Original subtitles

Here's an interesting idea, rather than rendering these flowing and connected polygons as we

might a standard polygonal object, how about we replace them all with planes of various sizes

with fuzzy animating textures on? it gives a pretty cool illustrative and very non-photoreal look®

we do have to be a little bit cautious with this technique though because it can be a

little tricky for the computer to render all of this, depending on how many planes we use, but we

should be able to play with the settings to get a pretty cool and very workable result, so i'm going

to use this car from Manu as an object as a kind of test subject, the crash test dummy so to speak

this car by the way is a sort of stripped down version from Manu's cheese attack scene

which is so good, i don't know whether this is a take on cheese not being very healthy and here

it is played out with more agency and urgency, a lifetime of cheese attacking the heart in one

go or something like that, but i love this image nonetheless and wanted to use this car, so let's

get on with it, so a quick setup of where we are right now i have this car in two different objects

they both use this same simple car material and i'm using a vertex color input and plug

that into the base color, here i've switched into vertex paint mode and now we can see the colors

we have on this selected object, to see it without shading we can select our flat shading and to see

all vertex colors for all objects within solid shading mode, we can just switch from material to

vertex here and then we could paint some colours in there if we like, this is easy stuff all we're

doing here is selecting a colour and then going paint and then set vertex colours for all the

vertices in that object and then repeating that step for the other object, this one which is also

using the same material doesn't have a vertex color set on there just yet, which is why this is

giving us a danger sign and if we take a look at it in rendered actually material preview, we don't

have any lights in our scene actually, uh we'll see it all shows up as black as soon as we just

go into vertex paint mode that'll automatically create a vertex color set for us which we can find

down here, vertex colors and call is the default name given, so that's all good to go i can paint

on here whatever we like but i'll just keep that as white and head back into object mode, all

right with that out of the way let's set up our particle system on just the sphere for the moment

and this is what we're going to use to be able to create this kind of effect, so i'm going to come

over to the particles tab of the properties window and then click on the little plus, we'll call this

fuzzy because it's kind of a fuzzy effect, right now we're given 1 000 particles, but they're only

going to be emitted between frame 1 and 200 and we want them all at the same time, so i'm going

to click and drag across there set that to one and there we go! so if we press play and then play to

stop we'll notice that they all fall down, so the next thing i'm going to do is come over to the

field weights and i'm going to turn the gravity all the way down and now that's much better

problem is though we've got a lifetime of 50 which means after 50 frames, a little over two seconds in

this case they're all going to disappear, they're all going to die basically because their lifetime

is tragically short, so what we're going to do is just hold down 1 a whole bunch of times

and that will convert it into the longest time that Blender can handle, it's not quite escaped

mortality but that should be long enough to create the illusion of immortality, that's all we need to

go back to frame one i can just go Shift and left arrow by the way which is why we don't need to see

a timeline in this to be able to control the where we are in the animation, but as we see this they're

expanding out which we don't want, so if we come over to the velocity we can set our normal down

to 0, now again shift left arrow and then press space to play the animation and nothing happens

they all just stay in position, which is what we want, we don't want any movement from this, now we

don't want these little spheres so if we come down to the render and viewport display area, we can see

it's rendering these little halos, so we want to change that we're going to change this to a plane

so i'm going to create a plane i'm going to press m to move it into a collection i'm just going to

keep it into the car collection for the moment and press g and just move that to the side and then

i'm going to select the sphere again so we can get back to our particle settings, come down to the

render section and then instead of the halo let's switch that to object, the object that we want the

instance object is in this list somewhere, but i'm just going to use this eyedropper and just select

our plane that we have in the scene there and now all those little halos have been switched to the

plane, perfect for our needs. now in the particle settings we can see that set to object scale which

means this object so as we scale, here we can see it going larger and smaller on the sphere itself

but it's not very equivalent to the main plane, so i like to set this to one so that the actual

size of all these particles are actually the same size as this plane, so i'm going to scale that down

a little bit to something like this, then select our particle system again so we can hack at these

settings a little bit more, something we'll notice here is that they're all facing up to the sky

and we want them to take on the orientation of the normal of every face in the sphere so

let's get that done, let's click on rotation and let's set this from velocity to normal, we can see

this has kind of had a sort of an effect that we want but it's more like standing on end like hairs

than it is taking the orientation that we actually want, now what happens with the particle in

Blender is that the face of the polygon is going to align to the positive y direction

so let's come over to the settings in the viewport display here and we'll just turn on our axis

on this object and we can see that the y-axis is pointing straight up and that's the way the

particle is going to face, so what i'm going to do instead is first of all rotate this object around

onto the z axis so that the y is actually facing towards us, so i'm going to go R Z 180 i didn't

have to do that but i just wanted to be able to see the plane when we rotate it in a second on

this side of the scene, so i'm going to tab into edit mode and then press R X and then 90. tab back

out into object mode and now we can see the planes are all aligning with those normals a lot better

something that might be a little bit confusing is that the sphere is sort of in the way so

instead of being able to see the sphere, our actual emitter object as it's named we can actually turn

that off so if we come back over to our sphere we can come back over to the particle settings

find our render section and disable show emitter, but also we need to find this in the viewport

display and disable it there, so with that done if we shrink this down enough we can see straight

through the sphere now those planes are just kind of slightly overlapping each other, well, not really

slightly they're probably overlapping each other quite a bit but we've now created this kind of

fuzzy sort of random collection of planes that fit the sphere and now depending on the texture

that we place on this plane, will depend on exactly how fuzzy or what kind of effect we actually get

so let's work on our plane material right, now it's not very exciting, right now it's just

a square so what we're going to do is carve out the edges with transparency, so we get more of a

circular shape but we'll rougher up the edges a little bit for some interest, so let's create a

new material for this and we'll just call this fuzzy and instead of just being principled we

want to have a mix of transparency and principled so with Shift A add in a mix shader, drop that in

and then also let's add in a transparent shader and then we can plug that into the first socket

and for transparency to take effect here for us in our viewport, we need to come down to the

settings and we need to enable transparency from here which is not immediately obvious because it's

called blend mode but this is referring to our transparency, so we can set that to alpha blend

and now when we move this slider we've got all the way principled or all the way transparent

or somewhere in between, but we're going to create the texture to drive this factor, while we're here

in these settings, i'm also going to turn off any shadowing from these, so we're just going to switch

that to none, this is more obvious if we actually do have a light in the scene, let's just go Shift

a and add in a point light let's move that close to our sphere take a look in our rendered view

let's increase the strength of this a little bit and bring that over here, turn it up some more then

if we find our shadow mode again and we set that back to opaque, we can see we're getting a lot of

kind of nasty little smudgy marks over there and we don't want our fuzziness to be corrupted in

that way, so i'm going to set that back to none now switch back to material preview because we

get more softer uniform lighting in this instance, i'm actually chosen to use this environment as our

hdri in this case, so let's set up our sphere, this is actually pretty simple to do, we can go Shift A

create a texture and let's use a gradient texture with the Node Wrangler add-on enabled it's easy

for us to generate some coordinates, just to go Ctrl T, then i'm going to select this mapping node

because i don't think we'll need it and just go ctrl x to delete it while maintaining the

connection through there instead of the generated coordinates though i'm going to go with object

coordinates, object coordinates start from the very center rather than the bottom left of the bounding

box and that's going to be easier for this gradient to create the circle that we need, that is

if we set this to spherical, so with that done we can plug that into our mix shader and now we have

the circle. it's not very interesting though so let's just add a couple of extra nodes to

give ourselves some interesting control, so with this i'm going to create a converter math node

set this to power and we can kind of use this to set the size of it, but it's really setting the

general fade, the falloff from white in the center to the black at the edges, black being completely

transparent in this case though and once we've got something we like we can kind of fill in the

center of the circle by simply multiplying this so let's duplicate that and then we'll set this

to multiply and then if we keep a look on the very center there as we increase this and clamp

it so that we don't get values above one and our filmic color management doesn't kick in to try

and preserve as much gradient as possible, we can see we're starting to flatten that out, by plugging

something into the factor here, we've kind of lost our ability to slide how transparent overall we

want this, so to control this with a little slider i'm going to create a color mix rgb node and drop

that in and then plug this into the second socket and then if we change this to black that's like

saying 0 so the more we slide this to use our first socket the zero, is saying how transparent

we want it overall, so this is kind of a slider now to show how opaque we want this material and we'll

set this somewhere halfway for now, something else to improve this is that it's completely

uniform radially, so it's not really interesting in that regard, so let's kind of rough up the edges

so with that all we need to do is just go crazy on our coordinates. to introduce some chaos into

this all we need is some noise, so with that i'm going to plug in our object coordinates and then

let's create a color mix rgb node and drop this in here and so we have our pure coordinates coming in

in the first socket, so if we slide this all the way down there's going to be no change to what we

had before, but if we plug in the color output into this second socket and then switch this

from mix to add, so that we start to add just a little bit of this noise, i'm going to hold

Shift and left click and drag to the right here just to add a little bit of that noise into it

we can see we're no longer getting just a simple circle, we're getting a lot more interest, problem

is of course it's sliding off in a particular direction there, so we need to correct for that, so

what we're doing here is we're adding all values above zero, so we're getting zero to one coming

out of this, all we need to do is subtract 0.5 from it and that will create a range of numbers coming

out of here that are instead of 0 to 1 minus 0.5 to plus 0.5, so that means that overall it's got

half negative and half positive values which should mean our circle doesn't travel anywhere

not without our permission anyway :) so let's go shift d to duplicate this node because we can

set this to subtract and we're going to subtract all the way here and we can already see this seems

to be working because we've got our values set to 0.5 already, luckily we don't have clamp on because

we need those values outside 0 and 1 for this to work, again for this node here we don't want

clamp on because our vector information is kind of infinite in either direction, but now we can see we

have a slider that we can introduce the noise and not worry about it traveling all over the place

let's alter the settings on our noise, let's set this down to about two we don't need any detail

just keep it quite straightforward, maybe play with the distortion a little bit, perhaps somewhere

around 1.5 or so and now let's take a look at our sphere, let's take a look in rendered view again

and we see that's really starting to take effect, thanks to our principled shader here we're still

getting regular normal shading, it's business as usual really so that's why we're still getting

this shaded area in the back there's possibly not quite enough polygons, another way to to solve this

is to simply scale up and close the gaps this way, so we can play with that setting and also

come over to the particles and create many more particles, let's double the number there and now

we get some pretty good results, now something i'd like to do is just offset this plane ever

so slightly, so i'm going to zoom into it tab into edit mode and then just slide it down the y axis

ever so slightly, so i'm going to press G and then Y and then just move it forward just a little bit

not too far, if we take this too far as you can see we're going to move outside of the sphere gradient

that is driving this effect, so i'm going to move it just a little bit further forwards, something

like that, now the reason for that is because the origin point is exactly in the position of

where those original polygons in the sphere were, so if we did want to mix these particles

with the original sphere, then now we can do that because this is going to be hovering above and

not z-fighting and giving us that weird flicker but i actually like the uh strange way that the

alpha blend kind of chooses which polygon to show i think that's a pretty good effect actually but

if we want to change and play with the idea we can come back over to the particles material settings

and we can change from alpha blend to alpha hashed, generally speaking alpha hashed is a little bit

more precise a little bit more correct with alpha blend we can sometimes get sorting issues

and problems that way but i actually think in this case it looks pretty good the alpha blend which

also has the benefit of not requiring really any samples to look noise free, it actually just gives

it that nice kind of flickery animated look and that's an extra detail we can create now on the

particle actually to really enhance that and the way we can do that is by switching this from 3d

to 4d. enter into the fourth dimension, which is essentially time, so we have this new slider now

on the w axis which allows us simply to alter profile in practical terms anyway so all we want

to do is just animate this value, luckily that's actually pretty easy to do, if we want to create

a driver to drive this value really easily right here in this field, we just need to use the #

symbol first and then we can type in frame and then when we do that it turns all purple and

now whatever frame we're on, which is frame one at the moment, is going to be this value here so

if i press the right arrow and move to frame two we can see that this has gone to two now that is

going to be crazy fast and just be a crazy flicker which might be what you're going for, that might be

exactly what we want but we can get some smooth undulation of the effect, by slowing this down

by quite a lot, so i'm going to right click that and edit the driver, here's our frame expression

i'm just going to switch that to divide by 25 so roughly speaking at 24 frames a second anyway

actually let's set that to 24 frames a second just so that it is exactly this, it means it'll take 24

frames to go from zero to one which should look pretty good at the moment i'm not getting a fast

feedback from the viewer but even here we can kind of see that it looks like a little bit in slow

motion and hopefully that translates, but we can just increase that figure or decrease it to taste

so let's now apply this to the car, so i have this single plane at the moment, which is gray

the color of this is being driven right here so we can click on this and set this to whatever we like

but as we can see our car is using these blue and black colors so what we need to actually do this

are two planes, so first of all i'm just going to move this into a new collection called particles

click ok and then i'm going to duplicate this and i'm going to select the first one again and press

F2 and instead of playing let's call this the blue plane let's select this one press F2 to name this

one and we'll call this the black plane so that it's a little bit easier on us, i'm gonna just

use this one material instead of duplicating extra materials and we'll just derive the color of these

with vertex colors, let's go Shift a, input, vertex color and plug the color right into the base color

that's turned black because it doesn't have an input here but as soon as we go to Control Tab

to switch to vertex paint mode it's going to create the color set that we want so let's set

that there and we want this to be a shade of blue. so i'm going to switch the color swatch here, let's

brighten it up a little bit, push it into the blues let's go with that rather than painting although

there's nothing wrong with that, we could actually make this multiple colors if we wanted i'm going

to just go the easy route and just set this as vertex colours and that'll flood fill but actually

this is our black plane, so i should probably just leave it as it is but actually what i'm going to

do is just take this way darker and flood fill it a much darker shade of blue instead so set vertex

colours, Ctrl Tab, back into object mode. select this one this one doesn't have vertex colors yet but

when we select on there now we do and then let's just take this make it brighter again and then

let's go to paint and then set vertex colors. now we have the particle colors that we need in just

one simple material, so let's select the car and come over to the particle settings click on the

plus icon and then we already have our fuzzy particles in there ready to go, we can also do

that with the other material, so we can come over to this and then click the plus and then find

our fuzzy and now we have particles there too! now the problem here is that we need to select

which particle, so we need to click the little number three there and set this to be fuzzy dark

now we'll go down to find the plane, the instance plane, instead of the blue plane we want the black

plane, with that done let's take a look at this in material preview actually and then we can see our

fuzzy car. now currently we can see the original car underneath, so let's change our particle

settings to allow this to just show the particles, so let's turn off the show emitter on the render

also on the viewport display and then let's do that the same for the wheels and the windows

so show emitter and show emitter disabled there in both of those places and that kind of exposes that

we need a little bit more particles or we need to simply size them up. i think we can get away

with just adding more particles, so let's try that, let's come over to here and give this about 9 000

and then the darker stuff, let's make sure so let's just see what we've got working here, we've got

2 000 of those already actually which looks like it's working pretty well, it starts to get a little

bit tricky in the viewport, the closer we get, but the further away we get it kind of renders a lot

more smoothly so that's probably something worth bearing in mind so there's a few holes in these

wheels here i think i might just remedy that by selecting our plane the one of these that we can

see in the background there and then just scale that up a little bit, press S and then we can fill

in a lot of the space there just make them super fuzzy... almost like uh... monster truck wheels like

the most cuddliest monster truck in the world with zero fear of cheese although this would be a very

sticky combination :) that's just best not to think of that. seeing how we're using particles here i'd

like to also mention there is a new alternative to create these kinds of effects in Blender 2.92

and above and that's with the geometry nodes, this is something that's just going to get

bigger and bigger with more functionality and we'll have more and more nodes to play with, so

let's take a quick look at this option just as a way of some kind of introduction to these new

waters and hopefully it'll encourage a little bit of playful experimentation, especially when trying

to do these kinds of particle things, so let's select our car body here, i'm going to come over

to the modifier and we can disable it here but i'm going to quickly discover that i can't see the

mesh anymore, so i'm going to still need to be able to come over to the particle settings and we can

see we can re-enable them again here, but really the only option that i'm looking for just at the

moment so so that we can see it is to be able to show our emitter again, to show our car and we'll

do the same thing with the wheels and the windows so let's show the emitter there and also come over

to the top and then let's disable that, let's come back over to the modifiers though and what we'll

do is we'll switch the shader editor to a geometry node editor and then just watch over here as i hit

new, but to create some new geometry nodes, we'll notice we also get a new geometry nodes modifier

i created which we could have also added in our generate options right here, but luckily

this does it for us so nothing's happening at the moment because we're just getting this group input

so we're taking our geometry doing nothing to it and outputting our geometry again but we want to

create that kind of particle effect, so how might we go about that, it's actually surprisingly simple

some of the terminology might sound a little bit scary or technical, but it's actually pretty easy

so the first thing we're going to do is come to our point menu, we've got all of these options in

here and these are all just going to grow and grow, but now in 2.92 this is what we've got

so i'm going to go to the point and i'm going to point instance so this is going to say what

object do we want to instance, this is kind of like which object do we want to use as our particle

now what i'm going to do is take a copy of this, so i'm going to Shift D to duplicate this plane and

just bring it close to the car, let's rename this with F2 and instead of it blue plane.001 i'll just

call it GN at the end to just indicate geometry nodes so let's come over to our car and actually

i was working on the other object, the car dark stuff at first, but i'd rather start on the car

body, so with this selected i think what i'll do is just add the modifier this time, geometry nodes

and then from here instead of getting this new set i'm going to come back to that but

i'm just going to switch back to geometry nodes like this and now they've both disappeared

so this doesn't seem too hopeful at the moment, but all we need to do is just tell it to use this as

the point instance, so i'm going to click this and select that blue plane and now we have basically

the position of every vertex in this object, a plane, this plane that we've told it to render

you'll notice of course though we have no car or at least it's a little bit tricky to see but

if we take a look from this side, you can see that the car itself has disappeared, if we wanted

to be able to see it the equivalent to using our particle nodes show emitter, we need to join what

we've got here with our instances and to do that we just go to geometry and create a join geometry

node drop that in there, zoom out a little bit just to speed things up in the viewport a little bit

and then take the original geometry that we've got and then we're going to plug that into the second

socket there and then you'll see it just popped up, we don't really need to use this node if we

don't want to, we can toggle this on and off with the M key to mute it as we could in the shader

editor, so a lot of the same controls are going to work here in geometry nodes, but rather than using

the position of the vertices, i'm going to create a little bit more randomization in here and for that

we just need to come to our point menu again and we can use our point distribute and just drop that

in and it's set to random by default, i'm going to switch this to i think that's pronounced poisson

like fish in french or something or sound disk suspect there's a scientist named Poisson of some

kind that has something to do with this, as far as i understand it this is going to try and not

make things overlap, something that the particle instances using the particle emitter would do

is often not be aware of how close it is to its neighbors whereas this can be self-aware in that

way, so if it's a little bit too much on the feet of something else, we can increase our distance

minimum to say... look we do not want to be this close to our neighbors and so it'll distribute it

a little bit better and then we have our density max once we have that set we can increase this

or decrease this to taste, i don't mind a lot of overlapping here, so i'm going to set this down

quite low, but i'm going to set the density down a little bit for the moment because we can see that

the alignment of this isn't quite right and we had our alignment perfect before, we could actually

do it in the nodes but i want to show that it's actually fairly straightforward to just do it here

as well, but instead of it being along the y-axis by default things are going to want to be on the

z-axis this time, so i'm going to rotate that back, R X and then negative 90 in this case and then also

we moved it forwards a little bit i think, just to come slightly away from the car so i'm going to go

g z and then just raise that a little bit up like this, that way it won't completely intersect with

the polygons on the car itself, so that's looking pretty good, i'm starting to see the shape of

the car come back again, now the only other thing that i want to do in here really is just to give

a little bit of variety to the scale of things so as we can see these polygons are definitely

not the same size as this, so rather than trying to scale this up which won't work in object mode

would need to be in edit mode, i'm going to just set that scale within the nodes instead so let's

go and add in an attribute node and we could set it to be a particular value or mix between other

factors and a whole host of other things, but we're just going to use the attribute randomize node

set that there, tell it that it's the scale that we want to change so i'm going to type in scale

layer and it's going to use values between 0 and 1 in this case and really that's all there is to

it! from here we can just play with these settings until we get the kind of effect that we're looking

for. but just before we sign off on these nodes the other thing that i wanted to just point out

on here which makes this really cool, we can use these like groups, so we can add things to make

things a lot more easily managed, so i can drag some important values, important sliders and hook

them up to the group input and we'll notice them being added here in the modifier, so if i just take

all of these here and then even the object as well, let's plug that into the group input, this min

and max isn't very instructive so i'm going to press n to open up the sidebar and just change

that instead to scale, rand, min and then similarly for the max, now with that done we don't really

need our geometry nodes window open anymore, we can set all our values from here, so let's just slide

up our density max a lot more, something like this and then let's take a look at the other one, our

car dark stuff select that this is where i'm going to shift select this one and go Ctrl L and link

the modifiers and now because our geometry nodes are essentially a modifier, it shows up on this

object as well, so we have the main car and the car dark stuff with these settings, which are exactly

the same, but we can have these as completely unique if we like for example we could take

the density max up to 30. but if we take a look at the original object, the car body, we can see

that's still set to a catchy 5.871. we don't want to use the blue plane, now we want a dark plane

so let's come over take this one, i'm just going to hit / on the numpad to isolate the view just

to make it a little bit swifter in the viewport i'm going to duplicate that, F2 to rename to

darkplane.gn and then with control tab jump over to vertex paint, i have this pretty

dark color set already, so i'm just going to use that and then use the paint menu, paint and set

vertex colors. with that done i'm going to jump back into object mode with Ctrl Tab, / on

the numpad to jump back out into the main scene and cease our isolation and then select the car

dark stuff object and now we can plug in our dark plane.gn then it's just a matter of setting this

to taste. so let's try not having any at 0, let's take that to say 0.2 and then instead of the mean

full, i'll be going too big there, maybe 0.5, but really it's just a matter of tweaking this until

it fits whatever environment it happens to be in while still keeping it workable in the viewport.