Hi everybody, this is Oliver here from lentus.com and well, this is finally the second part
of the spiderweb's tutorial.
I've been waiting too long for this tutorial because, well, I had some troubles with the
method of deforming the mesh for simulating cloth, the cloth effect on the spiderweb.
This is because, well, mixing, combining the two modifiers that I will be combining in
this tutorial can give some kind of troubles sometimes when working with different scales
or with different levels of position, well, it can be unexpected results or even just
don't work, it just don't work.
And I was some kind of, well, I didn't know what happened because in the test that I did
before starting the tutorial, it worked, but then here I wasn't able to make it work.
But finally I reported the issue and a Blender developers helped me.
So now I think I have it solved the problem.
So well, we can get started and let's explain you how it works and I hope it works for you
too.
And if you have some troubles, well, it's, it's pretty difficult to make it work.
So don't worry and just try it again to make it work.
Okay.
I'll explain it anyway when we are at that point on the tutorial.
So let's get started.
Here's the spiderweb.
And the first thing I am going to do is to actually go to the top view and create a plane.
Okay, this plane is the one that will deform the mesh, okay, the spiderweb, because we
can't just apply the cloud simulation to the, to the web directly because as we made it
from different curves, they will be sipped during the cloud simulation because they are
into the object in dependent measures.
So what we need is to apply the cloud simulation to this plane and make this plane deform
the spiderweb.
Okay.
So just create a plane, make sure it covers the entire spiderweb from all the sides.
And now press W, subdivide and with F6, we get that, that menu here, or you can just
press T and you will have this one is the same menu, but different ways of getting
to it.
So increase the number of cats, this should be enough.
And now we want to go here and apply a solidify modifier, okay, the offset in zero because
this way it grows to the top and to the bottom, the same distance, okay, it grows from the
center and the thickness should be something like 0.1, all right.
Because smaller values can give some problems.
Okay.
The reason of making this is that if we simulate cloud in a box like this, okay, made from
a mesh and not with solidify modifier, we'll make this vertices such, you know, they will
intersect together, the upper part of the plane and the bottom part of the plane will
intersect in the middle and they will be deforming the spiderweb in a bad way.
The things that solidify modifier always keep the distance between the top and the bottom
parts of the plane.
So this is what we want because in order to deform this spiderweb with mesh deform modifier,
we need the mesh to be entirely surrounded from the bottom and from the top, okay.
That's why we need a boxed, you know, shape for deforming it.
So now just select the spiderweb and, well, at this point you have to make sure that you
don't want to change anymore the shapes of the curves because we are going to convert
these curves to a mesh and there's no way back.
So make sure you don't want to change anything more or just duplicate it and move it to another
layer.
So if later you want to change something, you can go back, take the old model with curves,
change them and convert it again.
For now, I'm pretty sure I want to use this model.
So press Alt C and you will get this little menu.
So here mesh from curve, okay, and now this is a mesh, okay.
As you can see, these are vertices, okay, let's go closer, okay.
These are just vertices, okay, let's go out from the edit mode, just save this project
but once we save something like this, okay.
Now select the spiderweb and add a mesh deform modifier.
The mesh deform modifier lets you select another object, a different object that surrounds
the original one to deform it, okay.
This is very used for deforming high poly models with low poly ones that surrounds them.
So this way it's more easy, it's easier to weight the models to the skeleton and things
like that.
Okay, so here select the plane but sorry, I will call it something more intuitive like
deforming the former plane, okay, and this will be spiderweb model.
So let's select here the deformer plane, position in five should work good enough.
So let's bind it and binding it will make Blender calculate the weights of all the
vertices to the deforming mesh, okay.
If you increase the level of position it will be better, I suppose, because sometimes
as I said when combining the solidifier modifier and mesh deform modifier I had some problems,
okay.
But well, lately with this method it works.
So if you increase the level of position it will take more time but it will be better,
alright.
So now when you have this button here that puts unbind means that it has been already
binded.
So you can select the plane, go to the edit mode and if it works you can select a vertex
and you can see that it deforms the spiderweb.
This is very cool, huh, okay.
I'm using as you can see the, you know, the soft selection, it works, okay.
So now what we have to do, I'm going to save it again, what we have to do is to just go
here and press C, I'm going to use this way of selection.
This press and see you can select vertices or faces or whatever by painting the selection.
I find it very useful for these cases and you need to select the points that are out
of the spiderweb shape because we are going to put this vertices fixed on the space so
the glock simulation will only happen in the inside part of the spiderweb, okay.
So selecting them, well I will explain how this selection mode works, okay, for those
who don't know out there.
So you press C and you are just selecting, you cannot change the view point, the point
of view while selecting, you have to get out by pressing right mouse button or escape.
But now we are inside with the left mouse button, you select, here we go, but with the
middle mouse button you deselect, so it's very useful to know this and also by scrolling
the mouse wheel you can actually increase or decrease the size of the brush.
So right click for exiting this mode, go here to the mesh panel and add a new vertex group
which will be called for example fixed vertices, okay.
Press assign to assign these vertices to the new group that we just created, exit the edit
mode, sorry, and now just go to the physics panel and add a glock simulation, but I'm
going to do something right here, I want to see the plane, to see the simulation on it,
but at the same time I want to be watching how the spiderweb reacts to that simulation.
So in order to do that I select the web, I go here to the object panel and here on the
display part of the menu I'm going to select wire and x-ray, so by selecting x-ray you
will always have this object on the top of all objects, so you can see here that even
it's inside the box you will only see it on top, pretty useful.
So now select the plane again and let's go here to the glock simulation and okay, let's
check this fill here pinning and here we select the fixed vertices vertex group, this will
make that that vertices are fixed to the space size plane before.
So now if I press Alt A for playing the animation you can see that a glock simulation is happening
there, but we need it to be more obvious.
So last two and there we go, you can see that it's already working, structural, let's increase
this one, there we have it, so you can see we have now gravity affecting our spiderweb
and also well, as it's a glock simulation we could add wind effects and things like
that, forces and actually increase a little bit the mass, this way vending and now let
this one and hide it with H.
So I'm going to hide the grid floor because I don't need it anymore and well, we have
already our glock simulation done, it's not perfect and it's not probably what I expected
from a spiderweb, but well, you get the idea on how it works, so now you can just change
the parameters till you get what you need for your animation, so save it again, okay,
and now what is missing yet is the water drips, so I'm going to create the water drip, water
drips will be UB spheres, but I'm going to decrease the level of complexity of the spheres
because they will be very small, okay, so we don't need a lot of detail in this model.
So as we will have thousands of them, if we put more, a lot of vertices on its drip, our
computer can explode or start on fire, I don't know, so we have this water drip, I'm going
to call it just water drip, okay, select the spiderweb and we are going here to the particle
panel, so add a new particle system that will be called smaller water drips, okay, and here
small settings, alright, so let's put this on hair type of a meter because in hair type
what we get is that the particles emitted are attached to the surface of the model and
that's what we want because we want that when the cloth simulation is displayed, the water
drips are attached to the surface of the spiderweb, okay, let's increase the hair length, something
like this, and now what we actually need is to go here to the render panel, press object,
and here select the water drip, so this way I'm going to increase the size, you are starting
to see water drops, now I'm going again to the object panel and as we don't have already
the plane with solidify over this model, I'm going to change the game to solid view mode
and the activate x-ray, so we see the water drips as they are, okay, so I have here these
water drips, I'm going to change these values here, okay, increase the randomness of the
particles of size, so we get some smaller particles and some bigger particles, okay,
and also decrease a little bit the size, select it so we can see it better, and now just increase
the amount to something like seven thousandths, even a little less, okay, so we already have
our water drips, but now I'm going to add a new particle system which will be bigger
water drips, and here in the settings I will select the small settings, but here in this
number, let's increase a little bit the size of it, in this number we can click it and
now the small settings are independent, as you can see we have here the two of them,
small settings and small settings, zero, zero, one, what I'm going to do is to call this
bigger settings, because now we are going to use this particle system for creating bigger
water drips over the spider web, but just a few of them, right, so I create two different
particle systems so they are easier to control, okay, this way, increase the amount, something
like one thousandth, and also change the seed, so it changes the position of the particles
something like this, and just increase a little bit the size, this should be something like
0.01, random size, just a little bit, and the smaller water drips, something like 0.3,
and 0.4, well 0.5, and the bigger ones 0.7, okay, let's take a look at it, well actually
here I don't like it at all, so let's decrease a little bit the size of these ones, and the
size of these ones, but also in these ones increase a lot the amount, something like
0.10, and now decrease the size, just a little bit, okay, so here we have our water drips,
you can now play with these settings until you get what you want, okay, I think there's
something like this, it should work, okay, you can also increase this amount, I don't
know how to, five millions or something like this, and well you will need a pretty decent
computer, but well you can do it, you can actually do it, and here, well you can change
the parameter of the sizes and all that stuff, but well for now I think it's everything's
planned, and oh yes, let's play, so you can see when we play the particles are just attached
to the spider web surface, that is exactly what we need, okay, let's play it again, so
you can see it takes a little bit just 10 frames per second, well it's a very heavy
mesh and now there are a lot of water drips on the scene, so okay, there you have it,
it already works, so in this tutorial we covered the cloud simulation and how to generate the
water drips on the spider web, and in the third part, the final one, we will see how
to apply materials to all this, put a background and also a little compositing, so well we want
to make a little depth of field or something like this, so we'll see you on the next part
of the tutorial, and that's it, see you soon and happy blending!
