6.1 15 negative 2.1 0.085 and 5. and now you can see that we've got like the mixture of this the the noise of the wave texture in here and they're mixing together but we want more black than we do glass or at least I do so we're going to move this in just a little bit and then we're going to drag our white here almost all the way down so one more thing that we're going to do is we're going to open up my custom glass Shader by clicking on it and pressing Tab and we're going to change our colors around a little bit this top color we're going to want something to be more in the orange range we're kind of going like almost CMYK values for this uh they're just colors that I find more pleasant to look at we can leave our green alone for the most part because we're going to be using uh like green dominant colors and we're going to take our blue and we're gonna go slightly into the purple almost like a like a a slightly darker Violet I guess is what you would call that and with this you'll see that we have a kind of a green dominant look we're also going to crank up our roughness because I don't want the glass to be 100 see-through I think that that kind of like breaks up some of the realism sometimes unless you are working on something like a glass vase we're making abstract things here so realism doesn't really matter but you know that's what I like so we're going to move this up to somewhere in this value like 5.76 somewhere between those is probably good and we're going to change our ior to 0.75 and leave our value at one so yeah that's pretty much the basic effect here I'm made a couple of changes I set up some basic lighting you know the only thing that I really changed about the object was I played around with the color ramp and moved some of these around as I didn't quite like how the texture was falling I also plugged object into Vector if yours wasn't already there mine defaulted the generated uh which is fine but I wanted to play around and I found that object looked the best you can also come through and play around in the values with your wave texture also if you don't like the colors come in here drag them around have some fun because you could really go crazy with like what this looks like and instantly dragging these down here this is a very cool color combo the blues the pinks the yellow this is very CMYK but yeah that is the basic effect the the mesh D4 modifier is super powerful and I knew about it in the VFX world you know when you want to do like some kind of like soft bodies for Faces Sometimes they do this kind of thing but I never thought about just like using it outright to replace soft body and mograph and it's kind of Genius so shout out the blender Secrets Channel because not only are they amazing at what they do but also they upload constantly and it's always packed full of information that I didn't know and I wish I did know the the people that run this are very smart and they're very good at what they do and without them I definitely would not have been able to make this animation now if you're interested the project file for what we made here in the tutorial will be available down in the description below there will also be a breakdown on each one of these scenes available on my patreon I do want to say one thing here at the end though unfortunately I've been having some issues with people uh like downloading my project file and they can't get the same results to happen in their file and I think that this is an issue with alembic files when I'm opening them up on my end my computer can find the alembic file because it is there but yours cannot find it because it isn't there and I didn't know this prior to finding out about it you know in the last week or so but alembic files cannot be embedded inside of a blend file I did not realize how big alembic files can be so for some of these projects the Olympic files have been huge and I've tried to find a way to upload them but I cannot find a site that will host them for free without giving up information if I say that a project file is free I want you guys to be able to get it for free not have to pay the dollar to see my project file that's stupid but I also don't want to have to attach it to something that has my real name on it there's just that level of like privacy there between you guys and me and for both your sake and mine I'd like to keep it that way yeah basically I don't know what to do about that anymore and I'm really sorry that I kind of like baited people into being like hey I have this project file for free I didn't know that that's how it was going to work and I'm sorry about that for some people it does seem to be working for some reason I don't know how that's working either it's very confusing to me some people say it's working fine and some people are saying it's not and I don't really know what to do about it anymore so I'm just not going to upload project files with Olympics in them anymore um I'm sorry but I think that's just like the way to go maybe again everything that I make and show on this channel will be available for free in my Discord if you want to get your hands on it anyway sorry for that really long-winded thing here at the end of the video but I wanted to say something about it instead of just being radio silent thank you so much for watching this video thank you for all of the support and thank you to all of my patrons who have been helping me make this possible and help me pursue this as maybe something that could be a job one day I don't know it's not what I do now but it would be cool to do it eventually maybe anyways and often your time's been taken up thank you so much for watching hope you have a wonderful day and I'll see you guys again real soon

Channel: atti

Views: 87,258

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: qa3QXnyWd_0

Length: 16min 1sec (961 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 22 2023