Tutorial: Stylized waterfall in Blender

hi i'm kristoff and today i'm going to show you how to make this waterfall in blender i want to give props to kusero salido i had a look at his waterfall he made it an unreal engine and i decided to make my own version in blender this version only uses procedural textures and this is what the same scene looks like after i painted over it i used photoshop and then i post processed it in premiere pro i added caustics to the water this is also done in blender but i'm going to show you this in another tutorial so let's start with the waterfall let's dive into blender let's open a new scene delete the cube delete the light we're going to add a plane go to the shader editor and we're going to add an emission shader we're going to add a voronoi texture we're going to plug the distance into the color we're going to add a color ramp we're going to play around with the color ramp until we have some white circles let's make them a bit smaller and adjust the scale as well so let's put it to 20. now let's add a mapping and a texture coordinate node and we're going to stretch river section we can stretch these little marks a bit more by using the x to scale it and we can use the color ramp to show either more or less dots in the water so let's go over to the next section of the water just going to select our plane copy paste it we're going to rotate 90 degrees we're going to put it at an angle next up we're going to select the texture i'm going to put this scale the 50 in the voronoi texture and then also in our mapping node we're going to put the scale to 0.1 and then we can play around with the color map to get this more dripping result you can play around with it to get your desired result the next section we're going to make is the top of the waterfall where the water falls between the two sections let's select our bottom part i'm gonna copy paste it and we're gonna add a section to our material let's move our color ramp i'm going to add a mix rgb node i'm going to add a gradient node and let's add a mapping and texture coordinate so we can control the gradient node let's set the gradient texture to quadratic sphere and let's play around with the mapping we're gonna lower it horizontally till the sphere turns into this cigar shape let's turn this mix node into a soft light and let's plug the gradient into the first section and now we want to add a second color ramp behind the soft light mode and now let's play around with our voronoi put it to 4d as well now we're going to turn this into a little edge but before we do that we have to change the generated texture coordinate into a uv so let's do that both for the gradient texture and for the voronoi let's position this we go into edit mode and let's take a loop cut and let's cut it until we have enough geometry to make this into an edge i'm gonna delete these upper vertices as well as these lower vertices let's turn this let's turn this into a bend section like this let's have a look all right you can play with the color ramps to get different results but i'm happy with this for now now let's make a big splash zone start by adding a sphere let's move the sphere the underside of the waterfall let's maybe add a light so we can see the geometry of the sphere go to object shades mood and we're gonna go into our modifiers and add a subdivision surface and set viewport to 2 and then we're also going to add a displace click on new texture go to the show texture and texture tab add new or we can just go here and select voronoi now to animate this i'm going to set our texture coordinates to object let's add an empty so choose plane axis position it near the waterfall it's just for convenience and then we're going to select the empty object and now when we move it this will displace the splash of the waterfall let's select our sphere give it a new material so we're going to add an emission shader and we can also add a voronoi texture with a color ramp let's plug the distance into the color let's scale this maybe put dirty it's maybe a bit too much let's add 20. okay and now last but not least let's add another plane this will cut off the water effect let's add a new material add an emission shader and into the emission shader you're going to plug a wave texture color into color where it says bands i'm gonna select rings and the x we're gonna select z now let's add a mapping node and a texture coordinate node let's move the location on the y-axis till it's centered let's move this we're also going to add a gradient texture here so select the gradient texture add color a mix node i'm going to put it to soft light we're going to plug in the gradient texture to the top i'm going to add a color ramp that will give us more control instead of having a linear texture we're going to use a spherical let's add a mapping and texture coordinate node let's put the y to minus 0.5 now let's go back to our wave texture add some distortion you can play around with the detail we don't want too much detail and also we're going to add a color ramp after the soft light so i'm going to select the sphere maybe add another subdivision surface after it just to make it a bit smoother those are all of the sections of our waterfall now let's animate it let's select the top part i'm going to add a timeline and let's do some auto keying we're gonna stand on the x and press i this will turn this into a keyframe let's go to our frame 250. let's put it to minus 0.5 we're going to select all the keyframes and then we're going to select interpolation mode and set it to linear okay let's test this upper section okay this is going well now the next section let's do the same okay this one can go a bit faster so i've set it to -1 for this edge section we're going to do the same to the voronoi texture so go to frame 0 let's add a keyframe on our x location of zero let's go to frame 250. let's put it to minus 0.5 let's set the interpolation to linear this can go a bit faster so our last keyframe i'm going to put it to minus 2. this may be a bit too fast to minus 1. that's better okay for our splash we're going to take the empty let's go to frame 0 add a keyframe let's go to frame 250 and move it around also going to select the keyframes and add our linear interpolation this is going a bit slower because of all the subdivisions that's maybe the subdivisions let's not render it right now the last part is going to be the animation of our wave section and we're going to go to the wave texture go to face offset and put a keyframe on the first frame go to 250 let's add minus 200 and let's also set the interpolation to linear okay the last thing we're going to do is we're going to take our curve edge and we're going to make it into a transparent shader so let's add a transparent shader a mix shader put the shader into lower shader take our color ramp we're going to invert it and plug it into the alpha to make this work you also have to put blunt mode and shadow mode to alpha clip and you can do the same for the splash you can add some color to the color ramps let's pick a nice blue and this is what it looks like all animated now i wanted to show you this scene where i put the same waterfall into a scene with some rocks and grass and we're going to add one last change to the shader we're going to make it a transparent shader so you can see the rocks underneath so let's go to the shader and next to the emission let's add a mix shader and also a transparent shader instead of blue we're gonna turn the color ramp back to black plug it into the half of the mix shader and we're gonna invert it to make this work go to your material properties set blend mode to alpha blend and we're also going to change the color of the transparent bsdf to a blue let's pick a lighter blue there you have it this concludes the tutorial i'm going to share the source files of this scene in the description let me know if you liked it please like and subscribe and see you next time

Channel: Kristof Dedene

Views: 181,984

Keywords: Ghibli, anime, waterfall, stylized, blender, animation, cartoon, toon, 2D, 3D, water, FX, VFX, blender3D

Id: Im3SA3MSzcw

Length: 20min 27sec (1227 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 31 2020