A - Wind Effect. Blender Days of Type. Blender Tutorial.
Вставка
- Опубліковано 24 лип 2024
- ** My apologies in advance for the audio levels everyone! **
Inspired by the ‘36 Days of Type’ community project and others like it, the approach will be to use the letters of the English alphabet as a creative constraint combined with a key concept or goal to help explore interesting concepts in motion graphics. Not only will these projects and tutorials be a learning experience for myself and help develop my own individual production pipeline, my hope is that they help others as well.
These projects are only one way of doing things that I have found that works in this instance. Questions and comments below are welcome in the hope that myself and others will benefit and learn.
The Letter A.
In this first project I wanted to understand the best way to control the look of wind swept plants and to create a rig that would enable me to change the animation as needed.
The rig I came up with here was one that would control at least 3 different wind effects. The sway of the branches, the ripple of the leaves, and the bending of the plant as a whole.
Check out my Gumroad page here: gumroad.com/icomdesign
All the texture packs contain presets for both Element 3D and Blender.
Thanks to Quixel for their model of the Palm plant: quixel.com
And thanks to Unreal Engine for supporting Quixel and the wider 3D community: www.unrealengine.com/en-US/ - Фільми й анімація
this is a weirdly good introduction to drivers and making custom controllers in general
Wow that scene at the start is just really gorgeous and shows exactly the sort of thing a person would want to learn. It's rare to see people show the result at the very start. People should do that more so people know they aren't wasting their time. I love this. I just started the tutorial and I already know I'll be saving it for when I need to animate wind.
great tutorial indeed! did you mange to bake the animation into your mesh for exporting?
Man, this is a superb setup. I really appreciate you showing it and I'm looking forward to the animation nodes video. Subscribed.
Thanks Nitram 2000
Stunning grading!
just a PERFECT tutorial..fit my needs perfectly! well done, well explained and very easy to follow and understand! KUDO's! very happy to have found your vid!!!!!
Perfect is a strong word but thanks for the kind word. Hope it helped.
My Boss gave me task to learn animate plants through wind simulation. Good thing that I found your video and I can have full control over my plants like a Stelline's "memory orb" device from Blade Runner 2049. Thank you very much!
I have nothing to say, just wanted to add a comment to encourage you to do more work like this since it is very good and very useful to watch.
Thanks HandyAndyG
Beautiful!! Thank you!
Simple, but very handy. Thank you.
Working on another tutorial. This time I want to learn more about Animation Nodes and how to transform an object. I always thought I would get around to Animation Nodes but I keep putting it off. I'm also going to give away the project files for all these tuts.
YOU JUST SAVE SOMEONE'S LIFE !!!
@@runningcoyote9972 Great comment. Glad it helped !!! :)
Thanks, excellent tutorial! This is exactly what I was looking for. Animating Quixel plants. Also, an extra note for adding a little more realism: You can use a vertex group for the leaf displace modifier with high weights for leaves and lower weights for the stems. Either paint the stems in weight paint mode or do it with selections in edit mode. Converting tris to quads in edit mode and using edge select can help selecting all the stem planes faster.
Thanks Andrew. I agree the more vertex groups and variation in the weight maps the better. The stems of the plants are weight painted so they don't move.
This is really awesome, saved my arse on a project. Thanks a lot dude, subscribed!
Thanks Victor. It always pays to do a search on UA-cam before committing to a project. I do it myself just to make sure of what I'm doing. I also read the comments. There is always someone there who has a gem of an idea to add.
Thank you so much for this tutorial
Exceptional tutorial! Subbed, keep up the great work
Thanks Stefan
Wow - head and shoulders above everything else I've found for this problem.
Thanks Dave. Glad it helped.
the only good tut on animation thanks.
Thanks. I'm glad you liked it. But I know it's not the only one :)
Thank you very much for this class! I used to make wind effects in another software, but it is very expensive, and the effects are not so good as this one.
This is a new brilliant idea!!! 🤩🤩🤩🤯🤯🤯🔥🔥🔥
Thanks Kevin. Glad it helped.
@@icomdesign Your welcome... :)
thanks a lot man .
Thanks a lot dude!
Good job.. Bro
Thank you, excellent
Thanks Nathalie.
after assigning some brunches to a vertex group you could just hide them to get out of the way
yeah its easyer to see what is done
Thanks George. I absolutely agree. Rombout Versluijs pointed this out as well and was one of the main suggestions I was grateful for.
It looks like the Megascans plant is using opacity maps now, not sure why but the one i imported doesn't have individual poligon leaves, just a basic shape with maps.
We could go overboard with this :) We could add extra controllers to that cone which allows us to change the texture size using a driver and set say 2 rings on that cone you you can do all of that from the viewport.
Yes. And it would be the same for any rig. The more complexity the better. The more time you spend on the initial setup the more professional the end result will look.
Something so simple yet effective. Thank you for the tutorial. Only critique is that your voice audio is a little low.
this is so cool!!!
Thanks Metal Head
my pleasure mate!
This is great, exactly the results i was looking for! But how do we bake the animations into the mesh so that it can be exported as an animated .glb or .fbx for use in a website or game engine? i tried applying all the modifiers but the mesh is static. I am doing something wrong?
I like how you gave the animation before you started it
I also like to see the end product up front for longer style tutorials. Helps to know what you are aiming for and why you are doing certain things in the process. I'm also trying to put some of these techniques under real world pressure to see if they really work or not.
Wow! Thank you very much! But pls make else next part this lesson where you show us how can we record animation in blender and export this in game engine UE4 or Unity. Thx.
Thanks. I'm only just getting to know UE4 myself.
You would need to bake the animation. Im not sure it would port over properly. You wont get an armature, but i do think you can bake it.
very nice
Thanks Yadi
Can someone explain to me if unreal automatically plays the animation of the "wind breeze" when you import the fbx with animation ticked on. Or is it a blueprint setup you need to do afterwards as well? Also, is it hectic on system resources if all your trees, bushes and grass have a breeze-animation to them?
I used this method and scattered different plants (8-9 types) on the surface using particle system, the downside is that each type of plant has its own animation and when there are many of them it gets kind of synchronic. For example every rose in the scene has the exact same animation, every poppy has the same animation etc.
U found any way?
@@jatinjulka6478 no I haven't 🥲
Might be easier to hide the assigned geometry as you go along...select geometry, assign, hide "h", repeat... and when your done assigning press "ALT h" to bring it all back.
Thanks IvanB. Rombout has made the same point previously in the comments. Definitely the way to go.
This is a great tutorial. But seeing how you assigned the branches to vertex groups left me wondering: why don't you select all preexisting groups of branches, then with CTRL-I invert the selection and from that de-select the branches you don't want in your next group? Doing that would leave you each time with less branches to choose from. And you wouldn't have to remember which branches are already selected every time.
Hi Erika. Thanks for that. Read the comment below by George Tsianakas. His approach is even easier and more efficient. As he suggested, after assigning some brunches to a vertex group you could just hide them to get out of the way.
SPrry but when doing the vertex groups isn't it easier when you hide them as you are going forward. That way you easily see which ones are left and don't accidentally select the same one again. Atleast, that's how i would tackle it
That is a much better idea. For those who don't know once you select your vertices for the group you can hit the letter 'h' on your keyboard to hide what you have selected. Then at the end you hit 'Alt h' to un-hide them.
@@icomdesign Yup, i thought that would be much easier selecting the next set and so on.
please check Sound levels before exporting a video.. nice tutorial BTW but i had to listen this video on full volume on my speaker
Thanks Aman. Point taken. I'll double check my settings next time.
How would you do this with a group of plants or grass? Do you copy it and then paste it onto your canvas?
In the video I set up the basic method of controllers and drivers and then I made duplicates with the shortcut Shift - D. This preserves all their links to controllers and modifiers and so on. Grass however, is a different creature. I am actually working on a tutorial that deals with it. The video above deals with single or groups of plants. With one or two main controllers you can affect the whole scene as I did in the video. But grass is different in that it behaves almost like water. There is the individual motion of each grass or grain stem but whole areas of grass move together when a stronger gust of wind goes by. Artists need to be able to artistically direct the overall windiness of the scene as well as these gusts of wind. The tutorial for this will be out in the next week or so.
Hey, when I duplicate the mesh, and then move it, it start deform the mesh a lot. Do you have a solution please ?
Make sure when you duplicate the mesh that you also duplicate the controller empties as well. Each plant has its own 'Empty Bend' and 'Empty Movement' controller that has to go along with it. These empties are linked back to the scene main controllers.
@@icomdesign Yeah I understood that later ! The good fact is that we can use particle system without needing to duplicate controllers ! Thanks for your tutorial !
Next, how to create this in geometry nodes... :)
Can you make a tutorial how to make an object interact with plants in blender. For example, using a human object walking with mixamo rig, then underneath there is a plant like a human stepping on a plant. So, so that humans do not penetrate the plant, how do they interact. Realistic. Sorry if there are any mistakes word and thank you.
Plants are difficult to get right. It is almost like they need their own type of physics solver that understands some behavioral rules. Like fluid solvers do. To make closeup interactions with characters look convincing I don't think you have any option but to rig a plant and animate the contact directly.
@@icomdesign ... But I saw a tutorial how to interactive grass with objects, it's easier. If the plant doesn't know.
@@cg.man_aka_kevin Please share the link so we can all check it out.
@@icomdesign ua-cam.com/video/pYO_Ucq-rPI/v-deo.html
Let's check it out... :)
how do you change the object mode to edit mode
When you have an object selected if you hit the Tab key it will go into edit mode. In my case I have the 'Tab for Pie Menu' check box ticked in the Preferences section under the 'Keymap' tab. You'll find it if you go to 'Edit' then 'Preferences' and then click the 'Keymap' tab on the left.
PS didi you added bracnhes multiple times to different groups. I saw you had quite a list of vertex groups. BUt the plant didn't had that many branches, you selected 3 each time right?
Yes I selected about 3 branches per group. There are actually 25 branches that make up the model :)
@@icomdesign Ow really, than its quite dense, didn't look that dense in the video. I saw this tutorial from John van de Heml from blender tips. He has a trick using a lattice i believe. I wonder what could be done with that one together with some python coding to address each single lattice point to a group in the plant. Your approach is very detail and looks stunning. I did wonder if you use global controls, meaning each plant will be connected to that cone and other controller. Or does each single plant gets its own controller. Perhaps i missed that part
@@RomboutVersluijs Each plant is linked to global controllers. Those controllers are the ones I view in the bottom right in a separate 3D view port. To add more complexity and to prevent all plants changing speed at exactly the same time I would maybe have 3 groups of global controllers so I could offset the animations from each other.
@@icomdesign thanks, wasnt sure if you used 1 but that would look to repetitive.
Does the wind generator not work better ?
I personally have not been able to make the wind physics work very well for things like plants. The wind force seems to be better suited for objects that are more uniform like cloth or paper, but plants are more structurally complex and even with weight painting the system does not respond with the kind of predictability or directability that I need. Simulations can also be very computationally expensive. I don't know how other dedicated applications accomplish this, but it seems to me as though plants need their own kind of physics solver. Although a bit limited, in Blender we have an addon called “Sapling” that produces some of the best wind effects I have seen for tree objects and this is achieved by a rigging system without any kind of physics.
WOuld be nice for other if you happen to know tricks to select branches when they are connect :)
If you need to select the vertices of a branch that is connected to the trunk of a tree for example, one quick selection method I know of in Blender is to select a vertex at the tip of the branch and then hit 'Ctrl +' on your Num Pad and the selection will group each time you do it. Once you have almost selected what you want you will then have to manually finish off the selection exactly where you need it. To get an even better result you could then blur the cut off point with a weight painting brush. Weight Painting is an important subject in animation. I'm sure I'll be looking more deeply into that in this series.
@@icomdesign Yes i know that one. I do believe there is another trick. SInce this model has uvs you could also use "Limit by Selection" and then use UV maps as the limit. I was curious if you perhaps knew other tricks. Thanks!
PS wheres that model from. THis was a tutorial right?
The model is from quixel.com and is part of their Megascans collection. If you sign up for an Unreal Engine account at unrealengine.com you then get free access to quixel's resources. I should put those links in the description.
@@icomdesign Sorry, i think i didnt read the description very well, was late last night. I know see you did mention it at the bottom. Sorry for my mistake.
@@RomboutVersluijs No. I added the links after I read your question about where the model came from.
@@icomdesign Ow really, thats great!
This video is incredibly quiet