Wormhole VFX : Animate UV’s | Blender Tutorial

this is something that comes up a lot in sci-fi in fact the same kind of thing gets used in anime a fair bit - I've been asked to create those kind of ideas a couple of music videos and it's actually a lot of fun to mess around with and I'd like to share some techniques to make similar effects here today [Music] hi a de barros here and this is another bonus video from the space VFX element series by myself and Gleb Alexandra for those of you who have the course I've included these extra wormhole varieties as blend files for you in this video we'll be heavily relying on procedural animation techniques also a whole lot of procedural cycles texturing that works great in real time so let's get strapped in and make it so alright so let's start with some scene setup stuff will be using cycles rendering and I'm just going to left-click and drag to split the view here I switch one of these to a node editor the faithful cube we shall not be needing so I'm going to delete that with the X key the camera I do want that one but I'll put it at the center of the world so alt G to clear out any transforms and alt are to clear out any rotations I'm just going to orient the screen so the x-axis is running left to right now I'm going to be switching over from CPU to GPU and because of that I want to come down to the performance area and switch the tile size is much higher so I'm going to set that to 512 that'll speed up our rendering we want to keep that low if you don't have the GPU option though start resolution I'm going to set that up to 256 so that when we're in rendered view the first things that cycles tries to show us isn't quite so blocky this whole technique is going to depend heavily on emission shaders so if we come down to light paths we can set our bounces down to zero we don't need any of this stuff either I'm just going to go for a really basic scene the sampling also doesn't need to be very high so I'm just going to set those both down to 1 and now we can introduce our starting geometry which is going to be shift a and that will be a cylinder let's take a look at our settings here in the tool shelf and we've have a cap fill of N gone I'm just going to set that to nothing so if we peak down you can see we've not got any top or bottom to the cylinder now this is all looking great well I want it kind of going shooting along the y-axis so let's go R to rotate X to rotate around the x-axis and then let's do that 90 degrees and then hit enter let's see if we have any materials in our scene and we have this one material so I'm just going to give that to the cylinder there let's call this wormhole map and let's in fact rename by double clicking on the ceiling they're in the outliner and we'll call that wormhole cylinder and now I'm going to split the view again so left-click and drag across to the left and let's close out that tool shelf like a tiki let's press 0 on the numpad to jump into that camera and I'm just going to select on that little dotted line there and that will select the camera for us and let's just scroll the mouse wheel in a little bit just to fill the screen a bit more and as you can see it's pointing straight down at the moment and as we did with the cylinder I'm going to press R and then X and then 90 to rotate that around it's sort of looking down the length of this tube here there's not really much of it that we can see though so let's press 7 on the numpad take a look from top view I'm going to tab into edit mode press G and then Y and then one just to move them up on this axis and let's press Z juggle the wireframe a to deselect everything be to border select and left click and drag across all those vertices there and a scroll out a little bit and let's just make this I don't know about say that long but take a look in our tool shelf see how far we shoved it there almost 12 units let's just round that off there's something else to think about if it's had back into object mode there just to see it a little clearer everything is very faceted looking at the moment so I'm just going to scroll down here set our shadings are smooth but we're actually looking at the the backside of the faces that we've got here so let's press n to toggle the properties window here and have a scroll down we can see under a shading area we have back face culling I'm just going to select that on and that shows us that all the faces we actually want are pointing outwards so let's tab into edit mode select everything with a might need to do that a couple of times if you've got something selected already let's go ctrl F and then bring up our faces menu flip normals is right at the top so I'm just going to select that and then tab back into object mode let's press Z in this 3d view as well and we can rotate around and we don't have back face culling on in this view so let's press N and come down to the shading area again and set that there and to close it out again something else we can do is just select the camera and come over to the camera settings and the focal length of this can be a lot lower and it can gives the impression that the end of the tube the end of our wormhole as it were was way way way in the distance so that can be a kind of a reasonable effect I'm just going to set this way around 2004 now now the next thing I'm going to do is select this cylinder again and let's select to use nodes and we can scroll in and just take a look at this a little bit clearer and you'll notice if I go to select the camera we no longer see the material we're working on for the cylinder so I select this cylinder again and just hit this little pen icon so if we are dealing with other objects sometimes we can still select the camera for our material for that cylinder stays intact where it is so we can still make tweaks so let's reselect the cylinder I'm going to get rid of this property sidebar because we're going to get the walls kind of closing in on us here so let's click and drag across here and we'll change this to an image editor and what we want to do now is unwrap this cylinder so let's tap into edit mode with our cylinder and taking a look in the UV and image editor here you can see that there aren't any UVs now we could have actually simplified things for ourselves since when we first created a mesh cylinder we could have again set that to nothing and just simply generate UVs and now if we tap into edit mode you see there's all UVs therefore it's completely done and it's incredibly fast but if we would - now to some reason want to preserve what we had before instead of now setting up this one instead what we can do is just select our cylinder shift select this cylinder with the UV map that we do want on it and then we can just press ctrl L at the bottom of our make links menu there we have transfer UV maps and now if we select this cylinder that we had tap into ed mode there's all you v's so that was nice and easy but I'm going to actually undo that controls ed but let's undo a few steps so we have that second cylinder there out of our scene and let's take a look at another way of being able to do this let's get you tool DUP with some more UV techniques let's go tap into edit mode and then press U and then we have here cylinder projection which looks wild and crazy at first let's go up to our other settings though and change that to a line to object and it's almost looking alright but let's get this a little bit further and select scale to bounds and now this is exactly what we want in fact let's take a look at this by scrolling over a little bit further press n to open up the properties sidebar zoom out slightly and then just select one these vertices and exceeds position is at 0 256 and on this side it's 256 by 256 this is a default 0 to 256 grid basically now if we don't like it like that we can actually just set the coordinates to be normalized instead and that will run from 0 to 1 if that's a little bit more simpler to figure out but I'm just going to leave this on the 256 by 256 grid so let's take a look at how we can kind of improve this unwrapping a little bit further and that's to refine where our edge team is it'd be neat if the scene was this edge directly at the bottom and we want to see where that is on our UVs so let's keep our UVs and mesh editing in sync by clicking on this button and you can see it's basically just one off so let's go ctrl tab select that face at the end there and then we want to move that right over there since this edge is going to be where our texture seam is so let's just put that at the bottom and it kind of will always be able to quickly identify where that seam is so all we need to do is G X and minus 256 and it will pop it over on to the other side for us and what's cool about that is we can go ctrl tab select vertices select that vertex up over there and if we press G to move it around you can see it's all automatically nicely welded and now let's shift these all over slightly so let's press a and an a again select everything and we want the center of this to be 128 so let's set that to 128 and it shoves it 8 units over and now we have it all nicely aligned now what we want to do is animate these UVs so what we want is a temporary image that we can play with just sort of test everything's working out ok and see it zooming along this tube that we've got so let's click on new let's call this just a color grid and then what we want to do is the generated type that needs to be a color grid 1024 by 1024 is fine let's just click on OK now let's just shift these windows over so there's more space on the materials now on let's go shift a and add in a texture image texture drop that in let's find our color grid from the pulldown and let's ctrl shift click this so it just hooks it up into a viewer node for us a temporary emission shader basically and then what we can do let's try selecting this to be a material shading instead let's actually switch it on here as well over to Tyrael now the what this is exposed is that everything seems to be mirrored so let's fix that let's pull back over to our UV image editor and all we need to do is press ctrl M and then let's press X and then left click to confirm and there we go now another thing that I'd like to do is just at this end where the camera is I'd like all these to be the lower letters so let's press a to deselect everything go ship space so just have a good look at this texture so at the bottom we've got a 1 to a 8 on the side and what would be quite cool is to essentially reflect that on our tube so let's go ship space again select everything with the a key + r and then 182 just rotate that around and now our UVs are all properly aligned let's get on with the task of animating these so let's tap back into object mode come over to our modifiers add modifier and the animated UVs is basically called UV warp and what we're going to need is to tell it what we want to walk from and what we want to walk to so for that let's control that with some empties let's go shift a add in empty just a plain axis let's rename this to wormhole UV warp start let's shift D to duplicate that but let's make this look different and easier to select and change it from the old plane axes let's try circle Valis who's confusing with the cylinder opening let's try instead a sphere so now we have this one here which is the wormhole start and this one which is going to be the wormhole end so let's double click that and rename that to end let's reselect our UV cylinder and come over back over to the modifiers and now from is going to be our start and - is going to be our end and now we grab our end and let's left-click and drag on this y-axis we now have some animating movies now we want to make this feel like these UVs are moving towards the camera so let's see which direction we have to move there we basically just need to shift this empty towards the camera so that kind of makes sense so let's press alt G to reset the transforms there press I to insert a location keyframe and let's switch this one here to a graph editor and what we want to do actually is we only really need the my location so let's select the X location and press X and the zebb location press X and now we just have this one now what we'll do is press n to open up our properties and here we have our modifiers tab let's add a generator modifier and this is just going to create an infinite amount of distance for us now right now there's no point in me playing this because it's going to be extremely fast so if we just set this right down to maybe zero minus 0.1 let's press alt a now and see how that goes it's a little bit on the fast side let's hold shift and left-click in here to scroll it down so it's not quite as brutally quick and then now let's go alt a again and that's a little bit more like we can handle it right now we can speed this up a little bit later but now we have this kind of procedural control over how fast we want this to be moving now let's go back over to our node editor and something else that I'd like to clean up in the view is just what layers we have here and also this lamp see now we're going to clean up the scene a little bit more we don't really need that let's press X let's scroll up here and in fact escape space with our cursor in that 3d view so we can easily see the layers tab open that up let's hide some empty layers so right now everything's in the same layer but what we can do is just have this layer one as just the camera and then this mean wormhole cylinder let's press M to move that to the second layer instead let's turn on the visibility and we'll name that wormhole cylinder and then the empties for the UV warp in I'm just going to shift to let both of them press M and then move them to layer 3 turn those on and let's call them UV empties now the cool thing about these let's just select one of them is with this UV animating we can actually do quite a lot with this we can just press R and Z and then we can start rotating the UVs around we can press s to scale those UVs and of course as we've seen with the rest G to move those UVs around so let's just reset that transform without G put in our UVs back and then let's go shift space to minimize the view and we've seen our camera view here we have this orange crosshair those are our empties basically and that might make things a little bit cluttered that don't really need to be so let's just shift select the other one in the outliner now we've got them both empty selected it doesn't really matter where we move these as long as we move them both together it's not going to position of our UVs so let's go G X and three just to move it three units along the x-axis and now we can still select the other one and then move that and that's kind of going to behave exactly as we expect since our keyframe is only going to affect the y-axis anyway so if we shift left arrow is your just snap back to where it needs to be anyway okay so our wormhole at the moment is a bit on the boring side we have this just linear progression straight into the center of the screen and if we had to plunge into the abyss we might as well make it interesting to look at so we want all these bends and twists and turns and stuff so to do that we're going to use an armature to deform our cylinder with so let's go shift a and add in an armature single bone let's go our x- 90 to lie it on its side like the cylinder is and if we select the cylinder press n to come up with the property sidebar and you can see that the dimensions of that z axis is 14 units it's 14 units long there let's go shift spacer with a little bit more view and if I select the armature press 7 on the numpad take a look from top orthographic view we can then press tab to tab into edit mode and we can lift this all the way up to match the same height as the cylinder in fact we can just round that off to 14 exactly now we don't want one bone we want three altogether so I'm going to press W to bring up the specials menu hit subdivide and instead of just the two bones we want three so I'm going to up the cuts there and now I'm going to grab the bottom of this section and then drag that down and then grab the top of this and drag that up and if we want a little bit more precision we can just round these off so I set that to 13 and then this bit down here let's set that to one I'm going to select this middle bone and let's go shift Spacely break open our properties window over here let's go over to the armature settings and we want this to be displayed as a be bone setup and let's come over to the bone tab and then let's increase the amount of segments we have in our bendy bones area here fat let's go crazy this let's go something like 24 so I'm just going to pull the difference between these windows down a little bit and a stretch this over here a touch alright so with this let's enter into our pose mode select this top bone and press G to move it around and you can see it sticks into the position because it's still attached to the middle bone let's go back into edit mode and with that top bone selected I'm going to go up P and then clear the parent and now when we go into pose mode again we can press G and now this moves independently but we still want this one to kind of twist and turn pointing at that top bone since we'll animate this top bone and you just want the rest to be calculated for us so with this middle bone selected let's come over to the bone constraints add a bone constraint let's choose the stretch to find our armature and then now we have a problem because we don't know what bone is what so what we can do and what we should do really is grab these bones this but one at the bottom I'm going to call the base this one middle let's call this bendy no mistaking that and then let's go at the top maybe call out the head so now with this middle bone selected let's select the head to be the bone to stretch to and now when we select this we can press G it seems to be working but if we take a look at this and press G move this over here it's not exactly very smooth as it comes into it there is something we can do about that we can select our middle bone again and come over to the bone settings middle click and drag down a little bit more use our custom handle references and we can choose the base and the head as it's in and out points and now it's looking a lot more smooth so I select that and go alt G reset the transform on it and now we want that kind of behavior to deform our cylinder our wormhole that we have here the problem with this particular cylinder at the moment if we tap into edit mode to take a look is that we've just got some vertices at one end and some vertices at the other and nothing really else to deform and twist and Bend in between so we could add an extra load of loops with ctrl R and let's do that let's go ctrl R and then we can use our middle mouse wheel to increase the amount of segments that we want but let's assume that we didn't exactly know how many segments we wanted so we want to keep this kind of as procedural as possible so I scroll down to just be one extra edge loop for now and left-click and drag that in and instead of moving anything let's just right click and cancel that transform so one modifier that we could use to do this sub-divided modifier well as well as subdividing that central edge there it's actually going to subdivide all the edges going around the cylinder as well which is not really geometry I think we need so this is going to be a lot of wasted geometry there basically so let's come over to our modifiers and choose instead a bevel modifier now currently that's doing the same problem it's going to bevel every single edge so instead that let's middle click and drag down and set this to be weight instead and now it's only going to bevel anything with a weight value above zero so let's middle click and drag up on our property sidebar find our edges data and we're just going to set the edges that we have selected in the middle air21 now it doesn't look like much has happened at the moment but if we tab into object mode pres is said to toggle the wireframe and I've come over to the display area of our object data tab and then let's come down and select the wire and draw all edges let's come back over to the modifier and here's our one segment of beveling that we've done in the middle here we can set that to two or three and only our weighted edges get beveled what we want though is instead of them bunched up here we want them evenly spread across the whole length now thankfully because this is so simple geometry it's actually pretty easy to do instead what we can do is set this to percent and then we can turn off our clamp overlap in fact and then let's set this to say 50% it will spread our edges so that they make it fifty percent of the way to those edges that we have at either end of our cylinder so if we set that instead to a hundred percent it's going to spread it across everything that means we're getting some overlapping geometry at either end which we'll see if we take the amount down below 100 that overlapping won't affect us but I thought it was worth pointing out just to get a better of understanding of the modifier now we have control over how many edges are evenly spread across the length of the cylinder let's try 32 for example and in fact we can left-click and drag and just increase or decrease the amount of loops that we want down the edge of this cylinder to be anything we want so again I'm just going to set that down to 32 for the moment and now we have enough geometry to be deformed by the armature so with the cylinder selected ll end shift select to the armature and go control P and select how much deform with automatic weights that means when we select cylinder again we come over to our data tab and you can see we have these three vertex groups auto-generated base Bendi and head it's fairly straightforward to see what's also happened with these vertex groups if we switch to wait engine mode you can see that this been deboned has got full strength of everything that's why it's red the base and the head though I've got absolutely zero control over anything shown by this blue color so what we want to do is tab into edit mode alt right click this end edge loop here and with the head selected there we want to give that full weight and the same at the bottom all right click this and with the base there we want to select a sign to make that 100% now again we could just go into weight painting and then go through here the base now looks like this then be still got full control over everything and head has now got control over the vertices on that end so let's go into object mode select armature which is in pose mode already select that top headphone there and press G and move around and you can see the cylinder is now behaving just as we wanted now if we squeeze this in you can kind of see that the the diameter of the cylinder is actually changing because you're trying to preserve the volume now I'd like to switch that feature off so let's go over to our stretch constraint which should show once we select the bendy bone and then we'll switch the volume setting here to none when I select that top head bone again and see that has fixed it and it looks like it has and now all we need to do is just give this top bone a little bit of animation data and that should provide all the twisting and everything that we need all right so let's get organizing just before we do this let's go back to object mode and let's put this armature by pressing M onto layer four and then layer four pops up in our layer list there let's give this a name sure not much of a surprise there let's turn back on that layer the visibility of it and let's go back into pose mode and what we can do now is to give ourselves a little bit more space on this side I'm just going to clean up the view with N and T there and zoom in on here as control and middle-mouse to get bit more precise on the border there let's see in fact select this camera border go over to the camera settings come over to the pass by - setting where we can set the darkness of this surround here so let's turn that up to maybe about there and then of course if we select our armature it's kind of in the way so let's set the armature settings to say wire instead and then we should be able to get away with selecting our top headphone there pressing G and then we can kind of see what's going on in fact let's do one more thing let's press n to bring up the display properties sidebar and then let's take it to only render and press ENTER close that again and it's a much much cleaner now so what we could do with this is just manually go for it so press I let's say move it into a position I should say and then press I to insert a keyframe move forward a few more frames press G and then maybe we wanted it there and this kind of thing that's perfectly fine that's a very very cool way to go about it and gives you tons of control obviously well let's just try a more procedural way of going about things so let's press alt G to clear out transform on that top bone and give ourselves a little bit more space down below and I'm going to give ourselves bit more space in this window so I switch over to a graph editor we've got no keyframes on this at the moment so let's press I to insert a location keyframe let's open up the head bone that we've got there and we've got keyframes for x y&z let's go down to the modifiers tab and currently we'll have the X location selected let's pull this out a little bit further and we can add a noise modifier and now instead of it just been a flatline giving us the value of zero we've got the shaky noisy value so let's press alt a and see what we've done well basically we seem to have just made it shiver a quite a lot so we don't really quite want that sort of effect but what we can do is increase our scale and that will slow things down since the x-axis along here is going to be our time line and then the strength should give us stronger and more wider array of values to switch between so let's go alt a again and see how far were pushing things so let's go up to one of these top peaks here so I'm just going to left-click and drag up up there and let's just keep on increasing the strength until we get around about where we want it yeah so you can see the little gizmo still shows up that's probably about right but I'll go a little bit higher than that still okay so let's just round that off to 30 just to make things a little bit nicer so is it the right kind of speed that is doing this though let's try again okay and it maybe is a little bit fast so let's take the scale up I even further press alt' pay again and that's looking okay now what we'll do is come over to this little button over here copy our exposition settings which is going side to side we now want to give it some up-and-down values which is our z axis so we're going to come over to the z axis and we'll paste that in in fact while we're here we'll just take the Y location and let's delete it since we don't really need that so with that now we have an X location and a Zed location but you'll notice that the curves are exactly the same and we don't really want that so on the Zed location I'm going to alter the phase of this so that we get something completely unique noise pattern happening there and now let's press alt a again see what we've got and I think that's looking pretty cool and it's really easy to just tweak our settings here and get unique and varied results okay for the material this is a technique that has the sort of result that you see actually quite a lot with this basic idea you can do a lot of those manga like streaks that you get behind characters in fact I've done this sort of thing on music videos in the past all you need is a nice image anything really you could take a cloudy looking image from online like here I'm just browsing the clouds results on pixabay or you can try taking a pretty colorful shot from the nebula fly through tutorial like we've done once we've got that image we just need to make it seamless a fairly pain-free way of doing that is just to take it into and then go filter map make seamless and that's it all we have to do is export out our image and then we've got it and if it's needed I'll include the image that I'm using here as a download for you to use if you want to so let's bring our seamless cloudy texture into blender let's switch this window over to an old editor let's go shift a and add in a texture image texture drop that in there go to open navigate to the nebula render tiles image open that up let's ctrl shift click on it and we can immediately see in the view let's press alt a and take a look and now it looks like we're flying through something so this could be a bit more impressive I think so let's select on it go ctrl T and that will auto generate these texture coordinates and mapping node for us that is if you have the node Wrangler I don't enabled and now I'm here what we can do is we can actually stretch out one of the axes so we can kind of push that up if we want it to tile a little bit more frequently or we can switch it down to make it stretch right out which is a little bit more like what you get with those manga lines which are quite common thing is this is the slowest anime heroes oome or wormhole fly-through I've ever seen put to the screen so let's close out this image we don't really need it now as left-click and drag into it collapse it just going to lift this off a little bit and we can lift this up a little bit as well and let's switch this to a graph editor at the bottom since if we just go over and select our warp start or walk end I should say we have our Y location there let's press n to bring up the modifiers tab cells click on that scroll down and then this is basically controlling our speed so let's set that up by holding shift and left-click and drag on it I'm going to take that down to about zero point zero eight or nine and now let's press alt pay again and now we've got something that looks a little bit cooler so there's loads of things that we can obviously do with this as we could do with any node as border select across with B press G to move them across there and what we could do is maybe add in a hue and saturation I'm just going to take the saturation down a little bit maybe tweak the hue as well maybe push it bit more into the blues and what we could also do is add in a color RGB curves node and drop that in and we could maybe increase the contrast a little bit let's go okay again and so you can see we could get lots of different styles even with this one image now what I'm actually going to do is set this up a little bit higher so that we get a little bit more detail and resolution that we can see on this let's go alt a and we see is not as streaky but we're getting a lot more sort of clumps of high detail frequency noise going on and what I'll do also is come over to select the camera and then let's take the focal length even further down let's kind of really quite distort the geometry that is very close to the lens here so let's take it down to around 10 and press alt a again and that's also creating a smaller hole at the end for us so let's press alt a and we can maybe tweak the scale a little bit further maybe try taking that up a little bit more or maybe just keeping it a little bit lower and I think about that is a kind of a happy medium so with that we've kind of got our base for which to build the rest of the textures on all right so at this point I think we need to talk about the end we need to see what we're actually going to be plunging into so if we got old a you can see we've got this a little bit of color at the end which is just the color of the 3d view gradient at the moment let's press n to bring up our property sidebar and set that to be the world background instead now we have this dark grey color let's go over to the world tab and click on our color swatch for that and now we have our decision so we want to go optimistically into the light at the end of the tunnel or we want to plunge ourselves into the deepest darkest depths of some kind so what we could do I mean one way to use this kind of effect is to make it look like whatever it is where the camera is placed it's kind of a light emitting from that we could have that and then we have a gradient which goes off into black or we could set that similarly just going into white and it looks like there's some light that we're going into either way it's going to depend upon your state of mind I suppose so I'm going to choose the more light at the end of the Tal sort of option so let's get setting that up so first of all we have this base layer already let's press B left-click and drag across them shift P to add them into a frame and to bring about our properties and we can name this now I just call that base layer let's press n again to close that and what I like to do is operate in the node editor a little bit like you might in a 2d layer stack so I'm going to put that at the bottom and then we're going to build our elements on top so this element that we're putting in now is pretty much our final layer but it's nice to kind of bookend everything what we do in between with the major elements here so let's go shift a and add in our texture gradient enough talk let's get on with it all right so we have our gradient texture ctrl T to generate our vector nodes ctrl shift click on this to take a look so this is pretty effective but we have some nice clean movies that have been set up sort of switch to those instead and it's wrapping around the wrong way at the moment we want to rotate this but that brings us to another point and that's the fact that we have our UVs on this cylinder let's come over to them we have a UV map and they're actually being walked by the modifier so if we come over to the modifiers and select our UV map warp and come back over to our UV maps and what we want to do is not obviously have this gradient sort of zooming down constantly instead what we want is to have another UV map which is just going to be a duplicate of that one and now we'll go UV map underscore static this one won't move because the modifier is walking this one instead it's going to leave that one alone so let's get rid of this texture coordinate node we don't want that instead we want to go shift a and add in our input UV map because we want to specify exactly which UV map we want to use and we want to use the UV map static so let's plug that in and also just to be clear let's go shift s on this and switch the type of this node to the input UV map also and we'll switch the UV map warp this time so that's all nicely cleaned up now what we want to do is rotate this around and I think we need to go negative 90 let's take a look in this view as well and you can kind of see what's happening take a look from the top orthographic view with seven on the numpad Express end to bring up by our properties sidebar we're just going to set this to display only render as well to clean up the view of it so we can see it starts at black and wound and then it goes to white towards the other now what we could do is just shift a and add in a color invert and drop that in and now we have a toggle in case we do want to plunge into black instead but I'm going to set that down to zero and will not really use this node mute in fact but with the N key alright so now what we want to do is go shift a and add in a color mix RGB node let's drop that in and now let's hook these up so that we have kind of the beginnings of our layer stack let's grab all these with the B key shift P and then press n to bring up the properties sidebar let's call this the end gradient and we've got everything we need here but we of course don't have our base layer so we're going to add this gradient on top of everything else let's switch that to add and we want that in the second socket and now we want this in our first socket and we're going to add it all the way now let's press alt a and we can see will now get this fade into the very bright light at the end now what I'd like to do is just control the fall-off of that fade so let's go ship a converter masts drop that in let's put that into our frame set the calculation to be power and now what we can do is control this a little bit and we can see what's happening in this of you we're basically pushing it away from the camera really and just having that little bit of bright light at the end so with that I think we are done with our end gradient let's just grab these guys press G and move them right up and now we've got some spaces more layers here so let's add in some long streaky speedy lines going along that wormhole here let's zoom in a little bit and what we can do is just first of all steal a couple of these guys a select UV map and the mapping nodes shifty to duplicate them move them up alt P to unparent them from that base layer frame there and then what's called a and add in a texture noise texture this should be a pretty simple setup really let's plug this in ctrl shift click it a couple of times so we get our grayscale output let's now go alt a to take a look and we can see we've got our noise hurtling towards the camera there it's not very streaky yet though so let's take our scale value I'm going to hold shift and drag that down towards zero and I think somewhere around 0.1 should do the trick and let's go and make this a little bit more noticeable by cranking the contrast I want to use a color RGB curves to do that let's drag this bottom-left point here towards the middle so we're basically going to turn anything that was mid gray and below into complete black and then also the lighter side of things we can brighten up by just bringing in the other side like this so let's go alt a again and we get these sorts of things swirling towards the camera now now it's a little bit misty and not very defined whatsoever so let's take up our detail to something like fire and now we get a little bit more high frequency between those larger shapes there's a couple of things we can do at this point we can kind of create a lot more interest by taking up the scale so something like 20 as you can see or if I bring that back down to say 5 or 4 we can actually set up the distortion as well and that is going to do something quite similar to taking the scale up the difference is here is that when we introduce this lot of stuff you kind of get these looping sort of shapes which I think are quite cool rather than just long streaks if you don't like that though just take the distortion down to zero and up the scale instead but now let's combine this with what we had so let's go shift a add in a color mix RGB node drop that in there so now we have this in the first layer which we don't really want so let's bring this into the first socket instead which would move that one into the second now if we take this up to mix all the way then obviously we're only going to get what's happening in the second layer but if we take this and make that add again it's kind of working but I'd like to try and preserve the coloring a little bit better it doesn't sit properly really so one of the brightening ad modes we could try is Dutch and that should sort of set it in a little bit nicer and let's go alt a to see this hurtling towards us now and that's looking pretty cool alright so let's clean this up slightly let's go ship space on it and then this one wants to now go in the top there and now let's just tuck this in a little bit and now that's all layered up properly so it's ctrl shift click this one shift space again to minimize the view and go alt a and now we can see we get the various different layers that we have now the three layers so far working together one last thing I'm going to do is press B to border select across those and let's just press B and middle click across that because I don't want to include that in my selection and then just go shift P add in that frame and let's call these long streaks close out the property sidebar with the N key again and then I'm going to grab these two here press G and move them up and now we have a little bit more space for some more texture shenanigans all right so let's create some pulsating energy rings of light that kind of hurtle towards us here so let's go and add that in let's try this with a texture wave texture let's drop that in there and we want our UV coordinates so let's go input UV map find our walking UVs and hook those up let's go ctrl shift and click on this and right now if we go off a it's kind of a crazy psychedelic interesting thing happening which is pretty intense which might actually work really well as a one texture elements but we're just going to keep things simple and remove the spiral nature of this and so what we can do we do that is create a vector mapping node and drop it in here and if we just play with our y-axis here and set that to about 45 degrees we get our rings so let's go alt again and it's kind of difficult to see what on earth is happening there which is in itself again kind of an interesting effect but what we'll do is set our scale right down to say something like 1 and let's go up again it's slow enough to make out what's actually happening now so at the moment it looks more like just black rings rather than the white title rings that we want so let's go shift a and add in a converter math node to do that set this to power as we did before and then if we set this above 1 we can kind of start to decrease the amount of size of the white areas so let's go alt a and boom we have our right white bright light now we have the scale here which is going to do something a little bit similar to what the scale here would do or what I'm going to do is just keep things simple set these to 1 you can kind of get subtly different results here especially once you introduce the distortion and that's what we're going to do right now let's take this down a little bit further though 0.5 and now I'm going to up the distortion so I'm going to set out to about two and the type of distortion is dependent on these two values so let's set our detail up to say something like 5 and let's play with this a little bit more maybe take that up to what's hand so we have some weird seams here but we can always correct this later on if we need to so let's take another look with alt a and that's looking pretty good let's see this now in relationship with all the other layers that we've got so let's take this mix RGB node shift D to duplicate drop it in there and actually we want this layer beneath to be the first layer that want to be the second and then similarly up here this one needs to be the first and this layer itself here needs to be the second so that's all set up correctly now and let's go off a and take a look all right so that's looking pretty good at the moment it's a bit blown out though so what I'm going to do is try and introduce more gray values by taking this lower and closer to one so we get in something which is spreading out there a little bit which is okay let's take it down say something like 8 and that's looking ok I think what we need to do is just back the value of how much we're dodging onto this so let's try 0.9 and now we're getting a lot more detail and it's not quite as blown out but it's go old pay again and let's just take a look and yeah I think that should do the trick so zoom out a little bit forward to select across all of these B and middle click across that just make sure it's just these nodes that we can shift P to add into our frame let's call this horses let's create some mid frequency noise now just a little something for our eyes to anchor on to in these larger softer forms so I think this should be pretty easy since we've got a lot of the elements we need already for example in this long streaks should do it so I'm going to press B to border select across those and then shift D to duplicate them move them up that we need to make a little bit of space so I'm going to border select across these at the top lift that up grab our long streaks again and then bring them into position and to open up the properties sidebar let's change this to mid frequency noise alright let's ctrl shift click on it there's our long streaks those long streaks are coming from this mapping node the y-axis scale value which you don't really need now so let's control X to delete it while maintaining the node connection between these two and it's very distorted at the moment we don't need that to set that to zero and then we're pretty much there I think what we'll do is just add in a convert and math node at the end set that to power and now we've got some nice control over our fall-off especially once we raise this above one so let's take that to about there what I'd like to do with this is have more patches of light generally going on so I'm going to turn the scale up to something around 12 so something like that and these below now areas I'm just going to reduce a bit by taking this little white point on the far right of the RGB curves and just back that off a little bit in fact overall I think I'm going to bring in more grayscale values by pulling this one at the bottom further to the left and now what really what we need to do is see this in context so let's grab a mix RGB node shift D to duplicate it bring that to the side of this mixed frequency noise frame and then let's bring that into the first socket should bump that into the second and then let's put this into position by replacing the first socket there let's control shift click on the very end so now we have all elements working together actually I set this to one and really control how much brightness is coming into here with this little point on the far right here but for the most part I think we're getting a lot of nice little details coming through so for example what's really cool about this setup it's quite easy to just grab the node at the end and press m to mute it you can see the difference that that layer is making so it's got alt a and take a look at it in action and yeah I think that's all we need to this mid frequency noise I think that's kind of sitting in quite well let's introduce some star streaks into this kind of almost like little points of light that have been stretched because of some kind of motion blur clearly with this sort of technique we're going to struggle with introducing any actual motion blur so we're kind of going to fake it a little bit with this particular texture and it's very similar to the long streaks really so let's use that as a base let's border across them with the B key shift D to duplicate them let's bring them to the top and we'd hop on that in there let's go alt P pop that back out and this stuff up at the top border select across those with the B key give ourselves a little bit more space this is going to be one of the final elements now what we want to do is ctrl shift click on this I'm going to reset this all to one though so left click and drag across them all put that to one take the distortion down to zero the detail back down to two and instead of manipulating the Y value this time I'm going to increase the x value and I'm going to take that up to something around 8.5 and I'm now going to crunch in the leftmost point on this RGB curves take that up to around 0.6 or so and now we have our little stars that have streaked across we can control a bit of this with the scale factor so let's need to take that up to something like 20 and I'm also going to back this off a little bit on here fade these out a little bit more like this and I will see these in context so let's go shift space to go fullscreen since we're getting very vertical here and shifty did you create this one drop that in there again simply as we've done before this one goes into the top socket and this one goes into the top socket so it's ctrl shift click on the final airship space to take a look in our rendered camera now we can see all our little streaks showing in in fact if we want to just see the difference we can just select down node at the end there press M to toggle what they look like before and after and of course we've got long streaks still let's rename that to be star streaks and we can control kind of how bright some of these are with this right point on our RGB curves and I think maybe about there seems to be a decent sweet spot so let's take a look at this in action with alt pay and I think we're just about done with the major elements so far we've been reaping the benefits of the material viewport shading which is essentially giving us a dutiful and unflinching representation in real time of our material setup in fact if we uncheck only render here take a look at our frames per second in the top left there it's actually hitting it pretty nicely let's come over to our rendering tab set that up to say 30 instead and it's still managing to hit that with no issue and if we come up to 50 frames a second it's pretty much being maxed out at 40 frames per second or so which is pretty good setting that back to 24 frames per second let's take a look in rendered view and cue sad trombone things aren't quite looking how they should but this is actually pretty cool on its own but it's not really the effect that we're going for but it does give us a good opportunity to talk about how some of these nodes work so the majority of what we're looking at here which has gone wrong is coming from our star streaks so I'm just going to mute that here and now it cleans it up a whole lot so really all this is is it's just values outside of zero and one coming out of the RGB curves and you really get a whole lot of those when you squeeze things in on either side like we have here really easy to fix though we just bring this out and go and add in a color ramp node at the end this is essentially going to clump the values coming out of here between zero and one and now if we go to rendered view well in fact if we just unmute that with the M key you can see in render view it's actually totally fine and in material view it's very very similar now so some of you might be thinking what on earth was the point in doing that because this node right here could do the job of this one perfectly fine well basically I just like to start with these RGB curves because I'd never know whether I'm really going to go for color for starters and this color ramp is only going to give us grayscale values despite what this little yellow node is trying to trick us into the other issue is that we have things like a factor slider here and if we wanted to we could introduce curves into this I'm just going to undo that we control Zed though and since we're not actually using any of those benefits we might as well just swap this out now so what we've got here on this second point is zero point seven seven eight so I'm going to select this second point here and set that to zero point seven seven eight this one on the far left is zero point six one five so let's select this one on the Left zero point six one five and now if we actually just take this out and put that into the second socket and instead of taking the out of this RGB curves we take the factor out of the noise texture like this we can now easily compare the two with the RGB curves we're getting this and now with this color ramp node we're getting exactly the same all right so we can delete that RGB curves node and we can sit that back in and we've got our long streaks down here which is going to give us something similar so let's just mute this one and now let's take a look in rendered view and material view and that's pretty much identical now what we'll do is first of all just add in the color ramp towards the end and as I say we could just leave it at that because now the values are going to be clamped between zero and one but since we're not using it any curves we're not using any color and we're not really using this factor slider now's the time to swap this over so let's undo that point and select this one on the Left 0.5 that's pretty easy let's set that one to 0.5 and this one on the right this one needs to be about 0.699 in fact let's just call that 0.7 and now again let's just do our little test just to prove this take this one going into here and take the factor out of this instead to go into the color ramp unmute our Dodge node there let's take a look at the differences here absolutely none and let's take a look now in our rendered view and switch that back to material view and you can see it's identical again so now we can take out our RGB curves and delete it so with that we're back on track and we can add just one final element which is a bit of a nice to have but maybe not essential and leave it down to you as to whether you want to include it or not but what I'm going to do is just grab these final two nodes up here and just give ourselves space to just add one more thing so let's try some for an L on this basically some brightening at the glancing angles on this geometry as far as our camera sees it so let's go shift a in an input layer weight node and drop that in so we have our for an L output but we also have this facing output which I think has a kind of a longer and smoother gradient from our lights to darks so it's control ship click this to see we've got there we have our brightening on the glancing angles happening and what we could do with this is now control it a little bit better with this math node set to power which again as we've done before is just going to control our fall-off so if we set this up we kind of get more brightness and then we can kind of clamp that in if we like or we can bring this back now it's possible you may be thinking sometimes why not just use a color ramp on this let's just set that up to something like around here so if we wanted to say clamp it off into the blacks into around here and we want to achieve that with a color ramp we can plug that in and give it a try but I think you'll probably see that it feels like a nicer smoother gradient when we have a power node doing that sort of job so anyway I'm going to delete that with the X key and let's take a look at this really in context so let's duplicate one of these shift D to duplicate it as drop it in and then this one can go in the first socket and then the always go in the first socket of the one above them so let's do that again and let's ctrl shift click this final node and when you see we do get a little bit of brightening around the edges there let's try a slightly different area let's kind of make that a little bit larger a little bit more pronounced so I'm not going to clamp it in quite as far so let's take that down say something like three and I think that might probably just about do it don't want to go too extreme on the effect it's almost like it's getting white-hot due to the tension of whatever is happening in this thing might actually just set the size of it down maybe a little bit it's mostly going to be a bit of a push and pull between these two nodes for your personal tastes so let's just label this up even though there's not much to label just these two nodes shift P once we've selected them let's just call that edge highlight let's go ship space on the node window just to maximize the view there and we've got a few nodes down here that we don't really need I'm going to delete those two and keep the color grid that we had around though we might need that let's border slect across with the B key on the final nodes and let's raise them up a bit closer to our end node in the chain there and talking to that actually let's put one more in here just to treat the whole thing let's go RGB curves drop that in let's go ship space take a look at what we're doing here and basically if we go alt a we can use this to affect the coloring quite a bit so let's bump up the red channel for example and we can get kind of a completely different tone and feel to it I'm going to offset that bump in the red channel by just dropping the whole thing down a bit something like this and I think that's looking pretty cool so the major aspects of this material are pretty much in place we have the end gradient the edge highlights we've got things like the mid frequency noise long streaks and down at the bottom here the base layer the good old days when we had our nebula image and we spent the time energy impatience putting that into a 2d image editor and making it seamless let's ctrl shift click on that and there's our seamlessness in all of its glory but if we come up to where our procedural texturing begins and ctrl shift click our long streaks you can see we didn't really afford this the same kind of opportunities at the bottom there occasionally it's quite noticeable you can really see a kind of a nasty seam there and people may have been screaming at the screens about this since nearly the beginning so let's save some vocal chords out there and get this fixed so all we want to do is create a mask really so we want a nice little smooth gradient at the bottom there and then we'll use that to mix between two different noise textures so let's go shift a and add an input UV map and let's just choose the UV map static from the list let's go and add in also a texture gradient texture plug those in but ctrl shift click this and that's basically what we want but we want to remap this so we'll use a color ramp to do that let's drop that in and so we can add in an extra point and make this point at the far right a black color so that it now goes from black to mid gray background to black again let's make our mid gray actually white and since we only want to mix away just the bottom area there I'm actually going to crunch this over to the side maybe a 0.1 add another point take that to 0.9 and actually make sure that that is full white again and now we have our mask let's border select across these with the B key shift P and let's call that my and let's just move that off to the side slightly so let's give our masks something to do we want to blend between to noise textures so let's create the space to make that happen let's bring these up here and this color ramp out here here's our noise texture and the two nodes that we need with it so let's go shift D duplicate them move them down let's go shift a and add in a color mix RGB node here's our magical node which is going to do the mixing let's take the color out at first and plug that into the bottom socket and now let's get our mask and put that into action into the factor all right so let's ctrl shift click on this and now we can see the majority of this is quite colorful and then it blends into black and white right at the bottom where our mask is making that happen so we know we've got it working here I'm actually just going to flip these around though so I'm gonna left click and drag to swap those so that this stuff on top is the majority and this stuff at the bottom is the fix and also while we're here let's make sure we take the grayscale output before we forget so now these are very equivalent but we still of course have our seam since the seam here is the very edges of our UV map so if we tab into edit mode let's break open our trusty UV map image editor let's find that there and if we control tab to select our edges and alt right-click the side there there's our seam clearly running down the center at the bottom and what we want to do is we need a new UV map so let's click on the plus icon call this warp offset let's go ctrl tab switch back to face select mode and I'm going to try and press B to border select across the right hand half of faces there which it looks like a gut and now let's take a look at our coordinates by pressing the N key is that coordinates up here I want to switch this to normalize just because we can and then let's just go G X minus one to basically move it one full unit across to the left so it's still going to tile so now we're our scene was is right now in the middle so let's press a to deselect a to select everything and then G X 0.5 to move it halfway across which should place it exactly where we want it and it set the normalized off now though tab back into object mode close that window by left-click dragging into it and then what we can do now is find our UV map node and switch that UV map warp offset and we've now blended away our troubles there is a little issue with this of course if we go alt a to animate it we don't actually have anything moving there that's just a static UV map since our UV warp modifier is only concerned with this particular UV map so what we're going to need to do is add another UV warp modifier so let's go down to the bottom lift that up and then let's find that again lift it up again and that's fine in its second position let's call this UV warp dot offset and now the from can be the same as the other ones the start and end that we had and then our UV map can be the UV map warp offset now when we press alt a everything is fixed and we have our seamless procedural texture I think what I'll do now is close out the properties sidebar just clean this up a little bit move that down let's move this up slightly press shift and left-click across that noodle line there and let's just press G to move it and then again shift left click press G to move that off to the side there and this one which I'm going to go alt P to just pop it back out that frame and press n to bring open the property sidebar again and actually this node here to make sure we selected it and I'm going to call that mask as well and now it's just a matter of hooking this kind of setup up to any of you other procedural textures that we think are going to need that theme blending away so let's check our next procedural texture up our pulses layer and ctrl shift click on the power node at the end of this frame and let's just step through the animation with the left and right arrow keys I'm just going to hit the right arrow for now and here we are we've got a fairly obvious seam so we know what we're doing now so let's just go shift space and we'll correct this pretty quickly let's just border select everything above the pulses layer including the pulses layer move that up so that we have enough space to basically duplicate these nodes that are to do with the texture so I'm going to go shift D bring those down shift a to add in a color mix RGB node since this is where the magic happens I'm going to plug this one into the first socket since we want these swaps over and musk is here and we can plug that into our factor make sure we're using their warp offset and let's go ship space again and we can see those all fix okay cool let's go up into the next layer up let's find our mid frequency noise that's control shift click this ship space to take a look and it's a fairly obvious seam running through there and I think we can fix that just as easily as we did with the last one so let's zoom out a little bit create the space we need order select across all those g2 move them up a little bit and it's just these two nodes that are to do with the texture so let's go shift E and duplicate them down shift a to add in our magic node and there we go and then let's plug this into the top so that they kind of criss crossed over there like that and then let's grab our mask let's bring this out a little bit actually let's bring that out to about there and then left-click and drag from there to the factor shift and left-click across this noodle line here and press G to just make that a bit neater overall alright so also we'll swap that to our warp offset now let's go ship space and take a look and it looks like it's working ok to play the animation and we have everything right there now so let's move up a little bit we have our star streaks control shift click this there is a seam there but really I don't think we need to fix that let's move up a little bit more now we have our edge highlight and the end gradient which don't have seams anyway so it's ctrl shift click this towards the end and then that should be our final result let's press alt a to play that now and all our seams are blended right away but you can see that we've not really got the full frames per second anymore so what we can do is just in fact just shrink this window down a little bit like this let's zoom in a bit more and let's play that again and we're pretty much on 24 frames per second we can just keep on talking this in until we hit that 24 ounce a second which looks like we have it now so there we are we're back up to speed with seamless and it's looking pretty cool overall I think so that's our material all pretty much nicely wrapped up we've got loads of layers here and there's tons of variations we can do with this but now I want just suggest a couple of final other tweaks that we can make to this which are pretty fast and easy let's just step forward using the right arrow to where we can see the light at the end of the tunnel and what I'd like to do is control the size of that light at the end of the tunnel so the size of the end vertices on this cylinder basically so let's middle click and up on our modifiers we'll make this nice and easy on ourselves by simply doing this with a simple deform modifier let's middle click and drag down and find it click on the up arrow above the armature let's take it above the bevel modifier as well that's pretty much fine where it is so now let's set that to taper and we've got our factor deform control now and that's holler ease to it so now we can make this large or small or whatever we want I'm going to set it to around 0.6 so I think we're done with the materials we've done with the mesh one other thing to consider is possibly taking a look at our seam nodes let's select to use nodes and take a look down here and find them we've got nothing in our render buffer so let's hit f12 to render and it should render in a flash plus hit escape and now let's turn on the backdrop and we won't see anything until we hit control shift and click on this to auto generate our viewer node and what we could try is maybe a distort lens distortion just going to drop that in there ctrl shift click on it and then if we set this to fit about let's go full screen with ship space alt and middle click to move that off to the side there and if we set our distortion down to something like minus 0.2 we can kind of drag it and pull it away and make it feel a bit more distant there and shrink it even further and we can nicely offset that by increasing our dispersion which should also generate some interesting colors around the edge of the lens let's go ship space and take another look at a frame where it's twisting around a bit more say something like that one hit f12 and render this so with that effect it does add a little bit of render time onto it but as you can see it's nice actually taking very long to render at all I think playing with these values until you get hit the sweet spot will really help sell the effect but I'd consider just muting this really and just render it without and then once the image sequence is rendered out we just go shift a and add in the image and then find your image sequence and then plug that in and then unmute that obviously and then render that out to a new image sequence and then it's all done and that wraps those up time to return time and space back to how we found it thanks very much for joining us on this dimensional leap the spacing effect elements serious like with Alexandra and me 80 worlds

Channel: CG Masters

Views: 136,068

Keywords: aidy burrows, aidy, burrows, blender, free tutorial, video tutorial, tutorial, cycles, cg masters, cg, cgmasters.net, cgmasters, wormhole, vfx, anime, streaks, animate uvs, uvs, procedural, space vfx, space, bendy bones, rigging, texturing, real-time

Id: K2WTH016rfk

Length: 62min 44sec (3764 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 23 2017