Tutorial: Twisting Crystals in Blender

[Music] in this video I'm going to take you to the process of setting up this twisting shape effect in blender it's very easy to work with and surprisingly simple to setup and I think it's a really cool effect and I want to say thanks to everyone is working really hard on developing blender it's an amazing software and it's just incredible that it's free I'll be working in blender version 2.82 alpha but before we start head over to the render properties and change the render engine from evey to cycles so this cube is going to be our core element in this project to edit this cube we'll go into edit mode you can either do that in the top left corner or you can press tab we're going to scale the cube on the x-axis so press s and then X to specify the axis it's important to use the x-axis because it just makes it a lot easier to work with modifiers we're gonna be using now to get back to object mode we can either go in the top left corner again or you can press tab to cycle back and forth between edit mode and object mode now we're going to twist our mesh and we're gonna do it by using a modifier so to the right click this little icon called modifier properties and if you click add modifier we're gonna select simple deform modifier and we can already drag this slider and our mesh will twist the problem here is that we need more vertices to twist this properly right now it's just a cube so go back into edit mode and the hotkey we're going to use is ctrl R then you can just scroll on your scroll wheel to increase the amount of vertices press left click then right click go back to object mode and now when we twist our mesh it looks much better so let's change the name to core and if you like you can delete the other objects in the scene by just right-clicking and selecting delete so the next step is to make this core follow a curve so let's collapse this modifier and add another modifier called curve and under object huh okay so we're going to have to add the curve first so press shift a and select Bezier curve and nothing happens but we just added the curve so where is it so the curve is actually just hidden inside the mesh right now because it's just too small so you can toggle x-ray and now we can see the curve so to scale up the curve press tab to go into edit mode and then just scale it up by pressing s press tab to go back to object mode again and you can turn off x-ray if you like and now under object we have our Bezier curve and now you can see that the mesh is following the path of the curve to edit the curve go to edit mode and then you can select the control point and hit R to rotate to make the curve longer you can right click on one of the control points and it extrude and move this will make a new segment that is following your cursor and you can rotate and move this around the hotkey for this is e so our workflow to create this curved path will be to just press E and move your cursor and then you can rotate each control point one of the most interesting features about the curve modifier is that if you move a mesh that has the curve modifier on it it will sort of follow the curve but only on a specific axis and this is going to be the x axis so if you move the mesh on the x axis it looks really cool it's following the curve and here's the cool trick if you press n to bring up this properties panel we can go ahead and lock the y and z axis so when you press G in the view port the mesh automatically follows the curve because it can't move on anything else than the x-axis now we want to make our core twist as it's following the curve so we have to open up our simple deform modifier again and then you set the origin for the twist modifier to be the curve itself now that we move the mesh it will actually twist by itself we can increase the amount of twisting so it's easier to see that this is rotating around its own axis while following the curve path I want to try and make this into a more aerodynamic shape so good edit mode and to deselect your mesh press alt a then we're going to select the first four vertices of the mesh you can either do this by holding shift and clicking them individually or you can choose vertices edges or faces and the hotkey for this is just 1 2 or 3 so make sure this face is selected and press s to scale and we want to make some sort of gradient scaling hair so to scale down more than just this first face at the top where you can select proportional editing so now when we hit s to scale our mesh it will be proportionally scaling along the entire shape but we want to scale it on all axes except for the x-axis so press s and then shift X and then use your scroll wheel to increase or decrease the radius of the proportional editing and then when you found the perfect size just press 0 and it will just snap to 0 now let's select the other side of the mesh s and shift X scroll down and press 0 then I want to make the entire mesh a little bit slimmer so press a to select everything and then s shift X and then we can just press s to scale up everything and now we have a shape that is much more dynamic and I'd really like this shape a lot better but I want to make this more interesting by duplicating our shape so we can use this tool in the top right corner to navigate our scene so let me just adjust my view here we can do this by pressing the X icon here to watch it from right orthographic view mode so make sure your entire mesh is selected go to mesh duplicate and as you can see the hotkey for that is shift D so press shift D to duplicate the mesh and then you can hold ctrl to snap it to the grid and in the top left corner you can see how many meters we are working with so let's go - 2 by 2 meters then duplicate it one more time and hold ctrl and then to get it symmetrically choose 4 meters now we have duplicated our mesh into three pieces but I want 5 pieces so if we hover the cursor over the other object you can press L to select it now go back to right orthographic view and press shift D to duplicate both of these you can still hold ctrl and snap this to the grid and let's do minus 4 meters now we have 5 pieces of equal size that will twist around and follow the curve and we can still change the shape of our curve whenever we want and if something's weird make sure you have turned off proportional editing so right now this is an interesting shape but we can customize it even further so go back into edit mode and deselect by pressing alt a and press L to select the mesh in the middle then you can scale this off by pressing s and now we have a bigger streak in the middle and smaller at the outside I want to tweak this a little bit more so press ctrl I to select inverted and to scale this down I'll go S + Shift X to scale it down on all axes except from x-axis and then to duplicate and rotate at the same time press shift D and R and then you can hold ctrl to make it snap now scale this up pressing s and shift X now when I'm scaling these they are all scaling but I want to scale them individually so let's change the pivot point to individual origins and now when you press s shift X we can actually control the thickness of the particles but now when you rotate they still have their individual origins so select pivot point and set it back to median point and now you can press shift D and rotate the particles around and hold ctrl to make it snap and as you can see our mesh is still following the curve perfectly I want to move these particles back a little bit so when you're in edit mode by pressing L you can select all these outer streaks and just move them back on the x-axis you can also hold controller to snap them to the grid then deselect everything by pressing alt a and select the inner streaks now we have shifted the position of the streaks a little bit and it's just it's all a matter of flavor by now so make sure you make something that you think looks cool now we're going to add our camera so go to shift a and select camera and then in top left corner you can select view align view and align active camera to view and the hotkey for that is ctrl alt numpad 0 and then to control the camera I like to use view navigation walk navigation and this is basically like a first-person shooter game so you can just use WASD on your keyboard and then you can use scrolling on your mouse to change the speed this is a really precise and easy way to control the camera and blender to split the viewport in half select this line at the bottom here and right click on it and then select vertical split then you can press this camera icon to make this view be the camera view to split it again right click on this vertical line and select horizontal split so we're gonna change this top right panel to graph editor the graph editor allows you to see the keyframes that we're going to create when we will be animating our core so to animate our mesh press I or insert and then location now we have created a keyframe for the location value so let's go 200 frames and then we can move our particle a little bit and make a new keyframe by pressing I and then location again and here we can see our keyframes and you can hold on ctrl + middle mouse button to do this weird scaling thing you'll get used it so right now we're working in 24 frames per second and it's a little bit choppy so we won't increase the frame rate so let's say you want to increase the frame rate to 30 frames per second to the right you can head over to output properties and set the frame rate to 30 now it's going to play a little bit smoother so right now our time line is longer than the animation so go to the last keyframe and in the bottom left corner you can select playback and press set end frame so now that we have set up our camera we can go ahead and customize our curve path even further so I really like that is kind of moving in 3d space a little bit more so I'm not quite happy with the motion here it starts slow and it goes fast and it goes slow again we can change that by setting our keyframe handle type to vector so now the effect will have the same speed all the time but I wanted to start outside the camera and then come in so you can just press G and move it outside of the frame and then make a new keyframe by pressing I and location and now the keyframe will be updated same thing goes for the exit I wanted to exit the frame so I'm gonna have to extend the curve a little bit so now we can move the mesh outside the camera and make a new keyframe so I'm happy with the motion for now how do we render this we don't need a graph editor anymore so let's go ahead and change this panel to shade our editor and if you want you can start by just getting this out of the way and this principled BSD f note is quite comprehensive so we're not going to be using that for now so just go ahead and delete that press shift a shader glass to connect these just drag from the output of the glass shader and into the material surface but nothing happens that is because we have to set our viewport shading to rendered and this doesn't really look good right now even if you turn off overlays you can see that there's not much going on there there is a glass material that we need to have the light source so in the 3d viewport press shift a mesh and a plane and then you can just scale this plane up you don't have to go to edit mode for this just press s and scale the plane up and then let's move it above our mesh and right now this didn't change anything so make sure the plane is selected click here to make a new material and let's rename this to lamp top so you can delete this node by pressing X and to give this an emission material go to shift a shader emission and then we'll do the same thing again we will drag the output from the node into the surface of the material now we can see that our material is actually looking a little bit like glass but the entire world is really gray so to the right you can go to world properties and in the surface you can set the color to black and now we have a much more contrast filled image but we can still see the lamp in our viewport and we want to make the lamp hidden from camera but visible in the reflection of the glass so to the right go to object properties and under visibility you can turn off the Ray visibility for the camera and it's also a nice habit to turn the shadow so we want to add another light source and the easiest way to do that is just to duplicate the lamp that we have so go to object and duplicate objects which is shift D and set the axes to Z so we're moving it straight down and now we have a lot more light hitting our mesh which is cool but the mesh is kind of hard we want to make it smoother we want to increase the amount of polygons in the mesh so the first step to make it smooth is to right-click on it and you can set the shading to smooth but it's still a little bit wonky because we need to have a higher amount of polygons here so let's go to the right to the modifier properties and we can collapse these two and then go to add modifier and select subdivision surface so let's set the subdivision viewport to - and now our mesh is a lot smoother if you hold your mouse over the actual panel you can press control space to fullscreen it so in my opinion the mesh just got too smooth I want to keep some of the structure that allows you to see that it's actually twisting and a nice way to do this can be to add a bevel modifier but it's just making this weird boxy patterns and we can fix this by just swapping the position of the subdivision surface modifier and the bevel modifier let me just get some more space here so click this little arrow and in my opinion this shape is a lot more interesting and there are some weird stuff going on air that it's a little bit hard to explain but I can recommend that you set this limit method to angle and then we can set the angle to for example 70 degrees so to make this faster to work with you can set the viewport observation to one if you still want to make it look really good when you're rendering you can set the render quality to three now that we have a smoother looking mesh the resolution of our curve is too low you can actually see the individual lines in the curve so select the curve and to the right select these curve properties and set the resolution preview to a much higher number for example 64 and now the curve is a lot smoother and this makes the movement of our shape smoother as well so now we want to add some colors to this glass material we want to make like a custom color gradient that allows you to specify where you want the colors to be so to do this we'll go into the shader editor make sure your mesh is selected press shift a and add a texture called gradient texture and then you take the color from this texture into the color of the glass material and right now this texture is just a black and white gradient so to customize these colors we'll use a color ramp so press shift a and go to converter color ramp and then just drag it in the middle and it will automatically connect we want to add colors along the way of this shape you can take for example this black color and change it to be something else and then we can take the white color and change that to be something else too and now we have a color gradient and then you can move these points around and this color ramp effect is really powerful let's zoom in here if you press the plus sign you can add more points and give that a different color too now I think this teen is too dark so we can select our lamp and increase the strength of our emission node so let's try and set it to 3 or 5 or maybe 12:15 now I think it looks a lot better now I want to see what this looks like when it's rendered so in the top left corner go to render and render image I want to make the light source bigger so hold shift and select both lamps and press s and let's scale it up on the x-axis then we can move these around by pressing G and Z you can also rotate the lamps and I want to try and move them behind a little bit too now we did some changes and I want to compare this to our previous render so go to render and view render so we're currently on render slot-1 but if you select render slog to that slot is empty so it's leaded to render slot to and then we render another image we can compare renders with warm and render slot too and you can also do this by pressing 1 and 2 on your keyboard and this is such a nice way to see the difference between the previous versions so right now when we're changing the material we are changing the material of every part of our mesh so to separate our mesh to add different colors to the different streaks go to edit mode and then hover your mouse over and press L on the different pieces that you want to separate and then go to mesh separate by selection and the hotkey for this is P so you can press P to separate path selection go back into object mode now we have our core separated from the streaks around it so let's go ahead and rename these select the streaks and under material you can click this tiny button called new material let's give this a name and now we can customize this material now that we have separated our mesh we can actually change the twisting level for each of the elements so if you go through modifiers you can change the angle and it's going to have a different rotation than the streaks surrounding it so let's for example set this to minus 200 and then select the streaks and set it to minus hundred or minus hundred fifty so we can separate these streaks even further by going back into edit mode and then let's select these four big ones and then press P to separate by selection now we can take for example the smallest streaks and change this we can even give them a positive value so they spin the other way so let's set them 250 now we can compare our renders so all these renders are a little bit noisy you can zoom in and you can see these tiny grains of noise and these were rendered at 128 samples so to add a dino sir go to layer properties and enable denoising data and then set the editor type to compositor and when you click use nodes you can see a different kind of node tree let's separate this a little bit because we're going to be putting a denoise node in the middle press shift a and then just search for D noise then you can add this in the middle and connect the noise image to image connect the denoising normal to normal and connect the denoising albedo to albedo this doesn't change anything right now because you have to re-render which is f12 so now when we cycle through these different renders you can see that the denoise version has a lot less noise so to render this as a video file go to output properties and under output set the file format to ffmpeg video then under encoding I want to change the container from matroska to QuickTime and then under video you can set the output quality to high quality if you want then click this little folder icon to specify the output path and I like to make a new folder that is dedicated to the renderer and this is also really smart when you're working with image sequences so now that you have your animation you can go to render render animation and it's going to start render into your output folder to see the final result of your render go to render view animation and there it is [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Polyfjord

Views: 1,204,751

Keywords: blender, tutorial, 3d, animation, vfx, lotsalote, CG, blender 2.82

Id: uRAfhJQFjRo

Length: 28min 1sec (1681 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 03 2020