>> Hello and welcome, everyone, to another video.
Recently, I have created this Dragon Ball Z aura type effect in Blender.
And today, I'm going to show you how you can make it yourself.
Of course, as most of my videos, this effect is fully procedural.
So, if you don't like something about it or you just have your own vision,
then chances are you can just adjust the values that I will show you later and make it your own.
So, again, as in every video, if you managed to make something out of it or use it
in some scene, I would really love to see your creation,
so make sure to share with me on Twitter.
Link for that is in the description.
And now, let's just jump right into Blender.
So, first of all, we will delete everything and we will start with a mesh sphere.
And for those of you that watched my recent tutorial about the fire effect,
the beginning is going to be very, very similar.
So, you may just skip to the shader creation part.
And for those of you that are new, we will start by going into modifiers
and add a subdivision surface modifier as first one, then a normal edit modifier,
and as last we will add a displace modifier.
So, your stack should look something like this.
The next step, we will create an empty and put it below ours here.
Let's also name it "normal controller" because we will use it
to control the normals of our sphere.
It may not make a lot of sense right now, but just bear with me
and you should soon see visually what I'm talking about.
So, now, let's go into the displace modifier and click "new" to get a new texture.
And go down to the texture tab and change the type to clouds.
Now, back in the modifier stack in the normal edit, the target is going
to be the normal controller, so the empty we created.
And then, open up mix and change the mix mode from copy to add.
You may also notice that we have this warning that tells us to enable auto smooth
for this modifier to work, so we'll do just that.
Go to the object data properties, normals, and enable auto smooth.
Now, as you can see, not much happened.
But as you move this empty around, it may look like we are moving a light source,
and that is because we are actually editing the normals of our mesh,
which also means we can use these custom normals in our displace modifier
to displace it only where we want to.
So, in the displace modifier, change the direction from normal
to custom normal, so the one we edit.
And now as you move the empty, you can see that the mesh is being displaced according
to the custom normal that we are editing in real time.
So, let's keep it under.
And now, in order to have further control
over the displacement itself, we will create another empty.
So, again, empty.
Plain access is fine or any other will do just fine.
And this one we will call a displace controller.
Now, back in our sphere in the displace modifier,
change coordinates from local to object.
And the object is going to be the displace controller that we created.
This way, we can easily control the displace texture by simply scaling our empty.
Also, moving it around is going to phase through the three-dimensional texture.
Now, with this basic setup, let's make our aura look like an aura, so sort of an egg shape.
We can just pick the top vertex.
And with the proportional editing enabled, we can see simply move it up and just adjust it.
Just make it look like a sort of egg or a droplet of water.
And then when you get out of the edit mode,
you can see that it resembles aura a little bit more.
Now, one thing to pay attention to is when you go back into the edit mode,
you can see that the density of the vertices is much higher down here than it is up here,
so it is a good practice to sort of even it out.
So, feel free to just add some loop cuts in the middle to sort of have a uniform or at least
around a uniform across the whole surface.
So, with that done, right-click shade smooth so we have a nice smooth sort
of bush looking mesh, which is perfectly fine.
Don't worry too much about the displacement and the values so far
yet because we can always adjust it later down the road.
And now, let's just focus on the material itself.
So, let's get a new window, change it to shader editor,
and click "new" to create a new material.
We can delete the principled BDSF and get an emission shader node as well as transparent BDSF
and also a mix shader connected like so,
the transparent on top and the emission on the bottom.
And now, let's add a Fresnel node as well as layer weight node.
Now, let's also go into the render preview so we see what we're doing.
And as we preview the Fresnel node, the preview is control-shift left mouse button,
but you have to have a node wrangler enabled.
For those of you wondering, it's under edit, preferences, add-ons.
And by default, it should be in Blender already, so just make sure it's enabled.
So, the Fresnel node as you see gives us this really, really nice effect where only the edges
of the mesh is highlighted, which is going to play perfectly into what we are trying to do.
So, right after Fresnel node, let's add a color ramp.
And here, we can already start laying in some colors.
First of all, let's change the interpolation from linear to constant
so that we don't have any gradient, but rather sharp contrasty look between the colors.
And now, let's start with the darkest being sort of reddish, maybe something like this.
Then, the next one, we will go through orange then to yellow and the last one sort
of washed out yellow going into the white.
Now, we can adjust it as it is right now or you can do it later.
Just make sure it looks something like that, it gradually goes from darkest to the lightest
in the edges poking out of the mesh, but don't worry about it too much.
We can always come back to it later.
And this color ramp is going straight into the emission node.
Now, as we preview the mix shader, you can see that we have just that
and we don't have any transparency yet, and that is because first of all we need to go
into the material properties and in blend mode enable alpha blend instead of opaque.
And the second thing, let's also enable backface culling.
Now, as you see, everything is sort of half transparent because this mix shader is now set
to being half transparent BDSF and half emission.
So, what we need to do is we need to get an alpha mask.
And for this, we will use this layer weight node.
So, let's get another color ramp and connect facing into the color ramp.
And let's preview this.
Here, we can change the interpolation from linear to B-spline
to get a much softer gradient than with linear.
And also, let's bring in the black value quite high.
And the white one, just slightly move it from the edge to like 0.9.
Now, let's duplicate this color ramp and this time connect it with Fresnel from layer weight.
And as you preview this one, it has slightly different result.
You can see that the facing has more of that gradient going into our aura
and Fresnel only really highlights the very edges.
So, here, we can actually dial back this black value a little bit
to have that gradient as well.
And now, we just need to combine these two color ramps.
So, let's get a math node, connect both of them together, leave it at add.
Let's preview that.
And the only thing you need to do is enable clamp just to make sure
that the white values do not exceed one because this will go directly
into the mix shader factor, and so everything of value one is going to be fully opaque
and the black values are going to be transparent.
So, as we preview this, we can see that we already have something going on in here.
Now, make sure that the backface culling is on because if you turn it off,
then you see that we have some sort of artifact.
Not sure why it happens, but it does.
So, just make sure it's checked in.
And here, we can adjust the color ramp values just to make sure that our colors are popping
in nicely and they are not too faded, but also that we still have this nice gradient.
Also, if this mesh is pretty spiky,
remember that in the modifier stack we added a subdivision modifier at the beginning,
so we can up the levels of subdivision and this should give you a lot more geometry
to work with, which should also make the gradient a little bit smooth.
And then as you see in my case, I have very noisy displacement going on right now
and that is why we have this displace controller in here so we can easily just scale it
up a little bit in order to get much softer results.
Now, because it's an aura and it's supposed to be glowing, we can up the emission strength
in here to something like maybe 10.
And if you don't have this glow going around your mesh, just make sure that you go
into the render settings and you have a bloom enabled
because that's the setting that's allowing your emissive areas to glow.
Now, as you can see, we have very cell shaded sort of stylized look of the aura.
And if you want to have it more gradual, I would say blurry or smooth,
you can go into this color ramp that is dealing with the color of your aura
and just change the interpolation from constant to whatever you like.
I would recommend B-spline because it gives this really,
really nice soft gradient between the values that we have.
So, as I said, just an artistic choice for you to make.
And now, to put a little bit more life into this whole effect,
we can take the displace controller and just animate it going up because as you see
with the displace controller, the texture that is displacing the mesh is going up as well.
So, on the frame one in his base position, I'll just click "I"
and add a location keyframe to the first frame.
And then on let's say frame 20th, I will move it upwards and then click "I" again
and add another keyframe location.
And now, if we play this, you can see that it's moving from 1 to 20,
but what we can also do is change the interpolation to linear by clicking "T"
on the keyboard and choosing linear and then shift-E and choose linear extrapolation.
And this will take these two keyframes and based
on them it will extrapolate this animation further so that we don't need
to have the keyframe all the way up there in order to have this animation going infinitely.
And then if you want this to go faster or slower,
you just move this second keyframe further or crunch it in closer to the first keyframe
to have it really, really frantic.
I like the slower one, so I'll put it somewhere around here.
So, with this flamy color done, the next step is to add those bluish sparks
that are moving through the whole aura.
I'm talking about those blue sparks that you can see appearing and disappearing.
So, for that first of all we will duplicate this color ramp with the colors
and connect the Fresnel node to it as well.
And let's preview it up.
And here, we want to change the color scheme from this orangey yellowy flamy looking one
into the bluish sort of sparky colors.
So, we will just go through all those color stops and just move it into the blue areas.
So, this one here, this one maybe a little bit like this, this one much, much brighter,
and then the last one going into almost whitish just to have
that little oomph at the at the very edge.
Now, if we preview this blue spark color by plugging it into the emission,
you can see that it looks nice, but looks much better if its interpolation is changed
to constant because electricity usually is quite harsh and jagged.
So, I would recommend this.
But again, your choice.
So, let's move back the flamy boy into emission as a default.
And then, we want this blue one only to appear in waves.
So, let's start by adding a wave texture.
And then again, if you have the node wrangler enabled with the node selected, click control-T.
To get a mapping and texture coordinates node, change it from generated to object.
And then as you preview this, you can see that now the waves are going vertically.
So, we will need to rotate it on the y-axis by 90 degrees and also change the scale all the way
down to something like 0.7 so we have those waves quite big.
The next step is to animate the phase offset.
As you can see, we have the single value that can control the waves going up.
So, we will simply type in here hashtag frame, which is going to change it into a driver.
And then, we can divide it by let's say two.
And as we play the animation, you can see that these waves are moving downwards.
So, in order to change the direction, we just need to put a minus sign before.
Now, it's moving upwards.
And if it's moving too slow, you can just change the frame divided by 2
to like frame divided by 0.5, whatever you like.
I will have it at 0.8 because I found this value to work great for me.
And then in order to refine this gradient,
we will get another color ramp right after the wave texture.
And this time, we will change it to B-spline again so we have much, much softer gradient
and move the black value all the way in and the white value just a little bit
so that we have this really, really white value in here, then the gradient,
and then the black values in here, which is exactly what we're looking for.
Now, in order to give a little bit more variation to this,
we can increase the distortion, the detail scale in order
to just give it a little bit of irregularities.
Now that we have this wave texture already done, we will need a mix RGB in order to change
between the yellow and the blue based on this mask.
So, this mask goes into the factor, and then the yellow one goes into the color one input
and the blue into the color two input,
and the output of the mix RGB goes straight into the emission.
Now, as we preview the mix shader, so our finer material,
you can see that we have this nice sort of sparky wave going
from the bottom to the top of the whole effect.
But right now, it's visible all the time and I just feel
like it's much better when it's blinking.
So, we will need a couple more nodes in order to achieve that.
The first one will be a math node changed from add to ping-pong.
So, in order for us to have a blinking mask, we need to type in hashtag frame, again a driver.
And then depending on how fast we want it to blink, we can divide it by some number.
I will leave it at divided by 2 because I want it to blink quite fast.
And now, a disclaimer for those of you that may have problem with fast blinking images
or epilepsy, just maybe skip this part because I'm going to preview it and it's just going
to blink black and white, so be prepared.
So, as you can see, it's blinking right now.
And if it's too fast, too slow, again, you can adjust the driver.
And one more thing we can do is right now as you can see as we scroll through the animation,
it goes from black to gray and only then through white, and we want to skip the gray values.
We only want zero and one, so like invisible and visible.
And for that, we will need another math node connected right after ping-pong
and this time change the add to snap, and this will snap to whatever value we have in here.
So, I will put in one so it snaps to every round number without anything after comma.
Again, disclaimer, flashing images.
As you preview this, you have a clear zero to one mask flashing.
So, we move this a little bit further, get another math node.
And this time, it's going to be a multiply, and we want to multiply the result of the snap
with the color ramp going from our wave texture.
So, if we preview that, we have the same blinking thing,
but this time it's the waves that are blinking upwards.
And this goes into the mix RGB factor.
Now, as we preview everything, you should have these really blue sparks only visible every now
and then depending on how fast it's blinking.
And I just feel like it looks so much better than when it's always visible.
You can of course adjust the size of the waves and the scale of it all,
so like the scale of the wave texture, in order to have less
or more of the sparks going at the same time.
Again, all up to you.
I'll maybe change it to like 0.4.
And yeah, now is the time to sort of adjust all the values that you want.
And just small tip.
It's better if your background is much, much darker than this grayish value.
Then, everything that's happening is just more visible.
So, I would recommend just go into the world settings, change the color to something --
I don't know -- maybe bluish and then get the value all the way
down to almost like black, but not quite.
And then, you see what's really going on.
So, again, all the values that we went through, all the color ramps,
just feel free to adjust them as you wish.
I think I will leave it as it is.
Now, as you can see, the difference is that my frame rate here is much,
much higher than in the presentation video.
And that is because I just like this 12 FPS sort of look that I have had in this scene,
and you can easily have that as well just going into the render settings
and change the frame rate from 24 to custom and then just type in 12.
But then again, the whole speed of your animation, speed of your displace controller,
everything has to be adjusted based on the frame rate that you choose to have.
So, for this tutorial, I will just use 30 to have smooth-looking thing,
but just know that it's a possibility in order
to achieve a totally different look to the whole thing.
So, now, the last thing to do is the stones, the particles,
and that is done with the particle system.
So, we can just shift a mesh plane
to have a particle emitter on the bottom of the whole aura.
And we can also name it "emitter."
And then, we need just a couple of stones.
And I just simply took mesh rock generator.
I believe you need to have an add-on enabled for that as well,
which is I think extra object, add mesh extra object.
So, make sure it's enabled or you can just create any rock that you want.
I just found that this method is so much faster.
You just generate a rock, you go into the modifier stack, apply all of them,
and then add a decimate modifier and just go all the way
down until you have like a low poly version.
In order to see the faces better, you just right-click shade flat
and then bring it all the way down and then apply the decimate.
And you can just generate a few rocks like that, decimate all the way down shade flat and done.
So, when you have your rock collection, I don't know how many different variations you want,
just select both of them, click "M" and choose "new collection."
Name them "rocks" or something like that and this should create a new collection for you.
And now in our particle emitter in this plane, we can create a particle system
and under render change the render as from halo to collection
and the collection being rocks that we just created.
We can change the scale also to one so we see what's going on.
And as you click "play," you can see we have our rocks.
Now, first of all, of course, let's increase the scale randomness
so we have a variation with the scale.
Let's choose the frame start to be like minus 50 so we have a little bit
of pre-warn before the whole animation starts.
The end also 250 so it encompasses the whole animation frame that we have right here.
And now, first of all, obviously, the rocks are falling.
We don't want them to fall.
All the way down into field weights and turn down the gravity all the way to zero.
This will make our particles go up, but in very uniform and not pleasing way.
So, first of all, let's decrease the number to like something more sensible, maybe 100.
And then under the velocity tab, let's add an object aligned z velocity 1 meter per second.
And then under randomize, let's increase it to something like one so we can see
that the rocks are not going straight up, but have a little bit of random velocity.
We can also increase the lifetime randomness to like 0.5 so not all
of them will disappear at the same height.
Next thing, as you can see, they are all rotated the same way.
So, under rotation, let's enable it.
Crank the randomize all the way up, randomize space all the way up, enable dynamic.
And under angular velocity, we can increase the amount so that they will rotate as they fly
up as well, which I think gives a little bit more dynamism to the whole scene.
Now, if they are a little bit too big, you can either scale your models down or scale them
under the render tab to scale a little bit lower so they are not as big.
And now, I think the last thing to do is as you can see they just fly
up and disappear sort of abruptly.
In order to make this transition much smoother, we scroll all the way
down until we find the textures tab, then open it up, click "new" to create new texture,
go into the textures tab again, change type from image or movie to blend,
and we will use this texture in order
to tell the particle system how big the particles should be at given moment of life.
So, first of all, open influence and we want this texture only
to influence the size of our particle.
And then under mapping, the coordinates we want to be not generated, but per strand and particle
so each of these particles will be affected by this texture as its own entity basically.
Now, let's open colors, enable color ramp and open it up.
And here, first of all, let's increase the alpha of this to like one so we see what we're doing.
This basically represents the scale of our object throughout its life.
So, black is zero obviously, white is one.
So, we want it to start with the size one.
And then as it grows old, we want it to be zero by the time it disappears.
We can also change the interpolation to B-spline to have much smoother transition
and just bring it a little bit closer.
So, as you can see, the particles now start with their normal size
and then they just gradually scale down until they disappear.
We can increase the render scale now because they are a little bit too small.
And when you're happy with your particles going up, the last thing to do is take them
and create the material for them because right now in the render preview
as you can see we have this emissive color and then we have those stones.
And then, it depends what you want to go for.
I in my previous scene had a simple setup of area light shining
from the top quite big and quite strong.
And based on this light information, I had the stones cell shaded, and I will show you how.
So, first of all, let's select the stone.
And in the material editor, click "new" to create new material.
And we can delete the principled BDSF and instead have a diffuse.
And now right after the diffuse, we want a shader to RGB node,
which is going to take the shader information and turn it into an RGB color,
which we can further connect to a color ramp.
And let me show you what it does.
So, it takes this information of how this object looks like being lit by the light.
And based on that, we can just give it some different color.
So, because it's stone, I went with like the basic brown setup.
Let's do it again as well.
Change the interpolation to constant again to have the cell shaded look.
Now, the second one's going to be much brighter, but not too bright.
And a highlight on top.
So, you can spend much more time adjusting it.
I'm just hungry, so I'm going to wrap it up.
So, simply select the second rock, go in here and choose the material
that we just created for our rocks.
And now, as you see, as they fly upwards as the light changes, the material reflects
that as well and changes with it.
If the lighting is too strong for you,
then you can always just decrease the strength of the light.
And as you can see, it affects the color
because again it's taking the diffuse shader and then turning it into color.
So, depending on how the diffuse shader looks in the first place,
that's how the result is going to look like.
And yeah, because it's aura, one last thing.
You can select it.
You can see we have a shadow right now.
Go into the material properties.
And under the shadow mode, just click "none" so that it doesn't cast any shadow
because I just believe it shouldn't.
And this would be it for the tutorial.
I hope that you learned something, that you enjoyed it and you will be able to use it
in your personal project, which I would love to see if you do so.
Please share with me on Twitter.
Link for that in the description.
And if you have any requests for the future tutorials, comment section is for you,
and I will see you in the next one.
Bye-bye.
>> Hello and welcome everyone to another video.
Recently I have created this Dragon Ball Z aura type effect in Blender, and today I'm going
to show you how you can make it yourself.
Of course as most of my videos this effect is fully procedural.
So if you don't like something about it or you just have your own vision,
then chances are you can just adjust the values that I will show you later and make it your own.
So again, as in every video, if you manage to make something out of it or use it
in some scene, I would really love to see your creation.
So make sure to share with me on Twitter, link for that is in the description.
And now let's just jump right into Blender.
So first of all, we will delete everything and we'll start with a mesh sphere.
And for those of you that watched my recent tutorial about the fire effect,
the beginning is going to be very, very similar.
So you may just skip to the shader creation part.
And for those of you that are new, we will start by going into modifiers
and add a subdivision surface modifier as first one, then a normal edit modifier,
and as last, we will add a displace modifier.
So your stack should look something like this.
The next step, we'll create an empty and put it below our sphere.
Let's also name it normal controller because we will use it
to control the normals of our sphere.
It may not make a lot of sense right now but just bear with me
and you should soon see visually what I'm talking about.
So now let's go into the displace modifier and click new to get a new texture
and go down to the texture tab and change the type to clouds.
Now back in the modifier stack in the normal edit, the target is going
to be the normal controller, so the empty we created.
And then open up mix and change the mix mode from copy to add.
You may also notice that we have this warning that tells us to enable auto smooth
for this modifier to work, so we'll do just that.
Go to the object data properties, normals, and enable auto smooth.
Now as you can see not much happened, but as you move this empty around,
it may look like we are moving a light source and that is
because we are actually editing the normals of our mesh,
which also means we can use this custom normals in our displace modifier
to displace it only where we want to.
So in the displace modifier, change the direction from normal
to custom normal, so the one we edit.
And now as you move the empty, you can see that the mesh is being displaced according
to the custom normal that we are editing in the real time.
So let's keep it under.
And now in order to have further control
over the displacement itself, we will create another empty.
So again, empty plane axis is fine or any other will do just fine.
And this one we will call a displace controller.
Now back in our sphere, in the displace modifier, change coordinates from local
to object, and the object is going to be the displace controller that we created.
This way we can easily control the displace texture by simply scaling our empty.
Also moving it around is going to phase through the three-dimensional texture.
Now with this basic set up, let's make our aura look like an aura, so sort of an egg shape.
We can just pick the top vertice, and with the proportional editing enabled we can simply move
it up and just adjust it.
Just make it look like a sort of egg or a droplet of water, and then when you get
out of the edit mode you can see that it resembles aura a little bit more.
Now one thing to pay attention to is when you go back into the edit mode,
you can see that the density of the vertices is much higher down here than it is up here.
So it is a good practice to sort of even it out.
So feel free to just add some loop cuts in the middle to sort of have a uniform --
or at least around a uniform across the whole surface.
So with that done, right click shade smooth so we have a nice smooth sort
of bush-looking mesh which is perfectly fine.
Don't worry too much about displacement and the value so far
yet because we can always adjust it later down the road.
And now let's just focus on the material itself.
So let's get a new window, change it to shader editor, and click new to create a new material.
We can delete the principled BDSF and get a emission shader node as well
as transparent BSDF, and also a mix shader connected like so, the transparent on top
and emission on the bottom, and now let's add a fernel node as well as layer weight node.
Now let's also go into the render preview so we see what we're doing.
And as we preview the fernel node -- the preview is ctrl shift left mouse button,
but you have to have a node wrangler enabled.
For those of you wondering it's under edit, preferences, add-ons.
And by default it should be in Blender already, so just make sure it's enabled.
So the fernel node as you see gives us this really, really nice effect where only the edges
of the mesh is highlighted which is going to play perfectly into what we are trying to do.
So right after fernel node let's add a color ramp,
and here we can already start laying in some colors.
First of all, let's change the interpolation from linear to constant
so that we don't have any gradient but rather sharp, contrasty look between the colors.
And now let's start with the darkest being sort of reddish, maybe something like this.
Then the next one it will go through orange, then to yellow, and the last one sort
of washed out yellow going into the white.
Now we can adjust it as it is right now or you can do it later.
Just make sure it looks something like that.
It gradually goes from darkest to the lightest in the edges poking out of the mesh.
But don't worry about it too much, we can always come back to it later.
And this color ramp is going straight into the emission node.
Now as we preview the mix shader, you can see that we have just that
and we don't have any transparency yet, and that is because first of all we need to go
into the material properties and in blend mode enable alpha blend instead of opaque.
And the second thing, let's also enable back face culling.
Now as you see everything is sort of half transparent because this mix shader is now set
to being half transparent BSDF and half emission.
So what we need to do is we need to get an alpha mask,
and for this we will use this layer weight node.
So let's get another color ramp and connect the facing
into the color ramp, and let's preview this.
Here we can change the interpolation from linear to B-spline
to get a much softer gradient than with linear.
And also, let's bring in the black value quite high
and the white one just slightly move it from the edge to like 0.9.
Now let's duplicate this color ramp, and this time connect it with fernel from layer weight.
And as you preview this one it has slightly different result.
You can see that the facing has more of that gradient going into our aura,
and fernel only really highlights the very edges.
So here we can actually dial back this black value a little bit to have that gradient
as well, and now we just need to combine these two color ramps.
So let's get a math node, connect both of them together; leave it at add; let's preview that.
And the only thing you need to do is enable clamp just to make sure
that the white values do not exceed one because this will go directly
into the mix shader factor, and so everything of value one is going to be fully opaque,
and the black values are going to be transparent.
So as we preview this, we can see that we already have something going on in here.
Now make sure that the back face calling is on because if you turn it off then you see
that we have some sort of artifact.
Not sure why it happens, but it does, so just make sure it's checked in.
And here we can adjust the color ramp values just to make sure that our colors are popping
in nicely and they are not too faded but also that we still have this nice gradient.
Also if this mesh is pretty spiky, remember
that in the modifier stack we added a subdivision modifier,
at the beginning so you can up the levels of subdivision.
And this should give you a lot more geometry to work
with which should also make the gradient a little bit smooth.
And then as you see in my case, I have very noisy displacement going on right now
and that is why we have this displace controller in here so we can easily just scale it
up a little bit in order to get much, much softer results.
Now because it's an aura and it's supposed to be glowing, we can up the emission strength
in here to something like maybe ten.
And if you don't have this glow going around your mesh, just make sure that you go
into the render settings and you have a bloom enabled
because that's the setting that's allowing your emissive areas to glow.
Now as you can see, we have [inaudible] shaded, sort of stylized look of the aura.
And if you want to have it more gradual, I would say blurry or smooth,
you can go into this color ramp that is dealing with the color of your aura
and just change the interpolation from constant to whatever you like.
I would recommend the B-spline because it gives this really,
really nice soft gradient between the values that we have.
So as I said, just a -- So as I said, just an artistic choice for you to make.
And now to put a little bit more life into this whole effect,
we can take the displace controller and just animate it going up.
Because as you see with this displace controller,
the texture that is displacing the mesh is going up as well.
So on the frame one, in his base position, I'll just click I
and add a location keyframe to the first frame.
And then on, let's say, frame 20th, I will move it upwards, and then click I again
and add another keyframe location.
And now if you play this you can see that it's moving from 1 to 20.
But what we can also do is change the interpolation to linear by clicking T
on the keyboard and choosing linear, and then shift E and choose linear extrapolation.
And this will take these two keyframes and based on them,
it will extrapolate this animation further so that we don't need
to have the keyframe all the way up there in order to have this animation going infinitely.
And then if you want this to go faster or slower,
you just move this second keyframe further or crunch it in closer to the first keyframe
to have it really, really frantic.
I like the slower one, so I'll put it somewhere around here.
So with this flamey color done, the next step is to add those bluish sparks
that are moving through the whole aura.
I'm talking about those blue sparks that you can see appearing and disappearing.
So for that, first of all, we will duplicate this color ramp with the colors
and connect the fernel node to it as well; and let's preview that.
And here we want to change the color scheme from this orangey, yellowy, flamey looking one
into the bluish sort of sparky colors.
So we will just go through all those color stops and just move it into the blue areas.
So this one here, this one may be a little bit like this, this one much, much brighter,
and then the last one going into almost whitish just to have that little oomph at the very edge.
Now if you preview this blue spark color by plugging it into the emission,
you can see that it looks nice, but it looks much better if its interpolation is changed
to constant because electricity usually is quite harsh and jagged.
So I would recommend this, but again your choice.
So let's move back the flamey [inaudible] to emission as a default,
and then we want this blue one only to appear in waves.
So let's by adding a wave texture.
And then again if you have the node wrangler enabled with the node selected,
click CTRL T. To get a mapping and texture coordinates node,
change it from generated to object.
And then as you preview this you can see that now the waves are going vertically,
so we will need to rotate it on the y-axis by 90 degrees,
and also change the scale all the way down to something like 0.7.
So we have those waves quite big.
The next step is to animate the phase offset.
As you can see we have the single value that can control the waves going up.
So we'll simply type in here hashtag frame which is going to change it into a driver,
and then we can divide it by let's say 2.
And as we play the animation you can see that these waves are moving downwards.
So in order to change the direction, we just need to put a minus sign before.
Now it's moving upwards.
And if it's moving too slow, you can just change the frame divided by 2 to --
like frame divided by 0.5 whatever you like.
I will have it at 0.8 because I found this value to work great for me.
And then in order to refine this gradient,
we will get another color ramp right after the wave texture.
And this time we will change it to B-spline again so we have much, much softer gradient.
And move the black value all the way in and the white value just a little bit
so that we have this really, really white value in here, then the gradient,
and then the black values in here, which is exactly what we're looking for.
Now in order to give a little bit more variation to this, we can increase the distortion,
the detail scale in order to just give it a little bit of irregularities.
Now that we have this wave texture already done, we will need a mix RGB in order to change
between the yellow and the blue based on this mask.
So this mask goes into the factor and then the yellow one goes into the color one input
and the blue into the color two input.
And the output of the mix RGB goes straight into the emission.
Now as we preview the mix shader, so our final material,
you can see that we have this nice sort of sparky wave going
from the bottom to the top of the whole effect.
But right now it's visible all the time,
and I just feel like it's much better when it's blinking.
So we will need a couple more nodes in order to achieve that.
The first one will be a math node changed from add to ping pong.
So in order for us to have a blinking mask, we need to type in hashtag frame, again, a driver,
and then depending on how fast we want it to blink we can divide it by some number.
I will leave it at divided by 2 because I want it to blink quite fast.
And now a disclaimer, for those of you that may have problem with fast-blinking images
or epilepsy just maybe skip this part because I'm going to preview it and it's just going
to blink black and white, so be prepared.
So as you can see, it's blinking right now.
And if it's too fast, too slow, again, you can adjust the driver.
And one more thing we can do is -- right now as you can see as we scroll through the animation,
it goes from black to gray and only then through white.
And we want to skip the gray values; we only want zero
and one, so like invisible and visible.
And for that we will need another math node, connected right after ping pong,
and this time change the add to snap.
And this will snap to whatever value we have in here.
So I will put in one so it snaps to every round number without anything after comma.
Again disclaimer, flashing images.
As you preview this, you have a clear zero to one mask flashing.
So we move this a little bit further, get another math node, and this time it's going
to be multiplying, and we want to multiply the result of the snap
with the color ramp going from our wave texture.
So if we preview that we have the same blinking thing,
but this time it's the waves that are blinking upwards.
And this goes into the mix RGB factor.
Now as we preview everything, you should have this really blue sparks only visible every now
and then depending on how fast it's blinking.
And I just feel like it looks so much better than when it's always visible.
You can, of course, adjust the size of the waves and the scale of it all,
so like the scale of the wave texture in order to have less
or more of the sparks going at the same time.
Again, all up to you.
I will maybe change it to like 0.4.
And here now is the time to sort of adjust all the values that you want.
And just small tip, it's better if your background is much,
much darker than this grayish value then everything that's happening is just
more visible.
So I would recommend just go into the world settings, change the color to something,
I don't know maybe bluish, and then get the value all the way down to almost like black
but not quite, and then you see what's really going on.
So again, all the values that we went through, all the color ramps,
just feel free to adjust them as you wish.
I think I will leave it as it is.
Now as you can see the difference is that my frame rate here is much,
much higher than in the presentation video and that is because I just like this 12 FPS sort
of look that I have had in this scene, and you can easily have that as well just going
into the render settings, and change the frame rate from 24 to custom and then just type in 12.
But then again, the whole like speed of your animation, speed of your displace controller,
everything has to be adjusted based on the frame rate that you choose to have.
So for this tutorial I will just use 30 to have smooth-looking thing,
but just know that it's a possibility in order
to achieve a totally different look to the whole thing.
So now the last thing to do is the stones, the particles
and that is done with the particle system.
So we can just shift a mesh plane to have a particle emitter on the bottom
of the whole aura, and we can also name it emitter.
And then we need just couple of stones.
And I just simply took mesh, rock generator.
I believe you need to have an add-on enabled for that as well which is, I think,
extra object add mesh extra object.
So make sure it's enabled.
Or you can just create any rock that you want.
I just found that this method is so much faster.
You just generate a rock.
You go into the modifier stack, apply all of them, and then add a decimate modifier,
and just go all the way down until you have like a low-poly version.
In order to see the faces better, you just right click, shade flat, and then bring it all the way
down and then apply the decimate.
And you can just generate a few rocks like that.
Decimate all the way down, shade flat, and done.
So when you have your rock collection, I don't know how many different variations you want,
just select both of them, click M and choose new collection.
Name them rocks or something like that, and this should create a new collection for you.
And now in our particle emitter, in this plane, we can create a particle system,
and under render, change the render as from halo to collection,
and the collection being rocks that we just created.
We can change the scale also to one, so we see what's going on.
And as you click play you can see we have our rocks.
Now first of all, of course let's increase the scale randomness
so we have a variation with the scale.
Let's choose the frame, start to be like minus 50, so we have a little bit
of pre-warm before the whole animation starts.
The end also 250 so it encompasses the whole animation frame that we have right here.
And now first of all, obviously the rocks are falling.
We don't want them to fall -- all the way down into field weights,
and turn down the gravity all the way to zero.
This will make our particles go up but in very uniform and not pleasing way.
So first of all, let's decrease the number to, like, something more sensible maybe 100.
And then under the velocity tab, let's add a object aligned Z velocity, one meter per second,
and then under randomize let's increase it to something like one.
So we can see that the rocks are not going straight up
but have a little bit of random velocity.
We can also increase the lifetime randomness to like 0.5.
So not all of them will disappear at the same height.
Next thing, as you can see, they're all rotated the same way.
So under rotation, let's enable it.
Crank the randomize all the way up, the randomized phase all the way up, enable dynamic.
And under angular velocity we can increase the amount so that they will rotate as they fly
up as well, which I think gives a little bit more dynamism to the whole scene.
Now if they are a little bit too big, you can either scale your models down,
or scale them under the render tab to scale a little bit lower so they are not as big.
And now I think the last thing to do is --
as you can see they just fly up and disappear sort of abruptly.
In order to make this transition much, much smoother, we scroll all the way
down until we find the textures tab, then open it up, click new.
To create new texture, go into the textures tab again, change type from image or movie to blend,
and we will use this texture in order
to tell the particle system how big the particles should be at given moment of life.
So first of all, open influence, and we want this texture only
to influence the size of our particle.
And then under mapping -- the coordinates we want
to be not generated but per strand and particle.
So each of this particle will be affected by this texture as its own entity basically.
Now let's open colors.
Enable color ramp and open it up.
And here, first of all, let's increase the alpha of this to like one so we see what we're doing.
This basically represents the scale of our object throughout its life.
So black is zero, obviously; white is one.
So we want it to start with the size one, and then as it grows old,
we want it to be zero by the time it disappears.
We can also change the interpolation to B-spline to have much smoother transition
and just bring it a little bit closer.
So as you can see the particles now start with their normal size
and then they just gradually scale down until they disappear.
We can increase the render scale now because they are a little bit small.
And when you're happy with your particles going up, the last thing to do is take them
and create a material for them because right now in the render preview as you can see,
we have this emissive color, and then we have those stones,
and then it depends what you want to go for.
I, in my previous scene, had a simple setup of area light shining from the top,
quite big and quite strong, and based
on this light information I had the stones cell shaded, and I will show you how.
So first of all let's select the stone,
and in the material editor click new to create new material.
And we can delete the principled BSDF and instead have a diffuse.
And now right after the diffuse, we want a shader to RGB node,
which is going to take the shader information and turn it into an RGB color,
which we can further connect to a color ramp.
And let me show you what it does.
So it takes this information of how this object looks like being lit by the light,
and based on that we can just give it some different color.
So because it's stone, I went with like the basic brown set up.
Oh, let's do it again as well.
Change the interpolation to constant again to have the cell-shaded look.
Now the second one's going to be much brighter but not too bright.
Add a highlight, highlight on top.
So yeah, you can spend much more time adjusting it.
I'm just hungry so I'm going to wrap it up.
So simply select the second rock going in here and choose the material
that we just created for our rocks.
And now as you see as they fly upwards, as the light changes, the material reflects
that as well and changes with it.
If the lighting is too strong for you, then you can always just decrease the strength
of the light, and as you can see it affects the color because, again,
it's taking the diffuse shader and then turning it into color.
So depending on the how the diffuse shader looks in the first place,
that's how the result is going to look like.
And yeah, because it's aura, one last thing, you can select it.
You can see we have a shadow right now --
go into the material properties and under the shadow mode just click none
so that it doesn't cast any shadow because I just believe it shouldn't.
And this would be it for the tutorial.
I hope that you learned something, that you enjoyed it, and you will be able to use it
in your personal project, which I would love to see.
If you do so, please share with me on Twitter.
Link for that in the description.
And if you have any requests for the future tutorials, comment section is for you.
And I will see you in the next one.
Bye bye.