Book Image

Learn Blender Simulations the Right Way

By : Stephen Pearson
2 (2)
Book Image

Learn Blender Simulations the Right Way

2 (2)
By: Stephen Pearson

Overview of this book

Blender is a free, open source 3D software that allows you to create stunning visual graphics, animation, VFX, and much more! This book is an in-depth guide to creating realistic and eye-catching simulations, understanding the various settings and options around their creation, and learning how to troubleshoot solutions to your own Blender problems. In addition, this book can also be used to simulate the behavior of certain physics effects, such as fire, fluid, soft bodies, and rigid bodies. You’ll learn how to use Mantaflow, an open source framework within Blender software, to create fire, smoke, and fluid simulations. As you progress, you’ll understand how to easily produce satisfying rigid and soft body simulations, along with cloth simulations. Finally, you’ll use Dynamic Paint, Blender’s modifier, and the physics system to create eye-catching animations. By the end of this Blender book, you’ll have created a number of animations on your own, such as a campfire, waterfalls, and explosions. You’ll also have gained a deeper understanding of all the simulation options in Blender, which you can use to create portfolio-ready animations.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
1
Part 1: Using Mantaflow for Fire, Smoke, and Fluids
7
Part 2: Simulating Physics with Soft Bodies and Cloth
12
Part 3: Diving into Rigid Bodies
15
Part 4: Understanding Dynamic Paint in Blender

Adding the materials

In the previous chapter, we learned all about dynamic paint and what it takes to create a simulation, but we didn’t cover materials. That is what this next section is all about! We will be taking all the images we just exported from dynamic paint and importing them into the material. After that, we will learn how to create a material for the hair particles. Let’s get started!

Creating the canvas material

The first thing we need to do before we start working on adding nodes to the material is to separate the paintmaps and the wetmaps. When we baked the image sequence, both the paintmaps and wetmaps were put into the same folder.

So instead, let’s select all the wetmap.png files and move them into a new folder, as you can see in the following figure:

Figure 13.25 – Image folders

Figure 13.25 – Image folders

With that done, we are ready to jump back into Blender and start creating the materials:

  1. Head over to the Shading...