Transforming 2D icons using particles in Blender

welcome back to the part of your day where some stranger on the internet tells you what buttons to click on your computer today we're going to create a particle transition where you can morph from any 2D Vector icon to another so if you follow me on Instagram you know that I've been playing around with this for a few days now I think this effect is quite powerful quite easy to set up and I think it actually might have some interesting use cases [Music] so here we are in blender version 3.5 and we're going to start off by deleting everything and import an SVG where I like to find my svgs is feather icons.com these are simply beautiful open source icons these are amazing so here you can just pick whatever you want yeah let's do the thumbs up one and then oh it's a YouTube icon let's do YouTube as well so now we can go F4 import scalable vector graphics let's go to desktop and I'm just going to import thumbs up nothing happens but if you remove my stupid face you can see that up here we have a curve so let's delete the collection and let's rename this curve to thumbs now you can see that this is here so let's press a to select everything s to scale it up and now you can rotate this by 90 degrees on the x-axis and there is our thumb now this will be our particle emitter so let's go to um hang on where's the particle settings you can't really use a curve as a particle emitter so this is the one destructive thing that you have to do the emitter has to be a mesh so just right click click convert to mesh so now let's add a particle system so let's go to particle properties and let's click this little plus icon okay so now you have a particle system but you have many problems first of all why is it down here and second of all it's just one line it's going down there are many issues first of all let's turn off gravity so let's go to scene properties and let's disable gravity so now let's just go straight forward it's weird but and then let's change the frame end to one so now all the particles will spawn on frame one by the way throughout this video you're going to see me press Tab and then tab again and that's just a really fast way to reset the entire particle simulation you just select the emitter and you just go tab tab so now we have thousand particles in this space just going forward and we want them to last longer so let's change the lifetime from 50 to 250 but it's still moving forward so under velocity let's change the normal from 1 to 0 meters per second so now we have a particle standing still and now if you change the source of the particle emitter to be emit from faces to vertices you can see that we have tab tab we have our particle emitter here's a problem this is emitting based on vertices and we have an uneven placement of vertices you have a bunch here we have no one here so to clean this up simply select this line right click subdivide and then you can bring up this menu you can just make some value and you can take this one and subdivide that and then this one subdivide and then this one subdivide and then yeah and then press a to select everything and subdivide everything like 10 times and now you can see that there's still some uneven spacing here here we have like five and there we are like two this can be fixed with one button click and that is F4 preferences Loop tools these these are a lot of button clicks more than one at least under add-ons just search for Loop tools like this and enable that so now you can select everything right click Loop tools space and this just evenly it's sorts this out so the boring part is over now we have an even distribution of particles on our emitter let's do some simulation oh and we also want to save this so to simulate this we're gonna have to add some forces now when you press space we have done a lot of stuff to make sure that this just stands perfectly still so let's add a force field let's go shift a and let's add a force field turbulence and now when you press play you have turbulence I mean this is a cool effect by itself but the whole Magic here is to make this thumb icon behave like this for a little while and then snap into a different shape and now let's import the other model so let's go F4 import scalable vector graphics and let's go YouTube now if I turn off my stupid face again now you can see that we have two objects here and you can scale this up and now you can press Ctrl J to join this so now it's just one curve and let's call this YouTube and I want to delete this collection and let's uh line this up and now what I want to do is I want to turn this icon into a force field so luckily that's just one click under physics properties let's just click force field so now when you press play this doesn't really work and that's because you have to change the shape from point to curve and now let's just get rid of this turbulence force field for a moment because I just want to see how these interact together so now this looks really weird but we're on to something let's change the strength of the YouTube icon to -4 look at that now you can see where we're going with this we can see maybe some shapes and let's try and increase the flow look at that you see this this is the effect coming together now we're at the important part of this tutorial where we could together be tweaking these settings and having a lot of fun but the truth is this is a bit difficult to dial in on first try so I have just prepared some values that I know are really nice so I'm just going to save us all some time and then just tell you what are some good values for strength and flow with the current setup and scaling and the thing that we have right now so I want to start on frame 20 and I want to set both the strength and the flow to zero and I want to add keyframes to these values so holder Mouse over strength and press I and then hold your mouse overflow and press I so now we've added keyframes to both of this let's go to frame 40 and let's change the strength to four and let's change the flow to -10 and then press I and I again so now you can see this is going to look really weird because I forgot to make sure that the strength is -4 okay so I messed this up it's plus 10 flow and minus 10 strength I'm so glad I prepared these numbers okay so this looks slow and boring but this is this is a good thing okay so I want to split this in half you can also right click down here and go vertical split and I want to change this to graph editor press n to get rid of this menu and here's what we want to do on frame 60 we want to add a new keyframe for the strength we want the strength to be zero at frame 60. so basically it's going to look like this okay that's weird but here's where you can start tweaking this this bottom keyframe line can be pulled down like this and then you're increasing the strength of the force field and then by changing the position of this top keyframe you are changing the flow which I mean I could try and describe what the flow does but it's one of those things that you just have to play around with it and get a gut feeling on what it is it's basically some sort of drag in the air so let's move the flow over here a little bit and scale this up okay yeah we're getting this rubber effect you see that I like that so what's happening here is it we're turning on here we're at zero strength of the force field and then at frame 38 or something the strength of the force field is like -11 and then it goes back to zero while the flow is increasing why does this work I don't know I've spent hours trying to figure this out and these are the settings that worked don't ask me okay but now the problem with this animation see this it's such a geometric shape just being pulled right up there we want to spice things up we want to rip stuff apart so that they can Collide back together again so let's add another force field and the turbulence let's bring back the turbulence force field let's try and see what this looks like yeah we're on to something here we need to make a stronger turbulized force field let's try a strength of five yeah I don't want this to start just like out of nowhere I want the turbulence force field to start over here and then just move over here like that so now instead of animating the strength value of this force field the turbulence force field I want to just move it out of the way and then I want to use something called max distance you can increase it like this so now when you press play there's no force field but we can add a keyframe on its location so I to insert location keyframe and then let's move 30 frames and let's press G and X to move it over here on the x-axis and then press I to insert another keyframe and then location so now this will move over like that and it needs to be much stronger let's give it a strength of 15. see that now it's sort of it's moving through right and we can also increase the scale just a little bit you see this see this line here this thing that's because every frame the turbulence force field is affecting this on the same location so it's like all of these places are getting the same treatment with the turbulence force field but to get rid of this pattern you can enable global coordinates and now when you press play it's a lot more violent turbulence force field and also I don't want to have e-sync on this force field so let's just select the turbulence keyframes and press T and linear so now it will just linearly move over there and I want to lower the strength a little bit to maybe eight I'm still not super happy about this oh I feel like it's moving too slow let's try and speed up the simulation so let's select the particle emitter and let's go to particle properties and under physics and integration you can change this time step from 0.04 to 0.08 we're basically making it twice as fast yeah okay I can work with this so let's dial down the strength of the turbulence force field and let's actually change the size of the turbulence and this value is a little bit weird because when the size is set to zero that's the same as having the size set to 1. don't ask me how that works so let's set the size to 0.6 or something so it's almost half the size oh that's nice let's do uh 0.7 yeah and then let's make it move faster look at this I want to activate the YouTube force field a little bit earlier Let's uh press a to select it and move it on the x-axis yeah that's cool okay so now I'm going to address a problem that is a little bit Advanced of a concept that I'm going to try anyways you see all these vertices that are placing these particles if you go to the scene statistics down here you can see that this thumb is 2 300 versus so the problem is if we in our particle system set our particle number to 10 000. there are going to be more particles than there are vertices on this object so that means that there are going to be particles with the exact same positional data and the problem with that is that this turbulence force field is affecting them based on where they currently are so if they have the exact same position it's very often that they just they never get ripped apart but there is one feature that seems to be communicating with the some Quantum level special thing in the particles and that is in the physics properties you can increase the noise amount this seemed to communicate on a higher level or something I don't know I don't even know how this works but I've been tweaking these sliders a lot and I just I just want someone to talk to about it ah that sounds so lonely so let's try and set the noise amount to two that doesn't really do that much maybe let's set the noise amount to five yeah this is basically like pure randomness yeah that's cool yeah I like this so now we have this animation where a thumb is turning into a YouTube icon but what's really really cool about this workflow is that now we can head back over to the icon website and we can scroll down and we can find uh oh this is going to be perfect let's do the Bell icon so now let's go F4 import SVG and let's go Bell you can probably guess where this is going scale it up you can rotate it so now how do we transition this icon animation into hitting the Bell it's quite easy actually so let's select the bell and let's go to physics properties and let's make this into a force field as well and now you want to go to the first frame of animation and you want to insert keyframes so let's press I on strength and I on Flow and here's the deal once you have inserted keyframes on this channel now you can copy keyframes from the other ones so let's go to the YouTube and now let's select all the keyframes here by pressing a and then Ctrl C and then I'll select the bell and go Ctrl V so now you can press G and x and move this further away so the YouTube ends on frame 51 and then this starts on frame oh and one thing that I forgot to do before duplicating these keyframes hang on let me delete this is to select the YouTube keyframes and on the last frame you have to add new keyframes that have a value of zero so on frame 53 I'm going to set the flow back to zero so now here are what the YouTube keyframes look like they start at zero and they do the thing and they end up at zero with this hard transition here at the end and this is important because that means that the YouTube force field won't be interacting when the bell force field enables so let's add new keyframes to the Bell force field doesn't matter what this value are and select the YouTube select everything Ctrl C make sure you're in the first frame go to the bell and Ctrl V and now you can move this over so it starts after okay now let's see if that worked that didn't work because we forgot to set the Bell to curve so now let's try again okay nice the Bell icon is a bad icon because it has like this weird lines so it will almost always end up being like not complete because the particles are sliding around and yeah it's a little bit weird yeah we want to mess this up again so right before this activates we want to take the force field I and insert location and we want to move this over to the other side again okay so now you can see at the end of this yeah there's a gap here okay now here's the sad part of this tutorial I haven't yet figured out a super reliable way to make sure that there are never places like this so what I often end up doing is I select the force field and maybe you can change the seed and then you can just instantly do another stimulation because that just it's basically real time so yeah now it's a little bit better right and then you can select the particle emitter the thumb and then you can go to particle properties and you can maybe increase the amount of particles so instead of ten thousand let's do 50 000 we can also it sometimes it also helps to increase the noise amount maybe we can do a new seed like that yeah that works so now if I set my viewport to render view I'm working in Cycles by the way and I'm turning off the overlays you can't really see anything and that's because we only have a particle system we have not yet assigned a 3D model to be one of these particles so for this object I want to use a sphere so let's go shift a and let's add a icosphere and I want to right click set the shading to smooth and I want to press f2 and I want to rename this to particle so now if you set this to render view we can see the particle and that's actually a problem we don't want to see this particle in our final render we want to see the instant version of it we don't want to see this original so let's press M for move to new collection and let's make a new collection and call this particle object yeah it doesn't really matter what this is called now what you want to do you want to go to material properties and you want to give this particle a new material and I want to call this particle material and you can set the surface to emission now to hide this particle from the final render go to the outliner and let's disable this camera so now it will not show up in the render View and I also like to just disable it completely so we don't accidentally do stuff to it so now you can select your particle emitter again and even if you will not see the emitter I like to assign the particle material to the emitter because it's much easier to access it here than to open that hidden collection all the time but we're still just seeing these particles so let's go to the particle properties and let's go down to render and instead of render as Halo let's set it to render's object and let's set instance object to particle so now you can see we have some particles which are hidden because we haven't really oh yeah this is a big problem with Banner 3.5 look at this it just says updating lights and it just tests this forever okay so to fix this is that for some reason you have to go to render properties and under lights you have to enable light tree don't ask me why that just does it for some reason now it's much faster now we have our particles visible in the viewport but one thing that I don't like about this is that these are all placed the same you want to add some Randomness to this so let's go back to particle properties and let's enable rotation and then you can randomize the rotation like this and then you can also scroll down to scale and you can increase the scale Randomness if you want a little bit of a random scale now you can see the particles in the render view so let's add some shading to this so let's set this editor type to Shader editor and first of all make sure you're in Cycles because we're going to use a node called particle info node and this particle info node has a bunch of cool attributes that we can get from the particle system so for example you can do random and then every particle will have a random value and you can have age and index and a bunch of cool stuff and what we are going to use is the velocity attribute so let's just click and drag this into the color and now you can see that these are vector data of the Velocity but I think this looks a little bit weird so let's go shift a converter separate XYZ and now we've got the X Y and Z values so I can just use a math add adding all these together and then adding these together and you want to make sure you have clamping enabled so you don't have any negative values and then you can hold down control and let's change this to the strength instead okay so now the more velocity each particle has the brighter they will light up which I think is a really cool effect and quite technically we're not doing this completely correct because there are some negative values here that are being forgotten but I think this looks quite cool so I'm going to keep it like this and now to make things a little bit easier going forward we're going to bake the particle system just so it's saved how long does this last it's a hundred frames yeah let's do 100 frames so let's go to the particle properties cache and let's set the end frame to 100 and then I want to click bake so now our particle system is saved okay so now let's make this a little bit more interesting I want to add some color so this is the velocity which controls the strength and I'm going to input an RGB node this I don't want to increase the strength a little bit more so let's just duplicate this and let's set it to multiply by five so now you can give this a spicy color which is uh let's try this and now I don't really like that these particles are just completely pitch black when there's no light on them so I want to use an add Shader Shader add and I want to just give it a diffuse material look at this now the particles are lighting up these ones I think this looks really cool and I want to lower the world background to for now okay yeah so this is looking really cool already I think I want to render this out so let's make a camera shift a camera and let's press Ctrl alt nump at zero to make sure that we're viewing this from the camera view and to move the camera further back press G and then Z two times yeah I think that's cool hang on why aren't we why aren't they going pitch black they should be doing that perhaps we need to make the particle simulation longer yeah let's um set the end frame to 130 and let's just bake again and maybe this will help nope still a weird color okay well I'll just manually keyframe it black then so it stops right here and now let's insert keyframe on the multiply and then let's go to frame 100 and then just turn it off yeah that's cool so I'll just view this from the camera view and I want to add a light so let's go shift a and let's add an area light let's place this above like this and let's make it a little bit bigger let's view this from the camera by pressing nump at zero let's set the light power to 40 Watts now to add some depth of field just right click depth of field distance set it to there and then click depth of field and I want to use really narrow like 0.05 yeah that's cool okay maybe we should add like a background yeah let's add a gradient background I always do this okay that's the smooth gradient and let's lower the strength 0.1 okay nice now I want to add some little bit of glow to this let's go to the compositor and enable use nodes backdrop and I'm just going to use the same node setup I always use and now let's do a render and we should get motion blur as well yeah this is looking really cool already okay so let me just do the final render in a low quality I'm going to render straight to video because I'm impatient straight to MP4 let's do 256 samples and under performance performance persist data Ctrl F12 and let's try it so while we're rendering if you like you can check out my patreon this is the most popular one because you get access to all my project files and this thing is pretty cool if you thought this video was a little bit fast a little bit too conceptual I am making a longer more comprehensive probably more boring video on the second Channel but it will cover all the steps and it will answer your questions and it will also explore some other ideas and Concepts that I think are a little bit more interesting so that's it now I'm going to show you the final result as well as some of the concepts I've been working on When developing this technique thanks for watching see you later [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Applause]

Channel: Polyfjord

Views: 119,650

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Id: TInZfwRIgKg

Length: 22min 10sec (1330 seconds)

Published: Fri May 12 2023