Pearson Learn Blender Simulations the Right Way

Transform your artistic vision into stunning, realistic simulations with Blender 4.0
2. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-83620-004-8
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 414 Seiten

Ready to unleash the power of visual effects? From explosive movie scenes to mind-bending game animations, this second edition pushes Blender 4.0+ beyond what you thought possible. Featuring a brand-new chapter on combining multiple simulations for a burning effect and updated guidance on rendering with EEVEE, this book takes your Blender expertise to new heights.
While Blender excels in 3D modeling and animation, this guide focuses specifically on VFX, helping you master realistic simulations using EEVEE and Cycles. You'll explore five physics-based simulations-Fluid, Rigid Body, Soft Body, Cloth, and Dynamic Paint-learning essential settings, troubleshooting techniques, and practical workflows. Through nine hands-on projects, including fire, waterfalls, and explosions, you'll develop the skills to create stunning digital effects. Written by a VFX specialist who has taught thousands through best-selling courses, this book will help you build an impressive portfolio of professional-quality VFX projects in Blender and bring your creative visions to life!

Autoren/Hrsg.

Pearson, Stephen

Fachgebiete

• Mathematik | Informatik EDV | Informatik EDV & Informatik Allgemein

Leseproben

1

An Introduction to Mantaflow

Over the past five years, Blender has surged in popularity by an extraordinary margin. With the introduction of version 2.8 in July 2019 came a whole lot of new users wanting to learn what this free open source program is all about. More users are coming in every day, and in 2022, Blender was downloaded over 17 million times, plus another 1.6 million times from other sources such as Microsoft Store, Steam, and Snap!

This software includes the entire 3D workflow of creating 3D models, texturing, animation, rigging, compositing, motion tracking, game design, video editing, and, of course, the topic of this book, simulating physics! We will be covering all the simulations that Blender has to offer, starting with the liquid and smoke simulations.

Creating a liquid or smoke simulation in Blender is complicated and sometimes quite frustrating when you are just starting. From personal experience, trying to figure out how all the settings work in Blender by trial and error is hard and can take a lot of time.

If you feel overwhelmed by the hundreds of settings and values in Blender’s fluid simulator, there is no need to worry! The goal of this chapter is to ease you into working with Mantaflow and to help you get a basic understanding of what creating a simulation looks like.

If you didn’t know, Mantaflow is Blender’s default liquid and smoke simulator. In this chapter, we will discuss how it was developed, what you can create using it, and what you need to get started to create a simulation. Finally, we will create a fire simulation together. Step by step, we will go through all the settings and render out an animation so that you can upload and share it!

In this chapter, we’ll be covering the following topics:

• What is Mantaflow?
• Gas and liquid simulations
• What you need to create a simulation
• Creating your first simulation

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Technical requirements

This chapter requires that you have Blender version 4.2 or above installed. To download Blender, visit www.blender.org.

You can find the assets for this chapter in this book’s GitHub repository: https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Learn-Blender-4-Simulations-the-Right-Way/tree/main/Chapter%201.

What is Mantaflow?

Mantaflow is the framework in Blender for simulating gas and liquid. Mantaflow was introduced in Blender 2.82 and has seen many updates since then. It was first developed back in 2009 at the ETH Computer Graphics Laboratory. Now, it’s being maintained and developed by the Thuerey group at the Technical University of Munich (TUM).

In Blender version 2.81 and below, the smoke and fluid simulations were two completely different things, and they weren’t very compatible with each other. When 2.82 came out, the Blender developers removed these two simulations and introduced Mantaflow. This was a much better system because it combined both the fluid and smoke simulations into one.

To enable Mantaflow on an object, you need to head over to the Physics properties area (it will look like a circle with a dot in the middle) and select Fluid:

Figure 1.1 – Blender’s Physics properties area

Don’t get confused when you only see Fluid in Blender’s Physics panel. Fluid is just the name used for the overall simulation. Once you select it, you’ll be able to choose between Gas or Liquid.

Now that we’ve covered what Mantaflow is, let’s take a look at the simulations you can create with it in Blender!

Gas and liquid simulations

You’ve seen me throw around the terms , , and , but what are the differences? As mentioned previously, Fluid is used to describe the entire simulation. Inside the simulation, there are two options to choose from:

• Gas: Used to create things such as smoke, fire, or airborne solids
• Liquid: Used to simulate things such as water or honey

Let’s talk about each one separately so that you can understand the differences between them and how each one works.

Gas simulations

Gas simulations allow you to create smoke and fire in Blender. But what can you do with it? Well, you can combine fire and smoke to create a massive explosion. Other examples might include a flame thrower, campfire, steam, mist, or fog.

Figure 1.2 – Flame thrower example

There so are many things that you can create, and the possibilities are almost endless. The following figure shows what we will learn to create in :

Figure 1.3 – Explosion example

Smoke and fire simulations are made up of what we call voxels. You can think of a voxel as a 3D pixel of the simulation. The smaller the pixel, the better the simulation will look. You can change the size of these voxels by increasing the resolution of a simulation. Higher values will make the simulation more detailed but will cause the simulation to run slower and take longer to bake:

Figure 1.4 – Example of a voxel

In the preceding screenshot, the left simulation has a resolution of 8. This is quite small, so that is why the voxel is very large. The simulation on the right has a resolution of 64 and, as you can see, the voxel size is much smaller. You can also tell the size of the voxel by looking at the bottom-left corner of the domain object:

Figure 1.5 – Domain voxel size

The domain is the container for the entire simulation. We will cover them in detail in the section.

These voxels represent all the attributes of the simulations such as heat, density, temperature, and velocity, just to name a few.

What is an attribute?

An attribute is simply a term used to describe data that is being stored. You can take this data and use it to influence materials, modifiers, and more.

The smoke that gets created in the domain can be from either a mesh or a particle system. These objects that emit smoke are called flows. Flows are used to add or remove smoke from the domain. Using a particle system as the emitter, you can easily create an explosion, which we will learn about in .

The movement of the smoke or fluid is controlled by the flow of air. This airflow can then be controlled by the following properties:

• Density and Heat: These values are within the domain object’s settings. These values control how fast the smoke will rise.
• Effectors: These are mesh objects that will collide with the smoke, restricting its movement.
• Flow: These objects affect how fast or slow the movement of the fluid will be.
• Force fields: These also offer a way to affect the movement of the smoke. Depending on which force field you add, you can give your simulation a much more dynamic and interesting look! For example, the Wind force field will give a constant force in the direction you point it in. This can be very useful for adding just a little bit of movement to the smoke and making it look a lot more interesting!

Now that we have covered gas simulations, let’s talk about liquid simulations.

Liquid simulations

Liquid simulations are very powerful, and there are many things you can do with them. Do you want to have a glass explode when it hits the ground, causing fluid to fly everywhere? What about creating a waterfall, waves, lava, or honey? All of this is possible with the liquid simulation:

Figure 1.6 – Waterfall example

These simulations are used to simulate the real physics and behavior of fluids. Unlike the gas simulation, if you...

Über Autor(innen)

Pearson Stephen :

Stephen Pearson is a 3D artist, graphic and product designer, video producer, and the founder of BlenderMadeEasy. He has worked in the 3D industry for over 11 years and has produced several best-selling courses on architectural visualization, Visual Effects (VFX) simulations, and animation. He started using Blender in 2014 as a fun hobby, but now he uses it to teach other 3D artists around the world. In his spare time, he enjoys exploring local breweries, going for a ride on his motorcycle, and playing with his two dogs.