Tutorial: Making a Mechanical Walking Creature in Blender

[Music] in this tutorial we're going to model rig animate and render a mechanical creature i've been completely hooked on this lately just making hard surface shapes look like small creatures with legs it's just so fascinating so we'll be working in blender version 3.2 and let's start off by deleting everything and let's just draw some shapes of what we want to create so i want to view this from the side and i want to make a shape that is like this so this is going to be the body and we're going to have some like a joint here and a leg like this another joint a leg like this maybe one more leg a short one and then like a something pointy that hits the ground and then i want six legs so you can imagine that this will be multiplied by six like this this this and this and then we're going to rig it using inverse kinematics this is five isn't it there we go so now that we know what our base shapes are going to be like let's just start modeling these different pieces and see where we end up so i don't think this will be like a complete beginner modeling tutorial but i'll start off by showing you some of the base principles that we'll be using and we'll be iterating on that and working our way up forward okay so i want to make a circle first because i want this to be rotational joints i want them to be able to move and rotate so let's just give this a shape that is easy to work with like mechanically and i'm not gonna lie i have some ideas already of what i'm going to try and create today so we're going to extrude this and then some more nope there we go um perfect so let's just start off with some simple shapes i'm gonna add a will a bevel modifier work i think so and then a smooth shading no perhaps a subdivision is better for this one yeah it is so that was probably a little bit fast but the point is it has a hole in the center and it can be attached to things that's the purpose of this thing that we just made and now this next thing is really important for this tutorial we're going to change the pivot point of this object and we're going to be doing this a lot in this tutorial so you want to get these hotkeys into your fingers now if you rotate this you can see that the pivot point is at the bottom here we want it to be at the perfect center inside the circle so in edit mode you can set this to face select hold down alt and select this so now this face is selected and now we want the 3d cursor to be placed exactly in the middle of this circle so let's press shift s cursor to selected let's press tab to go back to object mode right click set origin to 3d cursor so now when you rotate this this is perfectly in center and this is really important when working with these mechanical pieces that we're going to rig using armature so let's see what we can use this for i want it to be a little bit taller let's rotate it like this yeah perfect okay so i like this let's take this center and let's use this for something i'm going to duplicate it so let's press ctrl r and let's just see if we can make sort of like a there we go um okay so i'm not like a modeling expert but i feel like we're onto something here so now i'm going to set my pivot point to be the 3d cursor and i'm going to press shift d i'm going to rotate this on the y axis by a value of 180. you could mirror it but then you got some flipped normal issues which is really annoying so now we can select everything right click merge vertices by distance so now we have this first thing that we made we basically want to make a joint so we can have something here and then we can have something here and then this can move so that's what we're going to try and achieve here so i'm going to duplicate this here maybe and this doesn't have to be super precise you actually sometimes want a little bit of imperfections so i used to make everything with perfect symmetry but that just sometimes ends up being too perfect so now i think it's sometimes better to just eyeball some things except for when you're rotating stuff so i'm going to rotate this and now you want to hold ctrl so this is exactly 180 degrees okay so now we're on to something i want to make a cube and we'll give this the bevel modifier and smooth shading also now that i'm scaling this this is weird because i set the pivot point to be the 3d cursor the hotkey for this is just to hold dot so if you see me do this i'm basically changing it from 3d cursor to median point 3d cursor medium medium point is the default so now i can scale it like this and then 3d cursor is like this and it works with everything so it's a really nice way to move things around okay so let's set it to median point i want to scale this down a little bit make another cube inside of this like this 0.4 there we go and let's set the shading to smooth and let's set the origin to the geometry because i know this has perfect symmetry okay so let's scale this up a little bit okay so one very handy shortcut is to select something shift s pull down to cursor to selected select this one and set the pivot point to 3d cursor and then i just shift d and rotate it on the z-axis by 180. we're actually starting to get somewhere i don't actually don't think this is going to be here i think we're going to do it like this yeah that's much better let's move this over and let's make a circle i want this to be um i want this to be like the cylinder leg yeah perfect yeah so we're going to fill this okay so we want to add the bevel modifier as well and the reason why i'm adding bevel or subdivision to everything is because we want to avoid super sharp edges and we're going to come back to why that is important or i can just say it right now it's because the highlight is much more beautiful you can see it already here in the just the viewport shading here it's dark and here you have this gradient highlight and then it's dark again but if you turn it off it just you can see it's just way too hard right there and that's not really something that you see in the real world so i recommend using the belt modifier and the subdivision surface and just getting some smooth edges is really helpful okay so let's um duplicate this over here so here we have sort of one leg and one joint and one leg again and we want to make another copy of this i think and i want to make this leg a little bit shorter because in my experience that looks just feels better and now let's make something pointy uh yeah there we go we want to have it to be like a pointy leg like this perhaps even more yeah i want to extrude it like this and i want to do the bevel modifier oh the angle is not steep enough there we go smooth oh and then if this bug happens where you get these lines you can simply add more geometry and let's make it pointy let's make a little bit of a detail here i think so what really takes the longest with this it's not the modeling it's coming up with the shapes so the reason why i'm able to do this so fast is because i already know the shapes i'm gonna make because i've been planning this a little bit so feel free to just steal the shapes that i'm making right now because the fun part is rigging this and making it look cool i'm not really sure if this is the funniest part or it could be i mean if you're into modeling i'm not super big fan of modeling okay so now we are getting somewhere these are the legs you know what i have a really fun idea look at this so let's make this over here and let's make a really short one yeah like this now look at this this is really cool this part is going to be connected to the body right so what we can do which is really cool is we can rotate it by 90 degrees and now this joint is going to be going like this and then these joints are going to be going like this you see that you get what i'm saying and that is really cool it really helps with just our brains being impressed by the motion i guess i don't know it it's something i really feel like can help i do feel like i'm going too fast on the modeling here but i don't feel like we have enough time to be focusing super much on the modelling because there's so much rigging and animating stuff we have to do okay so i want to make the body shape and i know that i'm going to make six legs so let's actually make a circle you can set the vertices to six vertices you see that so now we get this shape and now let's turn this into something i'm going to rotate it by 30 degrees okay so i want to try and add some more details to this boring shape let's start with a bevel modifier something like this oh hang on yeah i'm onto something here we make it like a thin line there we go that's too many details so we'll get rid of this okay this could be cool you know what if you want to make some details go to preferences and to add-ons and enable bolt factory this one so now you can just go shift a mesh bolt and then you have all these kind of settings add bolt here you can adjust all this kind of stuff set the bit type to allen i guess and then it's going to have a lot of detail here that we can just delete we don't need all this mesh there we go and then just as simple yeah so there's our bolt shade smooth let's go to object layer properties turn on auto smooth perfect now we can scale this guy down 90 degrees yeah so i want to place this towards the edges i think yeah you can do like this this is always cool like this and then you give it a random rotation and then i just want to view this from the top set the pivot point to 3d cursor let's go to edit mode shift d and rotate by 60. maybe we can do something clever like what yeah that works and then there we go so now we just have some screws which can really help and then if you want to be really fancy you can start roll oh you can start just give this a little bit of a different rotation like this because it can really help i feel like the body needs just some more detail perhaps we could do insert what does this work like this i'm not really sure what this is let's actually just make a sphere spheres are always nice i think it's poking through a little bit oh yeah let's tie this down that's amazing yeah that's a good idea let's make a curve okay this is a really good idea actually i want to draw like this i want it to be attached up here and then around like this and then let's give it some geometry i just want to make this looks like some sort of rope that is being pulled around the sphere below here yeah and then it goes up like this by the way if you ever want to make something look like it was handmade curves really good starting point look at this we can make this look like some sort of wire that is attached to these screws and it's sort of it's holding this this looks like a cable i think and then this one at the top does it look like it's attached yeah i think it could work yeah this needs to be okay now we need to just connect this i can do like this and okay yeah so i feel like this is attached we can duplicate it you know since we're perfectly at center yeah so these go on top and then these go nope and it goes like this okay that's good and then we can increase the this so it's a little bit smoother okay so there's the body some sort of ball transportation thing with a curve that holds it let's move this down so it's at the same level as the legs let's move the leg in this can be a little bit not so tall and then we'll get rid of this one yeah yeah okay okay now we're on to something here so these legs are going to be bending right it's going to go up maybe like this and then this is the these will be joints and we're going to rig this with an armature but what i also want is that these legs right now they can't really move by themselves these need like a motor so what i want to do is that i want to add like a piece of string that is connected here and it goes up and it's connected here here and like this so we could do sort of like a motor so it looks a little bit more alive and this really helps on the realism and it's also quite fun to set up so let's make a hook we want to start out here we want to make no we can use this one we can do this there we go okay so this is going to be the hook it needs to be taller and it needs to be 90 degrees perhaps it doesn't have to be that big it can be smaller or i mean slimmer and taller yeah it has to be a little bit slimmer here there we go yeah so it's a little bit of a hole there okay this is good let's set the origin to 3d cursor so now this is placed there now let's duplicate it to this one perfect and let's take this one as well perfect oh we need to make one here as well um let's actually make some room for something else perhaps this could work and then this is just attached and now let's do this there we go and i think actually this one can be bent a little bit so let's do 12 12. so let's turn on proportional editing we can do like this does this work yeah it does perfect this is going to be turned like this actually we're going to apply the scale and rotation for everything that we have made so far rotation and scale okay so now we're going to make a string that is attached to this one goes here here here and then we'll figure out when we go over there but the point is we have to be able to rig it afterwards so we're going to use a curve so let's make a curve you can take this default curve and you can rotate it by 45 degrees i think and then it gets completely flat and then let's rotate it by 90 degrees okay and now we're going to just eyeball this so first let's just do it's going to go around like this and then let's add some geometry some bevel and make it fill the hole it's important there we go uh i guess we can come back to this then we want this one to be really small we want to scale it down you can go to wireframe view for example and then you can see that we want to place this in the middle of this one scale it down a little bit and then we're going to go over to the next one and then e to extrude the curve and then let's go over to this one alt z to turn on x-ray view e to extrude over here okay so now we don't really have one at the end i haven't really thought of this yet because this should end somewhere let's try and just make this a little bit this will probably not be super mechanical yeah let's actually i'll try and just wrap this around here and it will probably be a little bit weird but so let's just make this i don't really know how this would work but okay and then what's actually pretty cool is that we can i think we should be able to use this knot on the other place as well and then you can use alt s to make it smaller boop and then into here somewhere yeah that looks like a knot right i guess that's okay and now what we can do is we can just take this part we can duplicate it and let's just get it all the way over here let's delete whatever this is where did it come from like this yeah this works let's place it where it's supposed to be perfect now actually let's delete this one let's take this one and this one and press f yeah so now it's all hooked together we just want to move this up a little bit yeah okay that's good i think now we have some sort of like a cable system right it's completely fake it's just a curve but we're going to rig this and it's quite straightforward to read this and i really like that this is bent so it feels like there was some real tension holding this together that's a nice detail i think okay so before we start duplicating any legs or doing that much complicated rigging stuff let's just give a simple material to some of these shapes so i'm just going to take this one and let's call it glass let's take all these legs that we want to be we want this to have a glass material and then control l link materials so now all these are glass material and then let's take the wire let's call this wire we don't really have to tweak the material we just want to assign a material so this is a wire as well ctrl l link materials and i want this let's give this a brass material it's probably not going to end up being brass but yeah so ctrl l link material and all these other ones will be linked to the one that is highlighted and then these ones i think these are going to be dark rubber so dark rubber ctrl l link in there and if you like you can collapse the surface and go to viewport display and you can change the color which is a really nice way to just get some get some different colors in the scene i didn't want this one to be brass as well let's take these ones this is white plastic i don't know what this is called even these things that we made and you can actually even make it more shiny if you want to all of these are going to be metal yeah but make sure you select all of them trust me this is really nice to do right now it really sucks to do this when we have duplicated all of them let's call this metal and we can make it gray and let's link it let's make the dark rubber actually really dark and then these bolts i think they can be brass and this is metal and this sphere can be glass as well so now all our materials are assigned they're not tweaked or customized in any way they're only assigned and that saves us a lot of time when we start duplicating stuff so let's rig this leg using inverse kinematics i'm going to start out by making a bone so let's go shift a armature and now we can't see the bone so i really like to go to object data properties and viewport display and click in front so now we can see the bone select your bone and let's press tab to go to edit mode we want the bone to go from here to hair and now we have to be really precise so all these brass cylinders that we made they have their center set to the middle and it's really important that these have their origins in the center because that means we can go shift s cursor to selected and now we can select our bone press tab to go to edit mode and you can select this end of the bone and now you can press shift s and go selection to cursor so now the bone is perfectly centered on top of this one which is exactly what we want and this other end is not that important we can just place it somewhere in here it doesn't really matter that much because this bone won't be animated so now let's just keep going by selecting another joint and press shift s cursor to selected and let's select the bone edit mode e to extrude and it doesn't really matter where you place it because we're going to select it and press shift s selection to cursor and now we're going to keep doing this and it's a really fast way okay so i can see that these got some rotation so we want to reset the rotation by pressing alt r so now let's just keep going select the object cursor to selected and then the bone and then the edge e to extrude shift s selection to cursor and then let's keep going this is actually not that time consuming and now we're going to do i don't actually think that this final bone will be bending even though it looks like it could let's do it so let's actually send this all the way down to the edge here there we go and then i want to press alt r on all of them okay so now the problem is we can't really see our mesh anymore so we want to change our viewport display from octahedral to stick now in the other tutorial we added an empty object here so we can move that around in object mode but we are going to use just another bone instead because it's a little bit easier to reset the position make sure the 3d cursor is set to the point of the leg and let's go shift a and a bone will be created and i like to rotate it so it points this way i really like that okay so here are all our bones now we're going to use the inverse kinematics constraint to make this so much easier to animate so let's go to post mode by clicking post mode you can also press ctrl tab and just go post mode and now let's select this bone which isn't attached to anything and then hold down shift and select the bone that is the tip of the leg and then press shift i to add ik to active bone so now you can select the bone that is at the very end and you can move it and we have an ik rig and let me show you why this is so cool to use a bone instead of an empty object now you can move this bone down here and you can go pose clear transform location and it just snaps right back and the whole key for this is alt g so that means you can just move it wherever you want it and oh you're not happy alt g and just start over that's going to save a lot of time but now a problem is that this bone that we want to be stationary is not stationary so let's fix that by adjusting the settings of the inverse kinematics constraint let's select this bone that has a different color because that means it has a constraint let's go to bone constraint properties and we're going to change the chain length because now it's set to zero which is basically infinity we want to stop the chain length here so let's just increase this one two three four five six we want it to stop there so now we can move this bone and it just works okay so now we can move around this armature as much as we want but we want the armature to be attached to our mesh so to do that let's just reset the location of this one we're going to just select the mesh and we're just going to parent it to each bone and the way you can do this it's actually really simple select the armature so this is the armature and let's press ctrl tab and then you can select this bone right now this bone is highlighted and then if you go back to object mode the bone is still highlighted you just can't see it so what's really cool about that is you can select all this mesh select this one this one and just hold shift and select all of these that we want to parent these all of these and then select the armature at last and then go ctrl p and then set parent to bone so now you can select the armature press ctrl tab again and now when you start moving this you can see that these parts have been parented to that bone so that's just what we're going to do for this entire leg and it's actually not that time consuming so let's select the next bone let's go back to object mode by pressing ctrl tab and let's select all these little pieces this one i think this is correct control p bone and i like to just test each time to see okay that looks correct select this bone this one wait let me see okay so that one is not so let's take this one um that's good control p to bone seems good next bone this one this one this one i'm not sure if this is the correct way to do it but it doesn't really take that much time and motion blur also seems to work perfectly fine with this so i don't see why you shouldn't do it like this let me see okay so this one needs to be as well remember to have the armature highlighted at last so you can parent the bone yep and then the last one yeah and then this one part to bone okay so now this should work perfect now we need to attach the wire to this and that is actually really simple we are going to use just some hooks to do that so let's select one of these white plastic objects and then let's hold shift select the wire and then let's press tab to go to edit mode and now we're only in edit mode with the curve so now what you can do you can select the pieces that you want to be connected and press ctrl h and hook to selected object so now we can go back to object mode again and now when i move this you can see this is attached like this and this actually works perfectly fine so now we just have to do this for all these points so select this one this other white plastic loop and then hold shift so the cable is highlighted and then press tab to go to edit mode and you'll know you've done it correctly when you can only see this curve type of edit mode because the vertices edit mode looks like this you can see all these vertices but we want it to be the curve edit mode instead so make sure only this one is selected control h hook to selected object and then let's test it yep it's hooked and let's do the next one ctrl h go to selected and then this one hook two selected and then this one as well hook to selected object so now let's select the armature control tab and let's select our bone but now there's an issue here look at when we're bending this clipping right here a really easy way to fix this i mean it's how you would fix it in real life what you do is you can simply just make this longer that's all you have to do you can just press tab to go to edit mode x-ray aviation and select all of them and then let's just move this up a little bit let's do one meter for example and then let's let's select the wire and let's move this up one meter hold on control so now you have a little bit more room we can also come back to this this isn't really super important right now because it's so fast to fix but now there is one problem that we have see this these bones are bending in directions that they shouldn't look at this it's going up like this this is only supposed to go sideways so a super easy way to fix this is simply to go into the bone properties and under inverse kinematics you can lock the different axis so we can for example lock the x-axis i think and then i think it's the yeah and then it's the y-axis so now this cannot rotate on anything else this one i think it's y and z yeah yeah looks correct and then this one is probably y and z as well and this one and what's so cool about this is that this fundamentally changes the behavior of the rig because now it really moves like it's supposed to see this look at how cool this is now you're really getting this kind of motion that yeah i love this so much this is the this is by far the funniest part of this thing hang on we have done made a mistake this is supposed to be two we're supposed to have a joint here okay so let's see if we can fix that there we go now i hope this works yeah it does oh that looks much better as well look at that i feel like it's much more alive okay so here's something really cool we can do you can see it it struggles up here right but you can actually relax each joint a little bit if you want to so let's say you take this one let's go to the bone properties and under inverse kinematics you can change the stiffness so you can maybe take this maybe you want this to be a little bit stiffer and this one i think yeah this one this one see that so now this just works a little bit better um there we go perfect so now it is intersecting a little bit less i think actually this one could be even taller let's make this one meter taller so it might look a little bit weird when it's stationary but it means that it can yeah we can bend it a little bit further so i really like this actually okay cool if you think these lines are annoying by the way because these are from the cable hooks you can go to viewport overlays and turn off relationship lines yeah perfect okay so now we are ready to duplicate the legs and at this point in the video you can choose how many legs you want i have already committed to this rotational symmetry which suits six legs really nice so i'm just going to go ahead and create six legs so let's um select all of these and make sure we get everything selected and let's press shift c to reset the 3d cursor so do this from the top let's set the pivot point to 3d cursor before we rotate now let's go ahead and press shift d and then r [Music] and then let's hold ctrl and do 60 degrees and then now we can just press shift r we're lagging a lot for some reason yeah okay now it works perfect i think the cables are actually quite high quality if you see the wireframe here this is too much uh details select all the cables hold down shift and select all the cables in the object data properties i think it is oh yeah you can for example lower the resolution preview you need to hold down alt so you can affect everyone at the same time so let's hold down alt and let's type for example 8 and then let's also go down to the bevel resolution hold down alt and set it to 2. so now we have a little less geometry if you have a lot of legs and a lot of cables this is going to really speed up your real-time performance okay so now i want to be able to move this one and then the rig just works because now i would have to go into all of these hold down shift and select all these armatures press control tab and i would have to select all of them like this and then i would have to move them and then the rig would work this is looking really cool already by the way i would have to do this but i want to parent all of these to the egg in the center if you use a bone constraint called child of and i don't want to parent it to this i want to make an empty object so let's go shift a and let's make an empty uh set to cube and you can right click you can increase the size so this is going to be our let's actually rename this f2 body controller if you hate selecting all the armature all the time you can press m and create a new collection armature and now you press one you can see this you press two you see the armature so if you want to select all the armature you can just press two and then a to select all of them so it might save some time so now let's press ctrl tab to go to post mode and now let's select our child of constraint and set the target to be the body controller so now when i press ctrl tab to go back again select the body controller now you can move this and this one leg is attached we're getting there all you have to do is to do this for all the other legs it's really difficult because it just keeps bugging if i try to use the copy to selected thing look at this copy to selected it just bugs out so i just add this manually and then just set it to body controller and it doesn't really take that much time because i only have six legs so now when we go back to object mode and now we can select this body controller and we can move it up and we have a rig and now let's select the bolts let's select hold shift select curve the ball body thing in the center and then select the body controller ctrl p parent to object so now let's select all the bones at the edge of this thing shift one so you can see the rig and now if you like you can move these around you can scale them down and then if you have made like a really weird setup and you want to reset this you can press alt g and it's reset and it's really cool so let's scale this in a little bit let's go to object mode let's select this one and let's move it up look at that how cool is this rig and then you can press r and then r again and you have this really interesting look at how cool this is okay so now you have a mechanical insect rig i'm very tempted to call this a spider but apparently they have eight legs not six as literally hundreds of people have been telling me for the past days so i learned that i guess but this rig is really stable and it's really fun to play around with in order to make this walk this way the legs have to move like this they are moving in this shape so what we are going to do is we are just going to create a path shaped like this and then let's just make the leg follow that path and then let's just copy that to all the legs it's just as easy as it sounds you just have to know what buttons to click which which is why i'm here i got you let's go shift a let's make a curve let's set it to circle this is going to be our path so let's just rename this walk path press tab to go to edit mode scale it up let's rotate it by 90 degrees on the x-axis and let's set our transform pivot point to 3d cursor and let's select this bottom one scale it on the z-axis to zero and let's select these edge pieces and press v and set it to vector and then we can tweak it a little bit and like this okay good i want it to be a little bit pointy at the beginning so the leg is going to land like this and then it's going to be raised up again like this i want it to be a little bit maybe like this we want this to have a little bit more level of detail so you can select the path go to object data properties and set the resolution preview to something high like 32 and what's so cool about this that you can change the path after you've started animating which is really powerful and just move it over here okay so now this is going to be our path let's select the armature and let's select this bone and let's go to bone constraint properties add bone constraint follow path and then just set the target to be our walk path so now it's so easy you can just increase the offset and it works and then all you have to do is you have to add this constraint to all of the legs select all these make sure the one with the constraint is selected the last and click this little drop down menu copy to select it and then you can hold down alt and you can drag the offset so now we have a jumping insect i'm about to say spider but it's apparently not a spider so now you want to offset this so make sure you're on frame one right click insert keyframe let's go to frame 50 and then if you keep dragging this you can see that 100 that's when you get back to the beginning so let's click 100 and then insert another keyframe what's really unfortunate is that we only add a keyframe to one of them so we just have to go and add keyframe to all of these now so insert frame 50 100 insert again so you can probably imagine that if you were to go crazy and make something with like 20 legs or something this is the part where it's not that fun anymore so now when you press play they do won't jump to make it go jumping forever make sure you select everything press shift e and set it to linear extrapolation and we want it to go faster so let's click and drag and select this one and press g and move it to frame 30 for example maybe even faster frame 20. yeah this is good okay so now what's really cool is that you can select the path make sure the pivot point is set to 3d cursor press tab to go to edit mode and you can press space to play the animation and now you can scale this down in real time and you can change the step length sort of okay so now from prevent this from jumping let's actually make this walking let's select the armature make sure we have selected everything now we want to see some more animation stuff here so let's pull this up let's press ctrl tab so now we're in the graph editor and here you can see our keyframes this is the time on the x-axis and the value on the y-axis so we're going to have this one is going to be one two this one is going to be two and one and then this one is going to be one and two because then they're walking like a yeah i don't know i watched a youtube video of ants so here's what you want to do you want to take this one and this one and this one and these are going to go similar we're doing 20 frames so if you offset these by 10 frames you can press g and then 10. that's it now we're working and if you want to be a little bit more fancy you can actually take for example one of them and offset it by one frame so let's take this one g and then one and then let's take this one and g and minus one and then let's take this one and give it g 1. that just helps a little bit with the realism let's actually make some more room here let's press ctrl tab to get back to the timeline cool down here okay now and this doesn't really look alive we have to make this come alive a little bit more you can actually record the keyframes in real time let's do that i haven't done that in a while let's extend our timeline let's view this from the side and let's turn on auto keying let's press space and g and now this can just move up and down and we're just giving this some life right perfect and then let's turn it off what you can do is you can go up here like this control tab and here you can see we have only changed the location data but there are a lot of other channels there so you can uh x and clean channels so now you have deleted all the rotation and the scale keyframes that were added as well and now let's just do some rotation ctrl tab again can we do rotation here space rr that doesn't work let's try layer recording that doesn't work either we can just add some random rotation to it okay so that's the location let's press shift alt o to sample keyframes and then alt o to just smooth it i have a tutorial on this effect that is a little bit more in depth so that's the motion and let's just add some random rotation as well let's go insert rotation and press n to bring up this panel modifiers add modifier noise and let's set the scale to 45 and let's set the strength to 0.2 yeah that's good this is crazy you can increase the face copy f modifiers go to the y rotation and paste it give it a different face z rotation paste it different face so now that's it perfect you know what let's delete the location keyframes because that's actually dumb let's do the same let's just insert location and let's just copy from the rotation to the location yeah i think that's much better okay so we got some rounded movement if you want to be fancy you can take the z location which is this one and you can add the built-in function set it to additive this makes it go up and down really fast we just look at that perhaps not that fast yeah look at that i love it okay so we need a ground that walks with it shift a let's make a plane let's scale this this spire is huge how big is this 100 meters let's scale up this plane let's add an array modifier so now we have a lot of planes it's going all over there and we're going to do like this this way scale up the plane even more so now we're going to animate the movement of this plane so the spider is stationary but we're still walking okay so just to see it a bit more easy let's add a modifier subdivision surface and then a wire frame and then let's set it to simple and then increase this let's make it a little bit less thick so now it's much easier to animate this ground plane select the ground let's rename this ground plane let's go insert a location keyframe let's move a few frames i think we need to go here and there does this work so now we're trying to move the plane right but we want it to go forever so we have to do the same thing select the keyframe shift e linear extrapolation and it's moving too slow let's zoom in here let's move this faster okay so it's almost it needs to be going a little bit slower you know what let's just line it up why didn't i just do that let's move it here there we go that should work yeah now it's lined up so now the floor is moving with this guy so let's delete the wireframe and the subdivision okay so the floor is ending but what you can do is you can just add more counts to the array modifier perfect okay so now we're going to render it in cycles let's set the render engine to cycle so let's right click down here vertical split and let's do a horizontal split here there we go and this is going to be our viewport in real time so let's hide this and let's save it i'm going to set the viewport shading to rendered okay so there's what we look like completely dark let's make a light shift a light area light if you want to see how i usually light my stuff i can recommend that you check out this video okay so right click adjust the light power we got a light power of 8 000 is probably good this is going to be really cool let's select our ground let's give it a ground ground material surface diffuse dart we're going to do a dark one let's set the world strength to zero now we're talking let's make a camera shift a camera align view align active camera to view why doesn't that work okay view align view align active camera to view let's select the camera let's go to object data properties under viewport display let's just increase the pass part two to one and then we can right click and adjust the focal length i want to take this ball which has the glass material and give it an actual glass material oh that's looking good let's take the cables and make them glossy i want some glossy cables let's take the brass material and actually make it brass or whatever this color is it's good let's take the metal let's make it glossy let's actually give it a mix shader with diffuse and glossy you can actually see that notice here if you want to and then the dark rubber let's make that uh diffuse and glossy but let's make it dark it's just so cool to sort of get away with it let's actually copy this because we'll probably be using it for yeah there's the white plastic hmm this is really glossy we should make the metal lip or look at this creature oh my god i love this yeah i really like this i don't think this ball can be as a glass i think it has to be yeah look at that it's too we could make it a little bit fancy let's give it a voronoi texture into a noise texture oh no it's the wrong direction displacement there we go no there we are there we go yeah i just want this to be a little bit more interesting than just uh and we're going to do a fresnel on the collar there we are that looks cool let's have a look at this from the camera perspective there is a problem here even though this is walking we can't really see that it's working because the ground doesn't have any textures but i've actually made a texture that i've been using to add an image texture i'm using the add-on everyone is using this one node wrangler so you can just select this one and press ctrl t 2d cross yeah i just made this weird texture just these crosses so let's add a color ramp yeah so you got these crosses on the ground so now when the ground is passing by i love it and then we need to have a smaller depth of field so let's select the camera depth of field and let's set it to one no right click depth of field distance no we have to be even more point zero because the scale in this one is really wrong yeah point zero one that's good let's get more light can we multiply by two yeah now we're getting somewhere we need some more color in this perhaps this one could have more color mix rgb i want to make it blue we need a we need a mix shader in there and we need a diffuse shader i hope this is interesting for you because i'm having an amazing time right now yeah now we're onto something it's the beautiful blue ball multiply yes okay that's it this is the note 3 i ended up with for the sphere let's add some camera movement it doesn't have to be much just i want just a little bit we can't have that much f2 camera point of interest select the camera shift select the point of interest f3 damped track i think it has less rotation let's move this down and let's select this thing insert location you can set this one to shift f6 graph editor modifiers add modifier noise noise it works that's way too little five yeah i'm just adding some random motion to this um i'm sorry if i call this a tutorial because i don't think i'm i'm explaining enough but i mean if you can learn something from this that would be amazing let's just look at it for a few seconds to make sure we're not messing up anything this is looking really cool but i feel like the color isn't right i feel like this color is better perhaps should this is that better i like it we need a brighter light it's not bright enough 50 whatever this is yeah okay so i think this line you can see the line here i'm not sure if you can this line here i want to have a gradient i don't want this line i want this to be like a perfectly gradient that fades out like this to do that let's just go ahead and make a an empty sphere let's call this gradient controller let's duplicate this texture gradient texture quadratic sphere mix rgb multiply there we go and then you i'm sorry if this is too small by the way no we need to see it here's the point this sphere is going to be set to be the controller the gradient controller so here you can see that this what no it has to be the object object created controller and then the scale there we go okay so the point of this is to make a gradient let's look at how this lights up here you can see that i'm basically isolating the texture so that it naturally fades out see here like this so it's a perfect gradient it will always be a black fade here it's no longer a sharp edge it's a couple of minutes of work but it's a really nice way so now when we set this to diffuse air there will no longer be a sharp edge it will always be a gradient yep that's how i waste my time at least oh no no because i think this has too much travel distance so we are going to need a focus object so let's go empty sphere let's call this focus let's select the camera focus object focus okay let's do a still render motion blur is enabled let's start with 128 samples this is synchronizing a lot of circles i think i have too much geometry i mean i think this is looking really good it's too bright though let's just make this a weaker yeah that's good synchronizing object circle how many i think we're having a lot of subdivisions there is this a circle yeah that's a circle and that's a circle so this could have been avoided i messed up a little bit on the amount of geometry in this scene it's way too heavy so it's taking a little bit longer to render than it should i'll manage i'll be able to render this and even if i have to use some tricks and by tricks i'm in a render form okay so let's do a test render still image okay let's do some compositing let's go to compositor there we are use nodes okay so let's do some compositing here because right now the edges here we need to have some glare into this shift a distort let's add some lens distortion first just a little bit and then some glare i like the fog glow high with a mix set to minus 0.95 threshold zero that's important and a big size okay that's good it's really subtle but it's there if you want to be sneaky and i want to be sneaky we can add just a little bit of sharpening diamond sharpen 0.3 maybe no i don't want sharpening okay i think that's it let's do 300 frames 10 seconds no we can do 8 seconds that's enough that's 240 frames 128 samples looked good let me see if i can get down to 64. i think the bottleneck here is the synchronizing of all these objects because i've been way too careless with the subdivision surface modifier i think 64 samples could work let's have a look at 128 i'll probably be using a render farm for this because i don't want to i just i get uncomfortable if my computer is on for too long it's the fans it i feel like it's too much dust in here okay so let's compare 64 by 128 it's not that big of a difference i'm ready okay so i'm probably hey what's that oh see this that's not good you need to make this a little bit shorter oh i love this it feels like it's carrying something right because it's like strapped onto it i really like that you know i want to change the depth of field it's too heavy let's set it to 0.2 i want to see what the wire would look like with a different color maybe something over here hmm maybe even deeper how deep should you go you know i really love it you know warm colors let's have a look at this one look at that i really like that by the way i just thought i was finished and now i'm just iterating on these small parts because i just want to do a little bit of extra this is where the magic happens if you're in a situation where you're able to just keep going just a little bit further every time this is when you start learning stuff when you just know i just got it and then you just keep going and keep going that's when you make the projects that people go what how did you you know um yeah fernell nicholas fernell no color invert that could work i'm not sure if i'm feeling that this is always nice huh i think i like this one i want to take this and make it into yeah this feels much better let's add the brass a sign look at that i think that looks cool okay now let's have a look now we'll get to see a before and after perhaps it's too much with those lines down there but i like the colors of the string or do i just like to change i'm gonna tone it down a little bit the video is over i'm just stalling because i don't wanna i don't eat dinner i wanna be here with the with you and my computer best thing this was supposed to be metal so let's just let's just get rid of it it's less tacky i think now i'm starting to like the warm one again i guess i just like the change it's important to be aware of that this one is it's this one oh i'm really looking forward to see it render how long is this going to take 17 seconds 240 frames it should be just about an hour let's render this okay so the render is finished i just used a render farm called render street so it got finished a lot faster not a sponsor i just i just like their service okay let's have a look nice it's more it's cuter than i thought it would be yeah i'm happy i'm happy with it [Music] [Music] 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Channel: Polyfjord

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Id: ktXD_WRMY8E

Length: 54min 34sec (3274 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 11 2022