My partner Jesse has been wanting to get back into composing music for a little while and has started making songs to post to Soundcloud. We talked a little bit about posting the music to youtube, and he pointed out he didn't really have anything to put in the visual part of the video, so I spent yesterday tinkering around with Blender, trying to figure out how to make an audio visualiser, and I am super happy with how it turned out!
To make this visualiser took a lot more steps than I had initially planned, but it was a lot of fun putting everything together.
everything in the video is part of a very simple 3D scene and rendered using Blender's Eevee render engine.
The bars that move with the music were actually the easiest part to make, I used the Blender Plugin, Bizualiser to generate them, and then gave them a few materials (half have the yellow material, some have orange).
The image in the centre (of Jesse's character Ashfin) was probably the more tedious part of this.
The image was drawn in Clip Studio Paint, but to get the effects to work the way I wanted them to, I had to export is as several images. The background (the one inside the circle), the dragon head and the glowing crystal/eye are all separate pictures that I put together inside Blender. There's also an extra image that you can see below, which is a black and white silhouette of Ashfin, this is a transparency mask which was used to tell blender that, anything in that image which is black, is invisible, allowing you to see the background behind him. Usually, this would be part of the first image, in something called the alpha channel, but Clip Studio Paint lacks to tools to edit that channel, and the results it was spitting out were pretty ugly.
The photo above is the material setup, meaning how the image was put together. I've set this all up in such a way that it could be easily reused and edited for another song. There's a few nodes in this setup that are able to change the colour of things such as the glowing crystal and the background, so both could be changed to better fit another song. The same is true for the materials on the bars and the border of the image.
Finally, the background is a quick painting I did mainly just to fill in the blank space. It gets brighter during the song, then fades out again, which is just a simple, manual animation on the "strength" of the material (technically the background also glows, and that's what the "strength" value is actually controlling, but it's set to such a low value, even at its brightest, that it isn't really obvious)
Also, because I was really happy with the artwork itself, here's a picture of the centrepiece without the border around it:
While I do plan to do more of these visualisers as Jesse makes more music, I probably won't post them here unless I make some major changes to the design, but we'll see. I might also make a video tutorial going into detail on how this was all set up and how to make your own, but I want to streamline my process a little more before I do that.
If you want to support Jesse and his music, please follow him on SoundCloud.
Commentaires