Create a Detailed Trippy Dynamic 3D Animation using Blender

1. Intro: Hello, my name is Ingrid now Ota. And today we're going to learn how to create this animation in Blender. Just didn't make a quick overview of the workflow we're going to follow. First, we'll upload an animated character using Mixamo. Second, we'll animate the camera to follow a circular movement and track the character. Next, we'll create a natural environment using sculpting tools and particle system. We'll learn how to create a crystal from scratch. Then we'll set up a sky and set up the Leiden for the scene. 2. Assets: Now I'm going to show you where to find the assets we've used on the animation. Go to Sketchfab, and on the search bar and search more D. We've used this one. Click here. This model here on the left. Made by 3D land free low poly. We've got our grasses and the bush from turbo squid. The bushes called for new Tenex. It's this one here. Made by X frog. Download here. Make sure to open an account to download the acid. And the grasses name. Grass texture. Is this one right here. Made by adult crafts shop. 3. Mixamo: So let's animate the character. Open the exam or on your browser, the character is already uploaded, but I will upload it again just to show how it's done. Click Upload character, Select Character file, find the file selected and click Open. Wait for a couple of seconds. When the character appears on this window, make sure it's on the front view and posing on a straight vertical line. If not, you can fix that by clicking these buttons. Then click Next. Now let's set up the markers. Use this reference photo to be more accurate. Click Next. This process takes a bit longer. Now this is a preview of the rig to see if the markers are placed correctly. If your character doesn't move like this, turn back and repeat the process and make sure you place the markers like the reference photo. Now click Next and let's choose the animation. The animation we're going to use is running tired. Switch it up here, and select it. Now as you see, the character walks a bit at first and then puts his hands on his head. We don't need the first part so we can shrink the animation, adjusting the slider, set it to 30. Now we have a small issue. As you see, his hands are clipping through his head. So to fix that, we can adjust the slider character on space. It widens or narrows the space between the characters. Hans, set it up to 75. Okay, Now before we downloaded, check on the bottom-left corner, there you can see the total amount of frames animation has. Here it shows a 147. We need 210 frames because the animation will be seven seconds long. And 30 frames per second. 30 times seven equals 210. So to prolong this frames, we can adjust the overdrive slider, which controls the speed of the movement. Set it to 20. Now it's exactly 210 frames. Let's download the character choosing FBX format, 30 frames per second with skin. Click download. 4. Workspace: Now let's jump in blender. Before we start working. First, I like to set up my space. There's divide this into four parts. But the cursor on the corner here, click and drag. You can adjust it here. If you want to merge two parts. Put the cursor here, click and drag in this direction. If an arrow appears, you're doing it correctly. So let's divide this into four parts. One for the viewport, for the rendered view, one for the shader editor, and won't for the timeline. Next, we'll set up our render engine, go to the render properties. Render engine, set it to cycles. Device, CPU or GPU, depending on your computer. Set the maximum samples to 32 because we don't want the image on the rendered view to render for a long time. Go to Output Properties and set the resolution to 10809020. Because we're, we're posting this animation in a real format. Set the frame rate of 30 frames. Frame start one and end frame 210. With a render this animation in PNG format to create a PNG sequence. To do that, go to the file format on Output tab and select the PNG, PNG format. Select RGB or RGBA. Here. Click on the folder to select the folder where the images will be important too. Create a new folder and accept. 5. Character: Now that everything is ready, we can start to work. First. Let's delete the cube as everyone does and add a new collection. Try to keep your assets as organized as possible. Click on the Collection and upload the animated character file. Import FBX, select Running tired, and import it. Now the character is very small, so select the armature and size it up a bit. Click the camera on the rendered view window and place it in front of the character. You can grab the camera and adjusted on the viewport or press Shift and the backwards sign. Navigate with the arrows and E and q for adjusting the height of the camera, please, the light in front of the character to an increase in radius. So the light spreads is more. Select the light and click here to change the properties. As you can see, the character has no materials because we imported it on Mixamo in OBJ format. I use OBJ format because it tends to be safer and doesn't cause any bugs during the Reagan process. In this case, we will make the materials ourselves because it's not complicated. But if you have another character with custom materials uploaded in Blender and copy the materials from it to the animated character you got from Mixamo. Now let's add the materials. Click on the hair and click New on the shader editor. Click on base color and make it brown. Here you can adjust the lightness or darkness of the color. So let's set this down and select orange color around here. If you want, you can change the roughness. Increasing, it will create a less reflective surface, decreasing. We'll do the opposite. I'm not changing the roughness in this case. Let's add the materials for other parts. Do. Now the character is ready. 6. Camera: Now we need to animate the camera to follow a circular movement. To do that first we need a circle, shift, a curve, select circle. Now go to Edit Mode and select 1. Press Shift S, and click on cursor to select it. Now click on the camera. Shift S and click selection to cursor. Now the camera is connected with a circle. To make the camera focus on our character, we will need an empty, shift, a empty select Plain Axes, movie empty to the character. Next, select the camera and go to Object Constraint properties. At Object Constraint, select track two on target, select the Mt. Next, select the camera hold Shift, then select the circle, right-click and select follow path. Now, if we play the animation, we can see the camera moving. Adjust the position and the rotation of the camera using g SNR to change the distance between the character and the camera, just the size of the circle using S. Now, the camera is ready. 7. Terrain: On this part, I will explain how to create a natural environment using particle systems and some sculpting tools. First, let's add a plane, shift, a mesh plane. Scale this up a bit. Before we start sculpting, Let's go to Edit Mode and sub-divide are playing 20 to 30 times. Right-click and sub-divide. Open this little window and type a number between 20 to 30. We need to subdivide our plane because then we can edit it on Sculpt Mode, exit edit mode, and go to scalp node. We're going to use only these tools. The first second, the first one creates bumps, the other one does the opposite. These controls the strength and the radius of the tools. On this part. You can be creative with the type of terrain you want to make, but makes sure it doesn't block the camera view during its movement. To prevent that, with the first to create some little bumps around the circle of the camera at some parts and make bigger bumps for some variety. At some bumps around the character to the lower the bumps you don't like. Use the second row. At this point. Go to object mode, right-click and shade smooth. If you want to go the extra mile, you can add a subdivision modifier. Go to the modifiers, add a subdivision modifier, set this setting to two and apply. This will be a terrain with grasses and bushes. So let's make this plain green colored, add a new material and change the base color to dark green. Also, I decided to increase the roughness because I don't want the surface to be reflective. Before we move on to the particle systems, I'll show you a cool trick to add a retro wave element of the scene. Duplicate the plane, pressing Shift D, and then right-click to leave it in place. Add a modifier, select wireframe, adjust the thickness and check, replace original. Now that we have this grid, Let's make it glow. As you see, because we duplicated this plane from our terrain plane. It has the green colored material. To fix that, click on this button here to separate the materials and then we can edit it. Delete the principled shader and add an emission shader. Shift a mission, set the emission color to cyan or some light color and increase the strength to around five. Now it looks better. 8. Crystal: Now let's go to the fun part. To create a crystal in Blender is not very complicated. We're going to use an ecosphere as a base mesh. So shift a mesh and select ecosphere, scale it up on the z-axis, pressing S, then z. Let's make the bottom part a bit flatter. Go to Edit Mode and select the bottom vertex, grab it and move it up. Pressing Z, if you want to affect all the vertices during the edit, activate this option, proportional editing. Now, if you move the vertex, it affects the neighbor vertices. You can change the area affected by scrolling up or down with the mouse. Now let's make it pointy. Select the top vertex and move it up to make the mesh taller. Now, move randomly some vertices to make it look more natural. Then go to modifiers and select decimate. This modifier removes faces from the mesh, decrease the ratio to around 0.7. Then apply. Now add a new material to the crystal, rename it here crystal, and delete the principled shader. At a glossy and a glass shader. Add an edge shader and connect the dots with a surface or material output. Now we need to adjust the roughness on both shaders. Decrease the roughness on the glossy shader and increased roughness on the glass shader. Keep the colors white because they reflect the line better. I'll make another crystal for some variety and add them on a separate particle system following the same steps as before. To use the same material for our second crystal, we can select it in this window. 9. Particle system: Next we'll add some grass and some bushes. Let's import our assets. I like to keep the assets. I'll use some particle system as simple as possible. So let's delete the empty, delete this circle and resize the grass. Give them together outside the scene. As you can see, the grass is animated. So let's remove that. Select the keyframes on the timeline and delete. Before adding a particle system, makes sure you apply all transforms on the assets. Press Control a, and select all transforms. Then make sure to set their origin point to their Geometry. Select the object, click object here on top, set origin, and select origin to geometry. This way we avoid complications on the particle system. Now select the plane, click on particle properties and click Select here, go to the render tab, render as collection. And select the collection we have our assets. Now we're facing a small issue. As you can see, our grasses and bushes are oriented on the right side. So to fix that, we select our assets, go to Object Properties, find the relations tab here on the bottom, and change the tracking axis to Z plus. This will fix the issue. Now that we've fixed that, adjust the size on a scale slider, what I like to do is I scale the asset a bit bigger and then increase the scale randomness slider for a more natural look. On the Emission tab, you can change the number which controls the density. If you want, you can copy my values or feel free to change them. Now the particle system is done. 10. Cylinder: I call this part cylinder because we will set up a sky, a light, and some glitch effects using three cylinders in total. Let's not waste time and add our first cylinder. Size it up to fit the plane in it. The height doesn't matter. Then go to Edit Mode, will remove the top and bottom faces using this option right here. Click on it, then select the faces. Then press Delete. Then shaded smooth. I removed the thesis because they reflect the light and it gets trickier later when we will set up the lighting on the scene, add a new material and drag and drop the image we'll use as the sky. Connect the image with the base color. If you want the sky to be more visible, you can connect the image with the emission to now it's more visible. Before creating our next cylinder. You see that this cylinder blocks our view. The things that go to Object Properties, viewport, display, and display as wire. Now we can see through, let's create another cylinder. Make it a bit smaller than the previous and shorter, shaded smooth and remove the faces too. We'll create a glow effect using principled volume. Add a new material, renewal the principled shader, and add a principal volume. Added color ramp, and a separate XYZ. Connect a Z with a factor of the color ramp, connected color with a density. The color ramp with a separate grader fading effect on the volume. So it looks like a glowing light, change the emission color and increase the emission strength to around ten. Now for the final cylinder, make it the same size as a glomming cylinder, but a bit taller. We'll add on glitch effects as a PNG sequence. To do that first, we need to activate an add-on, go to Edit Preferences, search, Import Images as Planes, and check the box. Now we can import a PNG sequence, shift a image, select images planes. Go to the Textures file and select the first hold Shift and select the 210, or select how many you need. Just make sure it matches with the total frames of the animation. Check the box on animate image sequences and select shade lists. Now we can import it. Move this plane outside the scene, go to the shader editor, copy the notes. Now select the cylinder, delete, it, snows, and paste the notes we copied from the plane. Disconnect the alpha from the factor and decrease the factor to make the cylinder look transparent. Before adding the lights, Let's unhide everything. And on the rendered view window, select the viewport and play the animation to see if anything blocks the view. As you see the assets block our view on this part. To fix that, select the camera and adjust the clip start slider. Set it to around 0.5. Don't put a big number because you can remove some part of the terrain is visible on the camera. Always check before rendering. Now the final thing we're going to do is set up the lighting. Take the light we have and change the color. Then Shift D to duplicate and move it on the other side. Set another color, then Shift D again to create a triangle with lights. Change the color on this one too. Last thing before rendering, go to the render properties and set the time limit here. They're around 30 seconds. Now we can start rendering. At the end, you can merge the PNG sequence using video editing software such as Adobe Premier. 11. Outro: So this is the end and he will have our PNG sequence. We can upload it in Adobe Premiere or After Effects or some other video editing software to do some post-production. I hope you enjoyed the tutorial and I hope it was helpful to you. By the way, this was my first ever tutorials, so any feedback would be much appreciated. Again, hope you enjoy it and thank you for your attention.