...Ready to make some noise?
hello my friends Gleb Alexandrov here
for creativeshrimp.com
welcome to yet another Blender tutorial.
in this
quick tip we'll have a look at how to
recreate this peculiar animated noise
texture in Blender.
it'll take some 10 minutes i guess and i
will try to walk you step by step
through the process. so, ironically it's
all about denoiser. but first
we need a scene, any 3d scene, really.
doesn't matter...
so i decided to pick this one, hdr
pillars,
love that one. so here's the plan: we're
going to use Cycles to generate a lot
of noise in our scene and then we're
gonna use the denoising algorithms of
Blender
to make something unique and interesting
out of this noise.
sounds pretty crazy, but let me try to
explain. if you use blender 2.90 at least,
you have the denoising options available
for you within the sampling tab.
by default the render denoising is set
to NLM,
we will need to change that to Optix,
but in order to do that
you need to have the Nvidia gpu
available, unfortunately,
as much as i dislike the status quo.
anyway here's why we need Optix in this
case if we are aiming
to get a unique brand of grain. the NLM
denoising, the default one, when coupled
with this small amount of samples
produces this kind of effect.
while it's pretty neat in its own way,
what got me attracted to the Optix
version of the effect it's
how it treats the noise, as strange as it
sounds. so let's have a look.
the key point is that if you have set up
your scene in a certain way, and
i will show you how to do it in a moment,
you'll get this type of
highly textured grain, very stylistically
interesting.
i even think that partially that could
be a bug,
but it can be exploited and that's why
we're gonna use it.
there is the third option though, disable
the render denoising altogether
then head over to the compositor tab and
add filter... Denoise node. under the hood
it's the Intel's Open Image Denoiser,
very potent stuff, which does exactly
what it's meant to do,
it removes the noise in the most
efficient way possible
and it doesn't require the nvidia gpu.
actually this denoise node is the same
as setting
the viewport denoising to Open Image
Denoise
with maybe some slight visual
differences,
but again in this particular case for
this tutorial it's completely missing
the point.
you see Optix in certain conditions
doesn't entirely remove the noise,
it leaves a little bit of texture in
there or even imagines
a little bit of grain and that's what
makes it so appealing.
so returning to our scene, that's why the
first thing i did
is activated the render and the viewport
denoising
and switched both options to Optix.
next we can tinker around with the
aspect ratio, i would like to see
something
wider, panavision-style... okay and here's
the trick,
down the sampling panel let's set the
render samples and the viewport samples
to 1
just one sample for each pixel.
surprisingly it still looks
kind of decent with the viewport
denoising turned on,
but under the hood it's a lot of noise,
we just need to utilize it creatively
and for that reason i will add the
volume shader. because
that's logical, when you want some
additional noise the principled volume
shader is at your disposal ;)
and right off the bat we can see that we
succeeded in
filling in the entire scene with noise
lovely path tracing inefficiency that
we're going to use to our advantage.
we can let more light to punch through
by reducing the density of the
principled volume shader
or on the contrary if you would like to
achieve a broken tv
style of noise you can crank it up. the
anisotropy parameter
works in kind of an interesting way, it
shifts
the way the light spreads in the fog, you
can play with it,
i think i will keep the density pretty
high. and we can even colorize the noise
a little bit...
all right, awesome, one thing that i
wanted to emphasize before moving on
is that the number of light bounces
especially the volume bounces is super
important.
according to the way that the path
tracing engines work
having zero bounces produce less noise
than having
one bounce, for example. and double so
when it comes to the volume bounces that
are known to produce
humongous amounts of noise. so in our
case the number of volume bounces can be
used to finetune the characteristics
of the noise. so in most scenes i have
been testing this effect
i ended up switching the volume bounces
to at least 1
to give Optix this little extra bit of
noise to play with.
for example here is the zero volume
bounces,
and one volume bounce with the Optix
turned on.
the way it looks to me that that extra
volume bounce is a secret ingredient
and as a measure of controlling the way
the light spreads within the volume,
within the three-dimensional noise, we
can add extra light sources like the
point light over here
and it looks pretty neat already. and now
we can enhance our motion graphics by
adding the title.
Shift A, Text,
position the text within the scene, Tab
to enter the edit mode for the text
i'm going to type in something like... i
don't know... massacre
for no apparent reason. and i noticed
that the text is apparently mirrored
that's because
the camera was mirrored on the x-axis
i'm going to press
Ctrl M and X twice. ctrl
m, x, x to mirror it back to its
initial state and now it's a matter of
adding the emissive material to the text
to let the light from the text punch
through the noise
and through the fog i should have said.
and what i love about this effect is
that it's art directable. you can move
the text back and forth
to bring it into clarity or make it
murky.
so on the one hand it's chaotic and
totally unpredictable
because of the way that neural network
based algorithm of Optix works,
on the other hand you can try to art
direct it.
it's an awesome creative struggle. okay
we can now post pro our thing by adding
the glare node
for some reason at least in my memory
this type of noise is associated with a
broken tv set,
so adding a little bit of glare like the
screen glare kind of makes sense from
this perspective
it comes from the same aesthetic domain.
all right and from here we can branch
into different styles
of rendering, for example we can try to
squish
the dynamic range to something absurd
like 0.01, or maybe it's too much,
maybe 0.1 instead. so
that's one of the ways to approach it, to
deliberately squish
the dynamic range, throw in some
chromatic aberration with the help of
the
lens distortion node, projector,
increase the dispersion to get some
chromatic fringing effect
that looks very appropriate in this
context.
but personally i would like to keep all
the dynamic range
available to us, at least until we render
it out,
so i will switch the clamping to zero
and then i will adjust
the text emission shader to make it
slightly warmer
and also i will increase the intensity
of this light shader
to make it illuminate this surrounding
noise
as strange as it sounds we're playing
right now with the neural network
interpretation of the three-dimensional
noise caused by the volume shader,
the stylistic properties of this noise
can be controlled via the density
property of the principled volume shader,
via the location of the text, because as
you move it further away from the camera
it gets swallowed by the noise to a
higher degree,
so that's the one way to control it and
also pay attention to the resolution.
this effect very much depends on the
final resolution
of the render, not only in terms of
interpolating pixels and stuff like that,
but the core properties
of the effect depend fundamentally on
the amount of pixels available.
for example at 40% it looks like this.
compare it to
100%. crazy, right?
much more Lord of the Rings style
smearing going on.
and obviously to fully unlock the
potential of this effect we need to
animate it. thankfully we're one button
press away from it,
so head over to the seed menu and press
the clock icon to tell cycles to use the
animated noise seed
we can choose a different noise pattern
but it doesn't matter much
in our case. once again, the render and
viewport denoising
were set to Optix, now we can just
choose the output folder,
some lossless format like png, tiff or
open exr if you want to go linear, but
i've chosen tiff
for the simplicity of it because i won't
be post processing it after rendering.
now it's a matter of rendering our
animation out, but first we need to
adjust the number of frames
i think 24 will be more than enough.
obviously it depends
on the type of the scene on the type of
the animation, but with a static camera i
think it will be
enough for us to loop this small
sequence,
to make a larger video file in the end,
[singing] and now it's time
to assemble the video :) but first we can
check the
animation for consistency from within
Blender
and in my opinion 24 frames per second
is a bit too high for this one,
i think it will benefit from lower frame
rate if that makes sense, even from
variable frame rate maybe, stop-motion
style,
and one thing i forgot to mention is
that the type of the noise
and the noise levels even depend
inherently
on the color management, so by adjusting
the exposure and the look
and especially the view transform you
can change the characteristics of the
noise
obviously it's best to keep the view
transform as it is...
well, filmic. and now we can proceed to
video editing. i'm gonna go new, select
the video editing
preset, uh add the movie or rather the
image sequence,
because we rendered out the tiff
sequence, so i'm gonna select
all the tiff files and click on add image
strip,
Shift A to preview it. and one thing to
keep in mind
is that the resolution of the movie
should align with the resolution of the
output
otherwise it will get stretched and as
for the frame rate, i think we can
drop each second frame or something like
that by switching the
fps to 12. initially it was set to 24.
it will help with this lovely painterly
look
now i will just Crl C, Ctrl V
this sequence a bunch of times to
increase the overall video length
and i think we're good to go. at this
point the tutorial is pretty much
completed.
one extra step that we can take is a
pretty exotic. we can record
our screen with the Open OBS studio or
other screen capturing software right
within Blender to try to capture
some of the lovely glitches. here i'm
picking the random spots
in the timeline to capture some of the
adaptation glitches, because
when you switch the frame, Optix takes
a few iterations to fully reveal the
denoised image.
and i won't be showing the full process
here because it will probably lead us
into weeds, but the idea is to screen
capture
the Blender viewport with the adaptation
glitches and then overlay it on top of
your original animation. it will require
transforming and cropping the footage,
all that stuff...
but it'll look something like that, let
me show you... [dreadful music]
you know, could be appropriate for horror movie
intro sequence,
the possibilities are endless. the last
step as usual is to render this mess out.
i will count the frames... so we we got 95
frames,
so we can type in 95 in the 'End'.
great, check the frames per second, set to
12.
for the final output i will go with the
ffmpeg video
mpeg4 as the container, h264 for the
video codec,
and i think we just need to set the
output
and hit render, render animation and oh
my god i love love love love
using denoiser in such an ironic way
to create stylistic representation of
some
noise type that wasn't available
straight out of the box
and that was brought into existence with
the help of denoising algorithms. crazy!
the glitch art is dreadfully interesting
direction of computer graphics and of
graphics
and visual imagery in general and i'm
sure we'll
keep digging in this direction. stay with
us.
thank you so much for watching, that was
Gleb Alexandrov for
creativeshrimp.com, feel free to
subscribe and share
because that's always appreciated and
while the world seems to be a crazy
place right now, stay optimistic
and safe and i'm sure that we will
change the world...
of computer graphics ;)
