Blender 3D: Create Satisfying Animations With Geometry Nodes!

1. Introduction: Blender is becoming more powerful every day. It's a free open-source software. And today we are going to be making this animation. Hey everyone, My name is Smith. I'm a 3D artists with over five years of experience creating in the industry. And as a freelancer, today, we're going to dive headfirst into the newest blender workspace, geometry nodes, and create some amazing procedural animation. This class is not for beginners. However, I will be holding your hand through each step of the process. While we learn the fundamentals of blenders, Geometry notes, before we dive headfirst into fleshing out the class, the project. Here are all the topics that we'll be learning today in this class, ranging from note payable, I close all the way through to lighting and rendering. The class project will consist of you creating your own unique animation. Within the geometry nerds workspace, we'll start out with a blank blender scene and walked through the motions of creating from scratch the final product. I've segmented this class into clear and easy to follow along sections so that there's a sense of progression throughout the entire class. And if you do get stuck or need to take some notes, you can easily jump back. By the end of this class, you will have a multitude of different procedural animations for your portfolio. As this entire setup is completely procedural. Meaning at anytime, you can change a small setting and your node network and you'll get a wildly at differentiating animation. I can't wait to start teaching you this new skill set. So with all of that said, let's get started. 2. Geometry Nodes Basics: Alright, so welcome to the class. I'm glad you could join me. Let's start out by a festival or ping up Blender. I'm currently using the latest build of Glenda, which is the three-point to build. But anything from three-point arc onwards will work just fine for this class. Let's start off by festival, deleting this light. So select that press, Delete and also delete the camera x. Delete. And we're just going to start with this simple cube. Again, as stated, this isn't a beginner class. So you should know the fundamentals of Blender, like the navigation, and just the very basics of how to use Blender to follow along. Either way, I'll be teaching you everything from start to finish. So let's begin by coming up to the top here and clicking on the geometry nerds workspace. You'll be met with this new workspace and it may look a little bit unfamiliar, but we'll get used to it. So first thing to do is actually just clean up the workspace here. This screen here on this side is basically an index of everything that's being created in the scene. And to be quite honest, this is used for more math heavy sort of setups where there's a lot of math involved and you need to figure out what the indices and everything are about each piece of your mesh. So this isn't incredibly helpful to us right now. And I don't think we're really going to have it use this. So for this class, let's just come up here and collapse this. So we'll grab this workspace here. Up the top left. You've got this little cross hair. Just click this, drag across to the left and that'll collapse in on itself. And now we have a workable workspace here. With your cube selected. I'm just going to press F2 to rename this. And we'll call this satisfying animation. And all we need to do now is come down to the geometry nodes workspace here in the lower half and click this New button. So this is now created a new geometry nerds setup for us to use. But I'll do straight away is click this little thumbtack Pin icon here. That way, whatever we do moving forward, let's say if we click off of this, or maybe even just go to a different workspace and come back. This will always be here. It'll be pinned and tacked on so it can't just disappear on us, which is very helpful. So to start, let's just get a little bit more familiarized with geometry nights. So if this is your first time using it, we can run through the basics before we dive headfirst into the class project and make that really cool, satisfying animation. To begin, we've got the group input here and the group output currently, all you can see is that there's a geometry input and the geometry output. So what's essentially saying is the geometry of this cube is here and it's going all the way through to the output. And basically it will be a stacking things in-between the middle to get a different result on the head here. But you will see if I just suddenly this connection, the cube or the original geometry completely disappears. So that's kinda the power of geometry nerds is that we can actually input our own geometry so we can come to a mesh permanent here. We could essentially create another cube, connect that to the output geometry. And you can see here we can actually play with the size of this. You can give it more vertices, less Medicis, all that good stuff. And let's just quickly make like a very small scenes so you can kind of understand more about geometry nodes. So let's say, for example, this new cube that we've created, we want to maybe instance a bunch of smaller cubes onto it. So what we can do is hit Shift a is open up the Add menu here and come through to instance, instance on points. And just drag and drop that in here. In the middle. You'll see straight away, everything's disappeared. And we have nothing showing on screen. That is essentially because we don't currently have an instance plugged into the instance on points node. If I was to duplicate this and plug another mesh cube into here, you'll see we now have for each point on the original cube here, we have a bunch of other cubes being instance onto it. So for example, if I bring the size down of our instance Q, you'll see we now have precisely eight cubes on our original cube being influenced. And you'll see it's essentially because there's only eight vertices to be instance onto. So if I increase the number of vertices here, you can see quickly it's increasing in the number of instances that are on the cube, which is super cool. So that's just a very quick understanding of geometry nodes. Another thing we can do is we can grab a transform node. And you can actually transform everything just through this transform node. So it's a very powerful and this is sort of very basic level of the German scenarios, but I'll get much more into detail in the next lesson, where we will start out creating the satisfying animation. So I'll see you there. 3. Creating The Spiral: All right, So welcome back. Let's just start out by deleting this nerve network that we've created. So I'm just going to select all of these nodes here and press X to delete them. And now what I'll do is just start fleshing this out. So let's just hit Shift a. And we're actually going to start this whole setup by using a Kev spiral to become through the cuff primitives. Let's just select this cuff spiral. Click this here, and let's connect the curve through to the Geometry Group output. You'll see now we have this curve spiral here in our scene. One thing I want to quickly note is that this top bit here is completely grayed out and we can't rename this. I'll actually just want to rename this geometry nerds group to something most suitable. To do. So you just need to uncheck this pin icon. Then you can actually click this and rename it. So I've just renamed mind to satisfying animation. And you'll see in the right-hand side here under the modifiers, because geometry nodes is technically a modifier. You'll see we have this Geometry notes modify here, and it's old, it's updating in real time. And we will be using this throughout the entire class. Alright, so let's continue creating this spiral here. This is the start of the chain of command. So essentially anything that we do here will affect the curves, spiral and everything down the line of this sort of conveyor belt that we're creating. For example, the rotations here is set to two currently. So if I bring this up, you'll see that we're getting more and more rotations. And that will technically create more and more. Vertices are points for us to instance cubes or circled oncospheres, whatever we want. So that's really powerful. So we'll keep that in mind. But for now, I'm going to keep that at two rotations. We're just going to continue down the conveyor belt here. So to start off with, we'll keep one spiral, but in the end we will come back and add a few more to give it more variety. But just to keep things simple for now, we'll keep this one. What we want to do now is basically we want to add in another node here called set curve radius. So again, let's hit Shift a, come through to curve, this curve menu here. And you'll see here we have this set curve radius node. So click that, just drop it in between here. You'll see the line goes white. So you can just left-click to accept that. If you don't have this on your version of Blender, It's just a simple add-on called Node Wrangler, which comes pre-installed. You just have to activate it. So let's just quickly run through that. Now actually, up here in the Edit menu, you can come down to Preferences. Open this up. Once that's open, just come through to this add-ons tab here. And up the top, we can search for Node Wrangler. You'll see here minds enabled, just ensure that this is checked on. And we'll be using this a little bit more throughout the course. Awesome. So once that's done, just exit out of this and you should now have all the functionality that I do. And we can continue on. Brilliant. So this is essentially all we really need for the beginning of this whole geometry nerds setup. This set curve radius Nerd is currently not doing anything. But in the future, we can utilize this feather and create more variations to our animation. So we'll just keep this here for now. As it stands. This is all we need for the spiral part of this setup currently. So what I'll do is select both of these and I'll just clean up my node network here so that it doesn't get too chaotic and have little noodles going everywhere. Let's clean this up now by selecting both of these and putting them into a frame. So the hotkey to do this is with both of your nodes selected, you can press Control J. And this is going to create this frame here, this black box that sort of houses both of these nodes. So you can see wherever I move it, it'll stay locked in place. Now this is good, but it's sort of bland and we don't really know what this is doing. So we can actually give this a name and a color. So to do so, we need to open up this menu here. You can either click this little arrow and open it up like that. Or you can press the N key on your keyboard. And that'll open up this side menu. Once it's open, well, we need to do is under the node tab here, you can give this a label. So click this and we'll call this spiral. And you'll see we now have a name to this frame. And we can also give it a color. So click this little color checkbox and then open up the drop-down and select whatever color you'd like to put their balsam. That covers the beginning of our geometry node set up here. In the next lesson, we're going to cover curating the curve profile. So I'll see you in the next lesson. 4. Creating The Curve Profile: Okay, welcome back. Let's begin creating the curved profile. So what is the curved profile? Essentially, what a curve is, is it isn't actually a mesh. So we actually need to give this curve some thickness. And then transform that from a curve into a mesh so that we can start placing instances onto each of the vertices on that new mesh that we've curated. For example, it will basically create a circle that follows the path of this entire spiral all the way to the top. And then we'll change this from a curve to a mesh and instance a bunch of points like this onto the mesh. So let's dive into this. So first status, we want to create a transform node. So let's go Shift a. And if you never know really what, where something is, you can always search for it. But I find it best to actually look through each of the menus and try and find it yourself and you'll get more accustomed to the jump tree nodes workspace if you do it this way. So luckily, you have for me to tell you exactly where it is. But let's just start out by going to geometry. And here is the transform node. So click that. Plays out here in-between. Again, if you don't have this sort of automatic connection thing, you need to make sure that your Node Wrangler is enabled. Okay, wonderful. So now that we have a transform, we can actually transform this mesh and rotate it, scale it, dual of that good stuff. And what we want to do is basically create a curved mesh and then put a profile curve which will be a curved circle. So let's do this now. Let's go shift a, come through to curve here and up the very top, you can see we have a few options here. Let's go to Mesh. Click that places here. And obviously nothing is yet happening because we don't have a profile curve. So what we want to do is go Shift a again, come through the curve primitives. And we're actually just going to use a curve, circle. Click this, plug the curve here into the profile curve. And you'll see straight away we have this massive cuff circle on the profile of this and entire spiral. So we need to do now is hone in that size. So for the radius, you can just grab this and shrink it or enlarging it. If you need more precision when scaling this, you can hold down Shift while clicking and you'll get a more precise movement. I'm just going to go something like this for now, 0.18 meters. Now we have this circular profile, which is really cool. And you can see there's no cap on the holes at the end. So what you can do is click this filler caps option and that'll just fill the mesh volume. Okay, Great. So we now have this completed mesh. We've transformed it from a curve through this, and then it's now being output as a mesh. So this actually has mesh properties. So if we were to now Instance things onto it, it would be having vertices and faces that we can put things onto that's super powerful. The next step here is to create basically a procedural rotation. Now this can get a little bit confusing, but I'll do my best to explain what we're going to do. So essentially, we want this animation to be kind of chaotic. And one way to do that is to actually rotate out curve like this on the rotation, on the z axis. So what we'll do is I'll just quickly show you my timeline. I'm bringing up a timeline here. Timeline that we go. I've currently got 250 frames. Now if I want this whole animation to loop and actually go on for infinity, I'm going to need to have 360 frames so that it matches 360 degrees of rotation, which is what we're going to set up. So to start with, just make sure that your timeline has 360 frames in it in total. That way, once it gets to the very end here, it'll go 360 degrees of rotation. And then it'll come straight back to frame one. And it'll start the whole thing again from scratch. You'll see that visually in a moment once we set up these nodes. So let's just begin by sprinkling at the z coordinate, which is what we want it to rotate. So festival, the easiest way to do this is to use a separate x, y, and z node. So let's go shift a. Come down to the vector option here. And we're going to use separate XYZ. So click this. And now let's grab the Z output and plug this into the rotation. So what this is saying is basically only the z will be affected. And the Z was that sort of clockwise rotation that you sell. So now we need a vector. So if we stop playing with all of these, you'll see we've got some crazy rotations going on. And what we want to do is basically plug a vector into here to control that rotation. So what we're going to do is actually use the timeline here. To control the rotation. So the easiest way to do this is to grab a math node. Let's go shift a, come through to Utilities and click this math node here. Plug that down and we're actually going to basically put in a driver option. So plug this, plug this math node down. And we're going to change this from an ad. And we're going to use instead on the right-hand side, this conversion to radians. So just click that there. The reason why we're using two radians is because we're going to use each frame as a rotational degree frame. One will be one degree of rotation. Frame 135 will be 135 degrees of rotation and so on. So that's why we had to create a timeline to be 360, because that will be 360 degrees of rotation. So if we plug this value into the vector, you can see as we increase these degrees, we're getting different rotations happening. Super cool. So as you can see, once we hit 360, it basically goes back to square one where it started at frame 0. That's why we want this basically to go through the frame rate of our entire timeline. Now obviously we need to animate this somehow. Don't want to do it by hand. We want to use a very simple math equation, or it's not even really a math equation, it's a driver of function. So a driver basically is a card that you put into this box here. The code is very simple, It's just hash frame. So our hashtag and then the word frame and hit Enter. Now you'll see your box here is purple, and that just means that there's a driver installed onto it. And if we hit Play, you'll see it's now basically for each frame that goes by, it's rotating to that degrees. Once it hits frame 360, it'll come back and it'll loop seamlessly. So that's super important if you don't have 360 degrees of animation, let's just say you have to default to 50. It'll go all the way to frame to 50. And then it will basically jump back in a very abrupt fashion and it won't look very satisfying. So just ensure that your timeline is set to 360 degrees of animation. And that's basically the curve profile section of this completed. Now, all that's left is to select all of our nodes here and clean them up a bit. So let's press Control J to frame leaves. And again in the end menu, so n to open up this menu here, Let's just give this a label of curve profile that we go. And let's also give this a color. So I'll just go with something like this. Amazing. So now we can actually start instancing some objects onto the new mesh that we've created. So we'll cover that in the next lesson. 5. Instancing: All right, Welcome back. Now we're up to the fun part of actually instancing some objects onto our curves spiral that we've created here. So let's just jump straight into this. I'm going to pull this group output across just a tad. And we've gotten to just basically turn our mesh a bunch of points so that we can actually put some instances onto those points. So the node that we need here is called mesh two points. So let's go Shift a and come through to mesh. And then up here we have the mesh two points. Let's just grab this and plug it in between here. And now, you can see straight away we have all these really cool sort of sonic ringlets. And for each ring we've got a lot of these points here. So each one of these sort of small cubes that you see on the ring will indicate a point that one of our instance objects is going to be at. So currently we've got quite a few instances here. We can change the radius of the instances just to see them a bit better. So now you can see them just a little bit better. There we go. So that's basically what these instances points will achieve for us. Amazing. So the radius here doesn't really do anything. All we really need to know right now is that we have a curve to mesh function. And it's changing the curve from a mesh. And then we're changing the mesh into points. Also. So moving on, we want to basically create an instance on points now so that we can instance some things onto these points. Alright, let's go shift a. Let's come through two instances. We'll click this instance on points. Note. So click this, drop it in here. And again, everything will disappear because we don't actually have anything being influenced. So we need to put some geometry or a mesh right into this socket here. So let's now instance a cube onto this. Let's go shift a, come through to Mesh Primitives, and let's just grab a simple cube. Drop this down here and plug the mesh into the instance. And now you'll see we have a bunch of cubes being insincere, but they're a little bit too big. Let's grab the size here. You can actually, you can actually left-click and drag down to cover all of these and then slide them across. So let's just drag down here until they're all highlighted. And then we can start scaling these down to something more manageable. There we go. So obviously this is like a ring lit type deal and we don't really want it like this. We want it to be more condensed. So this is where we can come back through here and start fiddling with some of the spiral settings and the curved profile settings. So for example, with the cuff profile, if I was to increase the radius, you'll see it starts to get more expansive and it's sort of just meshes into one. I like the look of this. Again, we can change all of this later down the track. What we also want to make sure that we're doing is we're actually increasing the resolution. So if we increase this, Let's see, we're getting more and more points and creating a more dense mesh. So the resolution is something to keep in mind. Also over here on the curves spiral at the start. Same deal goes for the resolution. So if we increase this, you'll see we're getting a much more dense and mesh here. So let's go with something like 100 nano, say it's a lot more dense and we're getting a lot more instances to play with. So I'll keep this at that level for now. And actually my just decrease the radius just to touch to something like this. And now we can move on. So the next step in this pipeline is to actually put something in-between the mesh two points and the instance on points. And that is going to be the set position nerd. Let's go Shift a, and let's come through to the geometry down the bottom here, set position. So just grab that and plug it in between here. And essentially what this is, well, this node is doing is it's setting the position of each instance for the mesh. So we are setting the position and we actually want to use some cool vector math to basically walk this and create a really cool shape and animation. So it's actually very simple to set this up and it's not going to take us long at all. So just uses three nodes and an old plugs into this position here. So let's just start off by grabbing the actual position nerd. Let's go shift a, come through to input. And we're going to grab the position here. Sorry, input. Position. What this is essentially saying is whatever the current position is of each instance, that is the, basically this is capturing the vector position of that. So it's getting a little bit technical here. But trust me, when I say this is a very visual learning experience. So it's not so much that you need to be a mathematician. You can actually just play with some settings and get some really cool results without really knowing everything behind the math. So let's just continue on and let's grab a vector math node. So let's go shift a, come through to a vector and click on vector math. And essentially what we're doing, we're taking the positional vector here of each instance. And we're basically going to plug this in here. We're going to take the cosine and the sine and then basically add them together and put them into the position. So a very quick rundown is cosine is like a waveform and sine is another waveform. And when you add them together, you can basically triangulate the vector rotation. And it just makes a really cool effect. So let's just quickly set this up so you can actually see it in action. So first off, with this ad note, let's change this from add to cosine. Like this. I'm just going to press Shift D to duplicate this now. And we'll change this from cosine to sine flexor and once again Shift D to duplicate this. And we'll change this from sign back to Add. And it's getting a little bit clouded for me here. I'm just going to move my notes over a bit. And now we basically just want to connect everything up. So the position will add this into the sign vector. And now we're going to add them both together. So add the cosine up the top here, and the sine down the bottom. And lastly, let's add the vector here to the position. And you'll see straight away, something really cool starts to happen. So if I hit Play, you'll see this really awesome looking animation starts to happen. Amazing. So now that we have this created, we can actually lay that down the line, come back and change some of these values to get some really cool results. And this is what I was talking about in the beginning where there's so much variability to create endless amounts of different animations. So now with all of this setup, we basically just want to select all of my notes here and again, throw them into a frame. So select them all, press Control J. And let's now just clean this up so it makes sure your frame selected. Let's nameless to beat instance objects. There we go. And again, let's just give this another color. I'm gonna go with a yellow this time. And if you don't really like the way these node noodles are displaying, you can actually clean them up with Node Wrangler. The quickest way to do this is by using a reroute nerd. So for example, I don't really like the way this node is being plugged into the position. Can't really see where it's going. So what I'm going to do is just drag this across a bit. While I'm holding Shift and pressing right-click, I can create this line, which is going to create a re-wrap node. If I just drag this through the middle here, you'll see I've created this node, is essentially another piece of this node just extended out so I can plug this into other things. But the whole purpose of this is now I can do that operation again. Shift, right-click and drag. And you'll see we've got this really nice sort of arrow line now, Frac press and G to move the selected point here, I can basically just create two of these. Let's actually go with three. Now I've got a very clean sort of operation and I know exactly where this node is going. So this is definitely not necessary. But if you lack this neatness in your notes setup, please go ahead and try this out. Okay, Brilliant. So we now have this really cool animation on hand, but it's not very satisfying right now. It's just very bland and we want to spice this up. I'm also noticing it's a little bit hard to see on screen right now. So I'm actually just going to create up here in the drop-down. You can actually come down and click this little cavity option. And that just gives, basically for every ridge or edge, gives it a nice sort of highlights so I can see what's going on. So now it looks a little bit nicer and I can actually read what's happening. So we've basically got everything up-to-date now. And the next lesson we're going to cover scaling the instances. So currently, each instance is the exact same size and exact same scale. But in the next lesson we're going to do a very simple node network to set up that's going to create some really cool effects and scale each instance individually. So I'll see you in the next lesson. 6. Scaling The Instances: All right, Welcome back. We're now up to the Power BI going to be scaling these instances to create some really cool effects. So let's just jump straight into creating this effect. Now, to start off, we're going to need something to scale the instances. And the name actually states exactly what it is. It's called scale instances. So let's just such shift a come through to instances and we'll click on this scale instances node. Drop that in here. And you'll see now we have this line here where we can scale each instance relative to its axis here. So obviously we want to do some really cool scaling. We want each instance alone to be at a different scale, at a different time basically. And the quickest way to do this is basically with this same setup here, just with a slight alteration. So very simply, all we really need to do is just copy this across. So I'm going to select all of these and press Shift D to duplicate it. Let's see quickly there's a problem here where it's kinda stuck in the instance objects frame to get it out of the frame here. So I'm just pressing G to grab and move it to actually get this out of the frame. But here we need to basically on parented from the frame. So all you need to do is press Alt and p. That's just basically stands for on-in parenting. And now we can have it in its own space down here. Awesome. So now what we want to do is just grab these. And what we can do, scrap the vector and plug this into the scale. So directly into the scale here. Now straight away you will see something has altered on the instances here. And if I hit play, it's a little hard to see because it's moving a bit fast. But basically each, each individual instance is now being scaled differently. But I want it to be a little bit more drastic and a little bit more noticeable. So the quickest way I've found is to just change the operation here from add to another operation. So the coolest one I've found is to use the dot product. It's a little bit hard to explain, but essentially, again, this is visual. So once I plug the value here into the scale, you'll see immediately the results. Awesome. So you'll see some parts of the mesh is really small, almost invisible. The other parts are added some maximum scale. So when I hit Play, you'll see we have this really awesome scaling effects going on. And it's gotten this high-end really well once we start putting in some rotational effects as well. Amazing. So now all we need to do again is parent all of these to a frame. Let's just select them all here. Press control J, throw them into a frame. And again, I'm just going to call this from the label. There we go, scale instances. And I'll give it a color as well. Let's go with little light blue. Amazing. So just for reference, if you have, if you think you've missed something, here is currently what we have for the nodes. We've got the curves, spiral, have the curved profile. We have the instance objects. And lastly we have the scale instances. For the next section here, we're actually going to create rotation. So we're going to create individual rotation for each instance. And it's going to coincide with the frame number. And it's going to create this really awesome rotational effect that you'll see shortly. So I'll see you in the next lesson. 7. Rotating The Instances: Welcome back. We're now going to cover creating the rotation for animation and all of that instance points. You can see as the animation is playing right now, everything is basically uniform. All of these instances and each one of these cubes is basically straight down like a line. So we want to, instead of it being like uniform like this, we want some of the cubes to be on their own axis of rotation. And it's very simple to do, but it does have a tiny bit of math involved. Again, this whole process is more of a visual thing. So you don't technically need to know why this is working or how the math is working. And I can just basically walk you through each step and I'll do my best to explain what's happening in KC. Do feel the need to know. So let's just start this out by grabbing a rotation. Sorry, grabbing a rotate instance nerd. Let's go shift a, come through two instances and grab the rotate instances node and just plug that in here. So straight away, you can start playing with the rotation. And you'll see each one of these cubes, whichever one you choose, will start to rotate depending on that axis. So what we want to do is actually create a little math function like this and plug that directly into the rotation so that each of them are rotating depending on a particular vector. So again, we're gonna be using the positional vector and then basically calculating how far away it is from the center of the curves spiral that we created. And it'll give it some really cool rotational stuff. So let's just begin by coming up above here to this little blank area. And let's just begin flushing this whole network cap. So to start off with, we're going to grab a method. So go shift a through to utilities and math. Plug this down. And again, we're going to be using our scene frames here to calculate the radians or the rotation. So what we want to do is change this from add to the conversion to radians, like so. And again, we can put in that driver hash frame here if we want to. But if you are in the more recent versions of Blender, there's actually a node that will do this for you. And that's called seen time. So if you just go shift a co-author to the input tab here, and down the very bottom we have this scene time nerd here. Essentially, it takes the same time, like seconds or the scene frame. So in this instance, we want to use the frame and you can plug it directly in here. Again, if you don't have a more recent or up-to-date version of Blender and you don't have this node, it's totally fine. You can just use the classic driver hash frame like this. And it'll do the exact same operation as this. Either or, it's totally up to you. I'm going to use the node because, why not? I have it. And now let's just continue creating this node network. From here, we basically want to triangulate the x and y coordinate for each of these instances. And to do that, we essentially use a cosine and a sine operation and plug that into a combined XYZ node. So again, a sine function looks like this. It's basically positive one up the top here and negative one down the bottom here. And it just alternates between. Then the cosine does the opposite. When you add them together, it basically finds the median and that's basically the long and short of it. So let's grab another math note here in the utilities that we go. Let's plug the value here into the top. And we're going to change this from add to cosine, going to Shift D to duplicate that. And I'm going to change this from cosine to sine, that we'd go, again, plug the radians into the value. And now we're just going to combine X, Y, and Z. And we're going to plug these into the x and y slots. So let's go shift a, come through to the vector. And you'll see at the top here we have combined XYZ. So grab this and we want to plug the cosine into the x value and the sine into the y-value. Amazing. So now essentially what we want to do is get to the position of each of these instances. So whatever, wherever they are now on frame 304 or 181, the position node will basically capture that attribute of that vector, that exact position. And we can utilize that to basically create this cool rotational effect. Let's go shift a hub through to the input here. And we'll come down to position. This place that down there. And we're essentially going to create three more nodes. So we need to vector math nodes. So let's go shift a vector, vector math. And let's just duplicate this. So we have two of them. So this top one here is going to be an Add tonight because we're going to be adding this and this together. Let's go position up into the top. This bottom vector, nerd, this bottom vector math note here, we're going to change this from add to multiply. And we'll plug the vector here into the top. Second, bind x, y, z into the top. And we'll plug this multiply node into the bottom vector here. So we're essentially adding the position along with the cosine and sine triangulation on the x and y. And we're going to multiply this by a particular number. For the Multiply node. To finish this up, we have this value here that we want to control. So let's actually just create a node to control all of them in one. Go shift a into the input. It will come down to value. Plug this here. And the value basically it will be a slider that we can change on the fly. Then we can plug this directly into the vector down the bottom here. Now, what that allows us to do is multiply by a particular number. So we could multiply the vector by one, by two by three by whatever number we want. To be honest, I found that 2.5 is a great value to use. So I'm just going to keep mine at 2.5. Amazing. So moving on, we've currently got this massive nerd jumble here. And we now want to connect this up to a procedural texture. So what we're going to be using is a noise texture, which is basically a random value. So let's go shift a will come through to texture and choose the noise texture. And now you'll see there's a little vector slot here. So we can pluck this vector into the top. And all of this math is basically telling this noise texture how to react, and how to apply it to each of our instances. I've just noticed that we've lost our instances here. So I'm going to connect them back up. Like so. There we go. Awesome. Now if we wanted to, we could just plug the color note here directly into the rotation. And you'll see if we hit Play. We do have some things happening, but it's not exactly what I'm looking for. So for now, I'm just going to continue fleshing this out. This last section is basically complete, so it's not going to take us too long. We just need a few more nodes. So this multiply node, I'm going to duplicate and just place here. And essentially we're going to take this noise texture, this procedural noise texture, and we're going to take the color and plug this into the top vector. Now straight away, what this is going to do is basically push 0.5 in this direction, or basically a way from the middle of objects orientation, which is this little orange circle. So to counteract this, we have to do a few things. So let's just change this to 0.5. So we're going to multiply it by 0.5 and that's going to push it. And then to counteract that multiplication, we basically need to bring it back to the center. And the easiest way to do this is just to multiply it again by two. So plug this vector into the top of this multiply node that we've just duplicated across and change the vector here for all of these and set that to two. Amazing. So we're nearly complete. Now we need to basically multiply one more time, all of this math that we've created. And then we need to multiply it by the scene frame or the radians. So again, that's fairly simple to do. Let's just duplicate this across one more time. Plug they multiply vector into the top here. And now we need a value node, and we also need a radians nerd. So we've already got them here. So I'm just going to duplicate this radians across to here. And also this value node duplicate that across. So now we want the value of this writing ensnared to come through and plug in to the bottom vector. And the degrees. We essentially want this to be 360 degrees. So you can just plug it in here like so, or you can just use a handy value node like this. And just type in 360 lexer. Amazing. So the final step for this entire setup is to basically just plug it in to the rotation socket here. So this multiply node, this last multiply node here. We can come through with the vector, plug that into the rotation. And you'll see straight away we'd have some really cool rotations happening. So if I hit Play, you see we have this awesome rotational effects going on. But it is a little bit chaotic. You can see them all sorts of rotating rapidly and it's a little bit noisy. And the whole reason why that's happening is because of the noise texture up here. So currently the scale is at five. So if we hit play, we actually bring this scaled down just a tad to something like, let's go with points. Let's go with just 1.5 for now. You can see we have this really smooth rotation going on and it's a lot more satisfying to look at. So this is totally up to you. The scale part could even change like other factors like the detail and the roughness. And that'll give you different varying results as well. But I mean, even just this set up here, it looks pretty amazing to me. So I'm going to keep it like that for now. Awesome. So we have this rotation sort of setup going on here. It's pretty chaotic, so I'm going to select all of this and just throw it into a frame. Press Control J. And I can just keep it up the top here like this. So it's a lot more nicer to look at. And again, let's just label this. I'll call this rotate instances, and I'll give it a color as well. Let's go with a green for now. Awesome. So currently this is what the satisfying animation is looking like. And the last step really is to basically set a material and then also fiddle with these spirals at the beginning and create more copies of them. So in the next lesson, we're going to cover curating the material for this object. And then we'll cover more cuffs, spirals and joining them all together to create a really cool, satisfying animation. 8. Creating The Material: Okay, so welcome back. Let's now start adding a material to an object. And then we can dive into creating more objects, more curved spirals, I should say, to create a more satisfying and organic look. To begin with, what we need to do really is set a material. So if we go shift a, come through to material here and click on this set material node. If we plug this in at the very end here, we now have a drop-down and it allows us to choose a material. So currently, we just have the base material that blend boots up with, which is just a white material. So I'm going to click this material so that set here. Then we need to change our workspace to the shading workspace. And we can actually edit the material that makes sure that you've actually selected the material. And once you've done this, we can now come up to the top, come through to the shading workspace. And we can start fleshing out a material for our object here. So to begin with, you can see we have just the basic material. I'm actually just going to change this to say, satisfying material. And of course we want actually see what by creating. So currently we're just in material preview. So up here you can see we've got viewport shading. You can also press Z on your keyboard and you have this little pie menu to change from material preview to solid to rendered. So if we just come through to rented, this will boot up and it'll show you what the actual rendered image is going to look like. So currently there's no lighting, so that's why it looks like this. So let's actually come back to material, preview, flesh out the material, and then we'll jump into lighting and rendering at the final lesson. Okay, so let's just begin fleshing this out. So it's actually quite a simple material that we're going to be using. You can obviously create any material that you would like to place onto your object. But I found that this one seems to look quite nice in the final render. So to begin with, let's just add in a color ramp. So let's go shift a search for color ramp that we go. What we're going to do is just plug this into another node and then into both the base and subsurface color. So just start with, let's just choose some colors here. So on this first color stop. I'm just going to come down to the color wheel here. I'm going to increase the color a bit, and let's just go with something like a red here. Then for the white color, stop, grab this, come to the colors again. And let's go with something like a blue. So now we've got this nice gradient between each other. And if we plug this into the base color, you'll see this is what's currently looking like. And I'll also plug this into the subsurface color. So subsurface or subsurface scattering is what it's actually named, is the effect of light penetrating through something and then scattering. So you see it mostly in human flesh. If you shine a light between your fingers or on the back of your ear, you'll see it goes basically completely red. And that's the light trying to pierce through and come through to the other side. But it's basically entering your body and scattering across and making that really cool effect. I'm going to use that to my advantage with this whole setup. And all you need to do is increase this subsurface slider here. I'm actually just going to increase this to one. So completely increase it. And for the rendering engine, I'm actually going to be using cycles to get that realistic effect. So this is totally doable in EV as well if you, if your computer can handle cycles. But just for my project alone, I'm gonna be using cycles. Awesome. So now that we have the base color here, you can see if we start sliding this across, we can get different colors. You can also change this drop-down from linear and change it to something like constant. Or you can also change it to B-spline. So this part here is definitely up to you for what colors you'd like. I'm just going to keep mine on linea for now and maybe pull this color stop across like this. Amazing. So moving on from here. So I'm just going to add in another node called layer weights. In the input here. Come through to lay awake. Click that, drop it here. And we're going to use this for now option here on the roughness. Just plug this into the roughness and it might be a little bit difficult to CFS, but I'll just show you visually what this is doing. So for the, for now, what that is is basically the outline of the object. So depending on where you're viewing the object from, you'll see there's sort of a gradient from black to white board, currently white to gray. So if I change this blend down to something extreme like 0.05, you can see there's this white highlight on the front now, and then the rest is just black. So what this is doing is it's creating essentially a mosque. And what that means is whatever is black will be a value of 0 and whatever is why it will be a value of one. So all of these black patches here, so for example. So for example right here, this is going to have a roughness of 0, which means it's going to be very reflective. And for all of the white sections like on this outer rim here, it's going to be very rough. So that's going to create a very dynamic look for when these objects are rotating and spinning around. It's basically a very dynamic and almost real-time mosque for the roughness that we've created here. That's super cool. And it's honestly, this is sort of diving into material creation, which I'll be creating a completely separate class to talk about because it goes quiet in-depth and you can do quite a lot of things with blenders materials. So if you don't understand anything I've just said, Don't worry, we'll be covering that in a later class down the track. For now, all you need to know is that we have this for now node plugging into the roughness. And it's going to create some really cool effects. So again, the blend here is going to basically decide how strong or how impactful this mosque is. For my scene, I'm gonna go with something like 0.2. And that's just a sort of mid-range between extreme and not extreme. Awesome. So now with that done, you can kinda see in the viewport here, the white is basically all of these really shiny reflective bits and the black is the non-reflective bits. So that's more of a visual cue for you to look at, especially when I hit Play. You'll see this in action. Awesome. So it's almost like glass tiles on each side of the face, which is really cool. Now that we've set up the material, we can just jump back into the geometry nerds workspace here. Up the top. There we go. And now what we can do is come all the way back to this dot here. And from here we're going to start fleshing out the look and feel of our animation before rendering it. In the next lesson, we're going to cover curating more spirals and joining them together. And then we'll be covering the parameters here in the group input and actually creating perimeters in this Modifier Tab so that we can update everything on the fly and we'd never have to jump back into the screen again. So with all that said, I'll see you in the next lesson. 9. Creating Parameters and Alternate Animations: All right, So welcome back. Let's now dive into creating more curved spirals to flesh out outlook of our animation. And also create group inputs or group parameters so that we can actually update everything here in the modifier instead of here, the nerve network where it gets a little bit chaotic and you might not remember where you put things. So let's just dive into this now. So for the curves spiral, this is actually quite simple to do and create a lot of variation. So essentially what we'll be doing is creating multiple different spirals with different parameters. And then we're going to join them together and plug them into this curve radius here. Awesome. So for the spiral, lets us go Shift D. Bring this up here. And straight away, what we want to do is join them together. So if we just go shift a, come through to geometry and select this joint geometry nerd. Plug this in here and you'll see there's this geometry tab here. And it's got a massive nerd socket that is indicating that we can plug many things into this one socket. So if I grab this curve and plug it in here, grab this curve below, plug it in as well. Then grab the output here. Plug this into the cup radius. You'll see nothing visual has changed yet. And that's because this spiral is identical to this spiral here. If I hit the reverse option, you'll see it's now mirroring it in reverse and it's created another section for this entire group here. So what I want to do is just change a couple of these settings. So maybe I'll put in some more rotations, give it a little bit more resolution. Change the height a little bit, change the end radius. And immediately you can see we've got all of this really cool stuff happening. So if I hit Play, you'll see we now have this super organic. It's a little bit too chaotic for my liking, so I might just change some of these settings back a bit. I believe that rotations might help. Let's go with maybe rotations or even one rotation that we go hit Play. You'll see now we've got this amazing, really cool looking animation happening. So with this in mind, you can now go buck wild and add in as many spirals as you'd like. So for example, I could just add in another one down here. Plug the curves straight into the joint geometry. And I could give this one like five resolution, one rotation, give it a different starting radius, give it a different end radius. And again, we've just created a little bit more variation flexor. So have fun with playing around with all of these. And if you want to, you can even add indifferent curve parameters are curved primitives. So under here curved primitive, you could add in something completely different, like maybe a star. Let's see how this reacts. So if I just grabbed the curve, this into the joint geometry, hit Play. You'll see it's created this sort of segmentation here in the middle. And that's actually looking pretty cool. So I might keep that one involved as well. And again, all the parameters here are totally different to this. So we could give it full points, could give it, give the radius something larger like this. Could even give it some twist. Amazing. So that is a little too chaotic for me. So I might just control Z, some of that we go. But you can see straight away how quickly you can basically improve upon your animation. Now with all of this in mind, it's a good thing to note that the instance is currently a cube. So if we wanted to, we come through to the instance objects and create variation here by changing this out for something entirely different. So let's say, for example, I want to just disconnect this and maybe let's add in an ICA is via shipped a. Let's come through to Mesh Primitives and let's just add in an ecosphere like so. Plug this into the instance. You can see immediately we have this really, we have this really cool animation, actually. So much like a bunch of growing sprouts or flowers. So that's cool. And again, you can change the radius. So maybe that's a little too big for your lacking, so you can bring it down to 0.13. Hit play. And straight away, we have a totally different animation happening. Cool. So I'm going to keep mine as the cube for now because I liked the look of it. So I'm just going to plug that straight back in. And again with the incense, you can change the size here. So you could do something like this if you wanted to. Totally up to you. Amazing. So moving on down, we're up to the spot where we can actually start creating some parameters to update here on the side under the modifier. So for instance, the main spiral here. We can actually plug the rotations into this below socket here. And you'll see straight away what this has done is it's created the rotation, basically slide, I hear it's plugged it into the group input. And it's now populated here under the geometry nerds modifier. So I can now update the rotations completely procedurally here without ever having to come back into the screen. So that's super powerful. So for example, if I wanted to change the radius of the curve, if I do so, it's going to become extremely noisy. As you can see. It gives us a whole different vibe for the animation. But if I wanted to, I could come through to the curve radius and do it here. Or I could grab this radius socket, plug it into the group input down here. And now we have the radius right here for us to update in real time. For example, if I made it super small, we got this really cool ring lit animation. By making it super large, we get a more noisy, chaotic animation. So yeah, there's pots completely up to you. I'm going to keep mine at two for now. And one thing to note is currently the names of these parameters are just staying the same as is on the spiral nerd. And I can get a little bit confusing. So what I'd like to do is in the group tab here, if you don't have this menu open, it's the End key. And on the group tab, what you can do is come through to the inputs. You can actually name them or delete them. So for example, rotations. What we can do is name this so that it's more accurate. So we could say rotations, spiral on the skull one. Now in the outline here onto the modifier. We now know that this is for the first spiral that we created. So that's something to keep in mind. So for example, we don't really need this geometry anymore. So I'm just going to hit this minus button here to get rid of it so that we have a bit more of a cleaner node group here. And moving on, we've got the radius here. I don't really know what that is, especially if I'm coming back to this project in like a week or a month time. So let's just clean this up to say something like radius. There we go. So now thinking back on this when I'm in the future, I can say, okay, this is the Cubs radius, and then I can update that and actually know what I'm doing. So something to keep in mind when we're creating these group parameters. Again, let's just continue this trend of doing it with this fast spiral. So we want to, we can create the heights as a parameter. So again, I would just click this and rename it to height spiral underscore one. So I know that that is the height of the first spiral. Again, let's just do it for the radius and the end radius. Come through here like the end, the bottom, and plug this one into the bottom. Start radius, I'll change that to start radius, spiral, uninstall one. And the end radius, I'll change this from n radius to spiral to spill one. Awesome. If you want to do this for each Spiral, you're more than welcome to. But I'm just going to keep this for time's sake. As just the one spiral for me. Moving on, we can actually duplicate this group input. So Shift D. And we can actually plug in other factors into this so that we can update them on the fly. So for example, one that's handy to have is up here with the rotate instances. If we come through to the noise texture and grab the scale input, just plug this into the bottom. And we can now update the scale of the noise on the fly. So what I'll do is I'll make sure to name this noise scale. Like Sir. If we hit Play, what we can do is with the noise scale, we can actually just bring this up or down as the animation is playing. So I could bring this up like this, or down like this. Remember the high you bring this, the more chaotic the rotational be. So for me I'm just going to keep it at 1.5. But now that we have this as an output, I can more easily update this as we're going along. Amazing. So that's all that I'm really going to add to the group input and the parameters. If you want to, again, you can add more as you please. But for Miocene currently I think that's all that I'm going to need. So now we have all of these really cool inputs that I can update as I'm going along. And it just makes it a lot more easier for me to iterate on my animations. So continuing on this trend, what we can do now is basically finish off this whole animation here by changing it drastically. So I mentioned at the start, you can have multiple different animations and totally different loudly changing animation just by altering just a few nodes and settings. The first settings are obviously all of these rotations and spirals and all of that. But the other one is obviously the radius here on the curves circle. That might actually be a good output for me to put it in. So I'll just grab this and plug that into the bottom. And I'll just name this to File radius because that's what it is. So now we have another slot to play with. Awesome. But another thing that we can do is actually change the operation of some of these to something totally different and get an extremely different animation. So for example, I'm just in the instance objects section here. And what I'll do is I'll change this from kerosene to something like, let's say, we can go with the normalized option here. And straight away you can see we have this increasingly changing animation. So if I hit play, you can see this is totally different and it has a completely different vibe to it. Actually really enjoy this one. This looks amazing. As you can see just with one setting. I've just created an entirely new animation. This is super powerful to play with. It doesn't take long or take any effort really at all. I've just changed one option. So for example, instead of this being ad, I could change this maybe to subtract. And straightaway, again, we have this amazingly different animation and it's just incredibly powerful and so fun to play with. So moving on from here, as long as you're happy with your animation now, we can start fleshing out the scene, the lighting, and then move on to rendering. So once you're all set, I'll meet you in the next lesson, where we'll run through all of those settings. 10. Lighting And Rendering: Okay, welcome back. So we're up to the final leg of the whole class here. We're basically now completed with our animation. We're happy with how it looks. And now we want to start fleshing out the scene, the lighting, the floodplain, and then the rendering. So let's begin doing that. It's actually quite simple to do. So first is we want something to cast a shadow and basically capture the shadow, which would be a full plane. Let's go shift a, come through to mesh plane. And we're just going to scale this up by ten. So just quickly, I've just press S to scale. Then I've typed in ten on my number pad to scale it up by a factor of ten. And now I'm just going to bring this below. So G to grab Z to pull down. And now we have a floor plan to capture some shadows. Awesome. So moving on from here, this actually might be a little too big. So I'll bring this in scale down just slightly. And now we want to create an infinite backdrop for this. So basically, an infinity backdrop or infinite backdrop is something that's used a lot in photo shoots. Or professional photographers usually use this a lot when doing subjects photo shoots. And it's very simple to setup. So we need to do is press Tab to go into edit mode. And we're going to extrude this edge up. So I'm going to press two. Or you can come up here and click this edge option. Going to select this edge here at the back. And I'm going to press E and then z to constrain it to the Z-axis. Just pull that up a bit until it's basically out of view. And now what we want to do is grab this middle edge here that we have created and battle that. So just press Control B, that'll let you Bevel. And then on your mask we'll just scroll up maybe three or four times to create some more edge cuts. And then left-click to select that. Awesome. I've just tapped out of edit mode. And you can see, you can see that this, these edges that we've created are positive. And that's a no-go that's going to show up in the render and we don't want to see this. So let's shade this smooth. So I'll click, so I'll right-click this and select shades move. And now you can see we've basically created an infinity backdrop for our subject to stand on. So again, we don't have a camera, so let's just add an a camera now. Shift a come through to camera down here. And that's going to create a camera in the middle of our scene. So I'm going to press G and pull this back. And to actually view what our camera is seeing, I'm just going to pull these two workspaces down a touch. So we've got more of a workspace up here. And I'm going to make another window here or viewport for us to look through the camera. Up the top-right. Any of these viewports are workspaces at any sort of intersecting side. So up here on the top left are the top rat. You should always get a little cross hair. And whenever you have the cross hair, it'll allow you to either collapse it into another workspace, will pull it across and create a new space. I'm just going to come to the bottom here, Left-click this, and just drag this across to create whole new workspace for us. Now that we have this, we can look through the camera and actually control the camera without viewport here. So press the key or 0 number on your number pad to look through the view of the camera and to actually control the camera with our viewport, you can press the N key to open up this side panel. Under the View tab here, we can come down to camera to view and just select that checkbox. Once you've selected that, you'll see these orange lines around your camera. And now if you try and move in the viewport, you're actually going to be moving your camera. So this is just a quick way to set up a camera view or camera angle for your scene. So I'm gonna go with something like this for the framing. And now let's just quickly set up our camera settings. Down here. This little camera icon here, it's the object data properties. And we're going to just quickly enabled some cameras settings. So the focal length will default to 50 millimeters, which is not too bad. It's kind of like a mid-range focal length. That's kinda good for everything. But for my animation specifically, I want it to be a little bit more zoomed in. So I'm going to set this to 85 millimeters. And you'll see straight away this is zoomed directly in. So I'm just going to scroll out a little bit on my Moscow until it's framed in the shot again. There we go. That's essentially all I need to do for the camera here. So once your camera setup is complete and you're happy where it is, it's always a good idea to disable the camera to view, just in case he accidentally move your viewport and you actually move your camera from its position. So again, I'm going to press N on this view port here. I'm just going to uncheck this camera to view set. Setting here. Awesome. So now when I move around here, it's not going to move my camera. And I can again press the arrow key on my number pattern to look directly through my camera's perspective. All right, so moving on from here, we can now start lighting as seen. So what we can do is just quickly jump into rendered mode. So just quickly up here in the render properties, this little camera icon, we can change our render engine to either EV or cyclists depending on what you are going to be using. Again, I'll be using the Cycles Render Engine, so I'm just going to switch that across for the device. If you do have a graphics card or a GPU, make sure that you've clicked this setting here so that it actually uses your graphics card because that is a lot quicker than your CPU Wilson. So now let's dive into rendered mode so we can actually see what we're looking at. So just press the Z button and then on this little pie we'll just scroll up and then either left-click or let go of z to enter rendered mode. Amazing. So currently there's not really any light source. We have very soft wildland and currently, but for everything else has literally no lights in our scene. So let's just start off by adding in some labs. So I'm going to go Shift a to come here to light. And I'm going to add in an area light that we go from here. It's just essentially setting up the position. So I'm going to quickly move this into a three-point lighting setup. So to start, I'm basically going to put a lot here, a lot here, and a backlight here. So I've just moved the light across and to actually aim it directly at the object. I'll just quickly show you a fast way to do this. So you could either rotate this manually on the x-axis and so try and aim it at it manually. Or you can actually just press Shift and t. So Shift plus T. And what this will do is it will point to the light directly at wherever your cursor is. If I want to point out over here, Shift T and it will aim directly there. Shift T again, and that's going to aimed directly at the object, which is really cool. So again, I'm just making a three-point lighting setup. So I'm going to move this one here. I'm going to duplicate this. Move it across on the y axis. Shift T again to pointed directly at the object. And I'm going to just put a point light right here at the back. So shift a light, white light. And I'm just going to pull this back to illuminate the backdrop behind it. So let's jump into rendered murder and see how this is currently looking. Alright, awesome. So it is a little bit dull currently. And that's just because the light sources aren't very powerful. So for this first light, I'm going to come through to the light properties. Here are the object data properties again, click this button, and let's just blast this to something like 500. Awesome. So that might be a little too powerful. Sorry, I'm going to drop this down to 250. There we go. And for the color here, I'm actually going to give this a little bit of a warm tint. So on the color wheel, I'm just going to hold down Shift so I can select my color more precisely. And I'm just going to pull it across to the warmer hue. There we go. So somewhere around this range seems to be good. So I'll keep it like that. For this secondary light here, I'm again going to increase the power. So for this one, I'm gonna go with 500. There we go. And for the scale, I'm actually going to increase this quite dramatically. So I'm just going to press S and scale that up quite a bit to something like that. Then lastly, for the point light here, I'm just going to increase this until it eliminates the backdrop. There we go. So 100s seems to be pretty good. And I'm noticing straight away that the actual object seems a little bit dull. And also the backdrop is completely white. So I think what we want to do now is just hone in those textures. So I'm just going to jump back into shading just very briefly. And I'm going to just play with the color ramp here. So in rendered mode, I'm just going to quickly play with this. Awesome. So I've just played with the color ramp here and I'm just basically credit is sort of gray gradient, red color here. It's very simple. And what I'm gonna do now is just contrast this with a blue baby blue backdrop for the plane here. What's going to create an entirely new material? So I just click on New and we can just name this backdrop like so. And all we're really going to change here is the base color. So what you can actually do is grab this color here. So you can either come through to the hex code and copy that, or you can literally just hover your cursor over this color bar and press Control C. And that will copy the color directly. So we can plug it into this material space column with the plane selected. Now, I'm just going to press control V to copy the exact read that this animation is using. So with that in mind, we can now choose the exact opposite, blue. And it will basically create a really cool contrast. In this color wheel. I'm just going to open it up. Come through to the HSV tab here. And on this hue here, this hue slider, we can actually just pull it across to something like this. There we go. So we've now got the exact opposite of this color, which is really cool. Looking through the camera here. It also looks really cool as well. Awesome. So with this now completes, you can obviously Tinker the lighting to however you'd like. For example, the weld lighting, I'm just in the shading tab. Come through to this drop-down here and change the weld. You could turn the weld flat completely off by changing the strength here. That'll give you a little bit more of a dynamic look. But yeah, this pie is entirely up to you. The lighting is a completely creative process. I really enjoyed the three-point lighting setup. It just looks quite nice in my opinion. With that, out of the way, we can move on to actually rendering this. So in your Render Settings here, under the Render properties, we can now just run through all of these settings and actually set up a render. So to start for the render itself, all of the new blend of saints will now start with a Mac sample of 4,096. That's probably way too many samples, especially for a scene like this. So something sort of mid-range would be 200 samples. That does become a point where you can basically get diminishing returns on the amount of samples that you're rendering. But for me, I'm just going to go with 250 samples. And I'm also going to make sure that the D noise setting is turned on. Another thing that we're going to enable is the motion blur. So just ensure that this checkbox is enabled, it's going to give you that really cool motion blur look. And the last setting in this setup here is just down in the column management. So click color management. This is going to open up a whole new drop-down. And what we're gonna do here is just change the look. So currently this nerve look applied to our scene. And if we open this up, I usually like to use the high contrast look. So if I enable that you can see it's now got a more punchy look to it and it's going to look a lot nicer in the render. So up to you here, if you'd like to add some contrast to your scene, you can see you've just, you see when you choose the very low contrast it but kinda comes more of a flat looking image. And again, I just enjoy the high contrast. Look. Awesome. So once you're happy with that and your animation, we can now jump over from the render properties and come over to the output properties. So click this little image icon here. And this is where we're actually going to set up what is going to be output or rented out for the resolution currently go to at 1920 by 1080. That's totally fine for the percent. It's at 100%. So we can keep that as is. Frame rate is 24 frames per second. That's just, that's fine. So we can keep that as is as well. For the frame range, we want to make sure that the frame start and end is set up correctly. So we're going to have I seen start at frame one and we're going to have it end at frame 360. So just ensure that those two values are correct. And now that one of the most important parts of the output section is actually setting an output folder for blended to put your images that you're rendering. So make sure to create a folder. Currently it's set to my temporary folder, which I definitely don't want. So I'm going to quickly create a render output folder now for all of my images to be placed into. Awesome. So I've just created an output folder here. And essentially all of the images or the movie file that we're going to render is going to be placed in this folder. So you can see if I open this up here, I've created a very specific file naming convention. And this is actually super important. Essentially I've named this satisfying animation underscore, one underscore. So this part specifically is what is important because we're going to import this whole sequence into a sequence editor like to Vinci resolve. So if this was to be named satisfying animation one, the actual output render would, basically it would name the file satisfying animation on the school 1001. And it wouldn't go up in a sequential order, it would become very confusing. So just ensure that you're naming convention is similar or identical to this. And you'll be fine. Once you're happy with your name, just accept that. And now comes the part where we can start to render. So if you want to actually render a movie or a video file straight from blender, I don't recommend that you do, but if you do want to, you can click this file format and change it from P&G over to FFmpeg video. So what this will do is essentially render out all of your images into a video file, instead of you having to manually open up another program like DaVinci Resolve and render out the sequence as a video file. The only reason why I don't recommend you do the video file in Blender is because there could be a scenario wet blend of crashes. Maybe halfway through your rent a, let's say you're rendering 360 frames at only gets to frame 100. You'd have to then restart your render from frame 0. So that can be really tedious and time-consuming. Whereas if you choose to do a PNG sequence, you're essentially giving yourself a safety net so that if blended does crash, you can locate what frame number that Blender got up to, then you can essentially just restart the random from that frame. So I always recommend to use this PNG file format. Amazing. So once you're ready to render this out, you have all of your settings complete. You're happy with your animation, your lighting, your material. All you need to do now is come up to the render tab here. You can click the Render Animation button. In the next lesson, once your render is complete, we're going to open up DaVinci Resolve and input your image sequence directly into there and render out the final video of your animation. 11. Davinci Resolve: Okay, so your render is now complete. We're now up to this step to open up DaVinci Resolve and actually input your image sequence directly in here and render out the video. So let's just start out by creating a new project. So you should be met with a similar screen to this. Let's just come through and click the new project option here. Now we're going to create a new project. So let's just call this satisfying Animation Skillshare. There we go, and you can hit the Create button. So this will now open up a entirely new workspace here. And what we're going to do is come through to the Media tab. So if you're not yet on the Media tab, just make sure the R by clicking down here. And this tab allows us to input an image sequence. So now all you need to do is locate where you saved your image sequence to. So I'm just going to do that now. Alright, so I've now found my satisfying animation. And if you don't have this kind of layout here where it's a stacked sequence and it looks a bit more like this, where they're just individual frames. All you need to do is come up to these three dots here. Click this, and then make sure that these sharp individual frames is not checked on. It does click that. It'll shrink them all into their own sequences. And now you can see, if you click it, you have this little outline here to view your animation. You can literally just hit Play and it will play your animation in real time. So that's super convenient. So now all we need to do is just drag and drop this into the media pool. So drag your sequence down here, place it here. It's not in the media pool for us to actually start editing and exporting into a video. So what we need to do now is actually place it on a timeline so that we can render this out. So come down to the bottom here and click on this Edit tab. This is going to open up an entirely new workspace. We don't need to worry about much of any of these workspaces. Apart from we have the media pool here. We have the timeline here. If you don't have the media pool here, just to ensure that this button at the top Media Pool is selected and then your immediate pool will show up. Now what we can do is just click, click and drag this onto the timeline like Sir, going hit play. And we have our animation playing in real time. And now what we need to do is actually rented this out. So super-simple, come through here to the Deliver tab with the rocket. Click on this. And what we want to do is basically set up these settings here, give it a name and a location to save out too. I found the quickest way for this is to actually just click the YouTube preset here. And what this will do is basically render it out at 1920 by 1080 by definition, which is exactly what we rented these images out as. So that's super handy. And all we need to do now is just choose a name. So we can call this satisfying and emission Skillshare. Then of course, we need to choose a location for this to save, to just click this Browse button and choose a folder that you want your final animation video to be saved to. Awesome. So once you've found your folder here, we're now ready to actually write this out. So click on this Add to Render Queue button down here. This will then pull it over to the render queue. It should say job one. And now all you need to do is click this render old button. There we go. So that's completed. It's rendering now and we actually have the video file that I can share it on screen right now. Once that's done, a quick way to actually locate the video file is you can right-click this. You can right-click the job here and it'll open up this little sub menu. You can click on Open file location. This will open up a quick folder here where your video has been saved to. You can double-click that and you can play, you're satisfying animation. 12. Outro: Congratulations for making it all the way to the very end of this class. I'm so glad that you could join me and learn through my experience with Blender geometry nerds. Hopefully now you have a greater understanding of palace, wonderful new workspace works. And you have a variety of different animations for your portfolio. Now, if you'd like to, I would love to see what you have curated. So please post your project in the project and resources below. Or feel free to tag me on my socials at Smith's sculpts. If you liked this class, please leave a review and I'll see you in the next.