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 final details

Congratulations on making it to this part of the tutorial! Hopefully you have learned some new tricks and techniques along the way.

In the last part of this tutorial, we will be adding in a ground plane and a lamp to help brighten the fire, and we will enable motion blur, as follows:

  • Let’s start out by adding a Plane object to be the ground floor. This way the fire is not floating in 3D space.
  • If we press Z and go into Rendered View, you might notice that the fire is not that bright. We could turn up the strength of the emission for the fire, but that would also change the color. Instead, let’s fake it by adding Point Lamp and placing it in the middle of the fire. Press Shift + A, then go to Light and select Point.
  • Set Power to around 100, match the color of the fire, and bring Radius up to 0.5. This will make the shadows a bit softer.
Figure 3.22 – Lamp settings

Figure 3.22 – Lamp settings

  • Next, let’...