Tutorial: Pendulum Waves in Blender

in this tutorial we are going to make a pendulum going back and forth and then we will duplicate it and give it a slight offset so it becomes a really interesting pattern [Music] so we're going to be working in blender version 2.82a we're going to start off by deleting everything shift a mesh circle and then we're going to zoom out by scrolling and press tab to go to edit mode press e to extrude and press z to make it follow the z axis and then hold ctrl and pay close attention to the top left corner and you can see we want to stop at 30 meters exactly so the pendulum is gonna have its pivot point up here because it's going to swing like this right so we need to make this the pivot point so press shift s to set cursor to selected and then press tab to go back to object mode and go object set origin origin to 3d cursor and now our pendulum has a pivot point and you can press r to rotate so let's slim this down by pressing tab to go to edit mode and select everything by pressing a and press alt s and this is really sensitive so you can hold shift and there we go now i want to zoom in a little bit and the 3d cursor is all the way up there but we want to bring it back to the center so press shift c to reset the position of the 3d cursor and this means that when we now create a new object it's going to be exactly where we want it to be so press shift a and add an x fare and then in this little menu you can set the subdivisions to three now i want to add something more so shift a and a taurus and i'm going to scale this up a little bit and press alt s to make it a little bit slimmer and then we can rotate it on the x-axis by pressing r and then x and then hold ctrl and look in the top left corner and let's see minus 90. so press tab to exit edit mode and you can zoom out and there's our pendulum so we're going to make the pendulum move like a sine wave and then we'll duplicate it and then we'll offset the sine waves frequencies just a little bit so you can right click down here and go vertical split and then at the top here we can set the editor type to graph editor so to make a rotation keyframe we can press i and then rotation and now we made keyframes on the x y and z axis but we only need the y axis we can make a little bit more space here select the x axis delete it and delete that so now our only keyframe is on the y-axis you can press g to grab it and move it up and down now to add a sine wave to this keyframe you can press m and go to modifiers and press add modifier and built-in function now it goes crazy right away but this is what we want so we can lower the face multiplier and set it to 0.1 so this is the speed right and then our amplitude we'll set it to 0.3 okay this is good so right now this is going at 30 fps or 24 depending on your settings so in the output properties set the frame rate to 60 which is a lot smoother now it's a lot faster too so in a face multiplier you can actually just type divided by two and it's going to be half the speed now we can duplicate our pendulums but we haven't added the material yet so it's a lot easier to just add the materials now and then duplicate the pendulum once the materials have been assigned so select the pendulum i'm just going gonna get out of the way here and then go to material properties here well i can look at it and then click new material and let's call this sphere so with the pendulum selected press tab and press alt a to deselect and then hold your mouse over the sphere and press l so if you like you can scroll down here and in the viewport display you can set the color to something different let's scroll up and this little plus icon here to add a new material slot and then a new material let's call this metal and now we have our sphere selected let's press ctrl i to select inverted and press assign so now our sphere has a different material than the rest and you can right click and set the shading to smooth so let me just get back in my corner and let's duplicate some pendulums so select your pendulum press shift d to duplicate and to specify the axis press y because we want to do the y axis and then hold ctrl in the top left corner let's take a look let's do 5 meters and we want to repeat what we just did the 5 meter duplication on the y axis thing so you can just press shift r and blunder will repeat the previous action so press shift or again shift r now we've got 5 six seven eight nine ten so ten pendulums all in sync now let's make it move like a snake so this one is gonna go slow this one is gonna go fast and in between it's gonna be like a gradient of movement right so let me just change my view here a little bit and select this first pendulum it's pendulum number nine but let's just call it the first one and let's not do anything with this and then on the second pendulum in the face multiplier it's set to 0.05 right so let's go 0.051 and then select the next one and set the face multiplier to 0 5 2 and then zero five three and zero five nine now when you press play it's going to move like a snake and this looks even better the further you get so you can go to like 2 000 frames and we get all these kind of interesting patterns and there's a really easy way to make this loop so i mean it's already looping but we just need to find the exact frame so select everything ctrl space by the way to full screen this you can see here in the graph editor that there is this interference pattern that's starting to arise so here it looks really clean and here it gets ugly so when we zoom out there we go here is the new cycle let's go to 6285 frames and let's zoom out here as well in the bottom left corner you can go to playback and set end frame so now oh it almost loops we need to do it one frame shorter so 6284 set end frame there we go a perfect loop with pendulums at 60 frames per second and the really cool thing about this is that you can actually just add more pendulums as long as you add faster pendulums you can add as many pendulums as you like and it will still loop because the slowest pendulum decides when it loops so how do we render this we should definitely render it in ev because in cycle it's going to take forever so go to render properties and if you haven't set your render engine to eevee so we can right click and join these areas and click on the one you want to remove and in the top corner set the viewport shading to rendered so i'm just going to move myself again and there and we're going to go to material properties which is right there so go to material properties and select sphere material and let's set the surface to emission cool and right now it doesn't really look like it's made of light because we need to make it glow so go to the render properties and enable bloom and then let's go back to the material and turn up the strength cool let's do like seven and we want this to be like a hot color like a warm or we i mean i want this to be a warm color so press this little icon next to the color and set it to blackbody now this is going to be kelvin temperature 1500 is really hot we can just increase this let's do 2200 okay there we go now i want to make the ground so shift a mesh plane let me just get out of the way here and make a new material called ground plane and we'll scale this up and we'll scale it up and we'll scale it up and we'll move it down a little bit so press g and then z there we go and then we'll make the surface a glossy material and we'll turn down the roughness a little bit but nothing happens and that's because we need to go back to the render properties and enable screen space reflections now we can see the reflection pretty cool so to make this scene a little bit more interesting let's go to the word properties under volume you can select volume scatter and every thing becomes dark because the density is too high so let's set the density to like 0.1 okay that's too high point zero one there we go so it's just a little bit of fog what i like to do with the volume scatter is to add a light so go to light and select spot and move this around and then let me get out of the way here and then under object data properties you can increase the power so let's set it to ten thousand fifty thousand and we're getting somewhere let's increase the size of this a little bit let's increase the blend you can just tweak this a little bit if you want so i totally forgot to do the glossy material on the pendulums so select the pendulum and go material properties and the metal set the surface to glossy and then we can lower the roughness and now they have more of a reflective material so to add a camera so we can render this go to shift a and select camera and then press ctrl alt numpad 0 and then you can move the camera around by pressing g and for example y let's pull back a little bit and then press r rotate it and you can select the z [Music] so there we go and we want a more wide angle lens so right click camera lens angle and pay attention top left corner let's do 30 millimeters there we go and we are almost done it's just one more thing that i want to show it's not going to be a part of this tutorial but if you want the ground to be like a wavy pattern as in the original i have a tutorial on how to do like displacement wave effect it's the exact same material as i'm using in that animation so feel free to check out that tutorial it might help with the reflections here being too similar let's try and just lower the glossiness of the ground plane a little bit so to render this click this little printer icon the output properties so if you're going to do some further compositing i highly recommend doing the openexr format it's really good for both after effects and blender but we are going to be doing a video render so set the file format to ffmpeg video and under encoding set the container to quicktime then if you want you can set the output quality to high quality and there are some other things you can tweak before rendering for example in the render properties you can set the screen space reflection and you can disable the half rest trace so i guess it makes it full rest trace well and then you can increase the trace position and it's actually quite noticeable especially if you do the wave thing on the ground so select your output folder give it a name accept and go to render render animation okay so i forgot to make the background black so no problem just press escape to stop the render and then x this out and then in the word properties go to color and set it to black so now when we press render again we don't have this ugly gray bar in our scene so the render is done and the placement of the lighting is a little bit unfortunate it's flickering a lot but while this was rendering i got an idea to use like a tablet with a pen and make a pendulum and record it into blender and display it in real time and i'm just really curious if it's going to work it could show some of the air drag and friction in real life and perhaps it's measurable it's really dumb but i won't try it out [Music] okay so the idea is that the pen is going to kind of like hover just above this and then it's going to kind of move like this in real time this might actually work [Music] oh [Music] it works okay i think it needs to be heavier at the bottom [Music] let's hit record let's space and now we're going plug it in okay perfect and grab [Music] [Music] that's it i think i'm gonna stop it there stop the recording save now let's take a look so the pendulum is actually moving oh my god that's amazing you can see it's kind of losing its energy let me just clean up the keyframes here this looks really bad so i'm going to smooth the keys key sample keyframes let's hope it's not crashing there we go and this is gonna be cool i'm gonna try and smooth it i'm gonna do another pass there we go i think the difference between this one and this one is the the circular motion i mean someone should take a look at this in a spreadsheet or something okay so it's not quite on the middle first glance it seems like it should be a problem that the pendulum is not on the middle but i mean we just move this one right let me just move this there we go so that worked it's a little bit weird but uh i mean we can actually see the air damping and the friction that's pretty cool thanks for watching [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Polyfjord

Views: 325,210

Rating: 4.9745173 out of 5

Keywords: blender, tutorial, 3d animation, pendulum, animation, educational, polyfjord, 3d, glow, eevee, learn, how to

Id: 5pOz-N2p4xs

Length: 17min 8sec (1028 seconds)

Published: Mon May 11 2020