Tutorial: Anime style Smoke & Explosion FX

hi i'm kristoff and today we're going to have a look at an easy way to make anime style smoke and explosion effects in blender once you get the hang of it this method is quite easy to use and it's easy to animate as well i use the smoke in this tutorial to make an explosion for this evangelion scene and i was able to do it in just minutes so without further ado let's get started and dive into blender all right let's start a new blend file delete the camera delete the cube we are going to add a mesh ico sphere let's go to the modifier properties and let's add a subdivision surface modifier and let's set levels to 3 for both the viewport and the render we're also going to set object shade smooth next up we're going to add a displacement modifier set the strength to minus 0.5 and now we are going to add a new texture and to edit the texture you can click on this little icon in the corner we're going to set the type to voronoi set the distance metric to distance squared and this is going to create a more round effect and now we can play around with the size and this seems about right for me and that's basically it for our small puff of smoke we're going to create a more detailed puff of smoke so let's select it and copy paste it let's go to our modifiers and we're going to edit the texture i'm going to set the size to 1 and for the strength i'm going to set it to something like minus 2.3 and then we are going to add a second displacement modifier we are also going to add another layer of subdivision so set it to 4 and then create a new texture for our second subdivision we're already going to set the strength to minus 4.4 and then let's go into the show texture in texture tab and let's resize it and this is going to create all these small bubbles this is a setting that i quite like i'm gonna go with this now when we copy pasted the puff of smoke the control for our large displacement uh got copy pasted as well so we don't need to set that one again but we are going to add a second empty and this time select a cube and we are going to use the cube to control the small puffs of smoke so let's go to our modifier tab and for our second displacement go to coordinates set it to object and let's select the cube and now when we move our plane access it moves the large displacement when we move the cube it's going to move all of our smaller displacements and that's basically it this setup will also work on a taurus so let's add a torus object go to the modifier tab and add a subdivision surface let's set it to tree and again let's add a displacement modifier set it to -1 click on new texture and we're going to set the texture type to voronoi distance squared and then we are going to resize it until we're happy i'm also going to modify the strength a bit and i think i like this now let's add an empty plane axis and then we are going to set the coordinates of the displacement to object and select the plane axis and now when we resize our taurus it is going to create a nice animation um to accommodate this we're gonna set our voronoi to a large setting so that when we scale it up it's going to give this blooming effect later on when we want to animate it i'm going to add a plane and now we are ready to create a shader for our explosions and puffs of smoke so let's go into the shader editor add a new material we're going to delete the principal bsdf and we are going to add an emission shader next up we are going to add a diffuse shader and let's plug it into a shader to rgb node and let's plug that one into our emission shader and now when we add a color ramp we get a basic tune shader so if you set your ramp up like this let's select for instance a light gray and a white color you get a basic tune shader something i also like to add sometimes is a fresnel and this is going to create these edge highlights so add a fresnel and plug it into the diffuse bsdf and now if we lower the setting we get these edge highlights which can be really nice for smoke effects so let's select our second puff smoke and let's add the same material and let's do the same for our taurus now let's have a look at some of the different things we can do with the shader so if we go to our render properties and we add a blue this bloom effect will create a glow that interacts with our emission shader so for instance if i set the gray value to yellow and i set the white to a black and we pump up the emission this is going to create this glow effect which might be nice for explosions another thing we can do is add a gamma so let's select color gamma and add it after the shader to rgb node and this is going to help us control our fresnel so i'm going to set it to 0.3 and to get rid of these soft edges we're going to set linear to constant on our color ramp and this creates a very sharp edge and now we can also add a third color and this is also nice for explosions to get more of a fire effect you can for instance add white in the middle to get a very bright and classic explosion and this of course interacts with our light so we can use our light source to control this as well for now uh let's set it back to a smoke collar so i'm just going to delete all of these colors and set it back to a gray and a white i'm going to lower the emission and now we can start animating this to animate it it's really easy i can for instance select this smoke use alt d to duplicate a couple of puffs and we can create a shape this way and then just by controlling our controller we can get this upwards moving effect on our smoke so we can go to our timeline and let's set auto key and let's move our controller i'm going to set the keys to an interpolation mode of linear and voila we have some animated smoke and it only took us about 30 seconds to make the same goes for our other puff of smoke gonna turn off auto key for now we can create different shapes this is maybe for instance a large fire and then we can animate our two controllers so let's again select auto key and set two keyframes let's do the same for our cube i'm gonna set a key on one and at 250. and that way we can animate a huge wall of smoke without much effort at all another thing we can do is to animate the puffs of smoke themselves so if we go to our first keyframe we can move our puffs down beneath the plane i'm going to select them all and resize them and then we're going to go to frame 25 and we are going to move them up resize them as well and then let's create a more irregular shape and then i'm going to go to 60 and i'm going to move all the puffs up and also going to resize them let's see how that looks and that looks like an impact or an explosion for instance a missile or something hitting the plane and then going boom all right next up is the taurus for the taurus we're going to go to keyframe number one and we're going to scale it down and then let's go to keyframe 20 and we're gonna scale it up and then on keyframe 50. i'm going to scale it up even more but also we're going to move it down and then keyframe 70. let's scale it up even more but even more down and let's see this gives more of a round smoke effect and that is how easy it is to just animate these puffs of smoke okay let's have a look at some examples now let's start with this evangelion scene i use this model i found on sketchfab by tnt predano comes pre-rigged which is awesome and the only thing i had to do is add my own toon shader i basically use a principal bsdf that's plugged into a shader to rgb that goes into a color ramp with three colors and i do this for all of the colors on the model so it's a very basic tune shader so the smoke really interacts well here with the light also i really like the shadow that's being cast on the explosion something that is noteworthy are these little splashes that i made i made them exactly the same way you would for making these puffs of smoke but instead of having a negative strength we use a positive value and we use an extreme value for this one so something like four and it's basically the same voronoi texture but also i used a small size so you can get these extreme splashes i also use this splash effect on the akita bike of my fire tutorial and there i animated this as well another thing are these little explosions or it looks like debris that's getting thrown out of the explosion and that is basically just a particle system that's shooting meta particles next up is this corridor scene i made for the fire tutorial based on the movie akira and i used the same puffs of smoke as in this the rest of this tutorial you can just duplicate as many as you like and for this smoke i'm basically just moving my smoke controller so let me show you what that looks like i have this smoke controller and i can just move it upwards or downwards and that's all there is to it another thing i want to show you as well is that i keep the subdivisions low in the viewport but i set the render subdivisions high so this will create more geometry while we are rendering the animation and that is uh keeping the frame rate manageable because with all that fire and all that smoke the fps can get very very low next up i want to show you some explosions i made by combining the different techniques in this tutorial and the last thing i want to show you is how to make this shader where it seems like the smoke is about to disappear so to do this you can actually turn the shader we made earlier into a transparent shader by plugging the emission into a mixture and then plugging in a transparent bsdf and to control the mix i add a voronoi texture and then we can animate this color ramp and this can just give this disappearing effect and that is all there is to it and that concludes our tutorial i hope you liked it let me know in the comment section please like and subscribe and see you next time

Channel: Kristof Dedene

Views: 58,885

Keywords: anime, blender, animation, cartoon, toon, 2D, 3D, blender3D, paint, procedural, explosion, smoke, evangelion, dedenne

Id: eL6O3qN-d4E

Length: 20min 46sec (1246 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 15 2020