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Tutorial: Working with Steam Elements/ Adding Drips (Patreon)

Published:
2020-05-13 02:18:32
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

Content

Another video from Sleepy-Ian-Attempting-To-Fix-His-Sleep-Schedule! Here's a couple steam elements I shot with Nate:(right click, "Save As")Narrow Steam (good for chimneys and such)Steam Column (good for random stuff?)I'll be uploading the rest in a bit here for the tier 7 folks! I'm excited to finally be putting these elements out! I use them all the time just to add a bit of life/atmosphere to scenes. You should also try shooting your own elements, if you cant! A lot of times you can even use your phone. You just need a dark room (or the nighttime), and a bright light to light it from the side/behind!

Files

Using Steam Elements

Comments

Rusta UZa

Can somebody help pls..? I see the steam in the preview but not in a final animation render.. thanks

Jordan Hilliard

How does one create the nice sun/lens flare happening at the begining of this video

Dylnciaga

ian youre a wizard

Rob

Hi! I was the guy who was wondering about this a while back. Thanks for posting!😊

IanHubert

Ah!! That's great! I hope it's useful! :D

Abraham Mast

Woah! That shot turned out amazing!

Maikeru

Unbelievable! Well done sir!

Chipp Walters

Yeah, I've been awaitin' for this one. Thanks, Ian! Great job. One question, was the lens glare done in AE?

Max

Wow! so fast) Just finishing my scene, and there was only steam left. As always cool! thanks!

Pete Burges

Hey Ian, have you tried a program called Embergen? It's still in alpha, but it allows you to generate fire, smoke or gas in real time (yes, real time!) and export the results as an image sequence or VDB data. As Blender now has VDB support you can use that data to drive volumetric shaders. I think you'd find it incredibly useful for the kind of stuff you do. I bought an alpha license a while ago and the amount of time it saves is ridiculous- you can simulate a smoke twister or a fireball or whatever and generate the footage for it in just a few minutes.

Ry Ken

dang i love your content bro i never get bored

IanHubert

Ah- I hope it's useful! And yeah, those are from a pack I got a long time ago, so I can't share em- it'd be fun to shoot some custom ones at some point, though!

Mark Miller

The reprojection worked really well. I can hardly believe you went from the gray boxes to this so quickly. Thanks for the elements!

Alexander

This is great thanks! But why don't you use ViewLayers? Or a linked scene?

Ben Mauro

Super cool Ian! Gotta play with that.

Bo Maryniuk

So why would we need to pay here for coolest Blender tutorials just to know that we would need to also pay 270 USD/month so we can recreate the recipe? Thank you for an advertisement of some irrelevant stuff, but please don't do this again, it is annoying.

IanHubert

For... very silly reasons :P. I'd already rendered the first half of the cycles pass for most of a day, and I was going to finish the rest of the cycles pass as an overnight render. I wanted to do the eevee/steam pass in the middle of that as I ate dinner (so I could wake up in the morning with all the passes done), and I just didn't want to risk inadvertently tweaking something and making the cycles passes not fit together, so I avoided the issue altogether by making a new project. I probably should have mentioned that in the video though so folks don't think that making multiple projects is the best way to do it :P.

IanHubert

Oh man I am SO pleased with how forgiving the reprojection process seems to be! And yeah! Fortunately in this case I'd already had a lot of the other pieces modeled in some form, so i just had to assemble it all/line it up (although getting the colorspace/lighting of the video to match the environment took a minute). And you're welcome! I hope they're useful!

Pete Burges

It wasn't intended to be an advert, just sharing- but I take your point. Apologies.

your local cryptid

Man, that's some pretty unnecessary hostility just for a simple software recommendation... but yeah, Embergen is really cool, and it's only like $25/month, not 270. Definitely worth checking out

shonal bose

OMG am speechless ...i have no words......mind blown

Dewi

That’s just brilliant. Thank you for letting us in on the process as you do it, it’s very inspiring/empowering coming along for the ride.

Dewi

I wrote “do it” but actually “create it” is more appropriate. It’s the fact you show yourself inventing new processes in Blender as you solve creative problems that’s empowering.

Gehrig Campbell-Dempsey

Agreed with Stefan, that response feels totally unnecessary. Embergen looks rad, but I haven't tried it myself. @Pete, do you feel the price tag is worth it even in the current alpha stage?

your local cryptid

They have a 14-day trial with no restrictions. Just give it a try, dude!

Orkun Işıtmak

seriously, using edge loops to change the steam is genius!

IanHubert

Works even better if you throw a subdivision modifier on it!! :D

Orkun Işıtmak

after watching this video i have an idea, not sure if it's a technique. Can you put a 3d character to replicate what 2d imported green screen guy doing (to same location and making 3d character layer holdout) to be able to have realistic shadows? Does it makes sense?

shonal bose

that flying wall-e looks adorable ....animation and kitbashing a lot of questions i think am going to lose my sleep thinking over this...lol

Pete Burges

@Gehrig- yes, I do. Time is money, and the amount of time it's saved me so far is worth more than I paid for it. :)

Ian Letarte

Bruh, this is gold! It looks so good and actually I was gonna ask if you would share your steam with us... :D no need now.

Syd

Ian, you already give us so much and I feel slightly guilty for asking - but do you think you'll ever make a tutorial talking about how you build your digital sets? Like how you go about sectioning them and compositing them all together? I just find it really interesting. I figure you pre-render out the background landscapes and spend more time modeling things closer to the camera but I'm not completely sure. lol

Anonymous

Totally off topic from the video, but are you using a render farm to get these shots done? Or are you just rendering them at home?

IanHubert
>>36923467

Totally at home, yeah :) Everything's typically reeeelatively low poly, so it renders fairly quick (2-3 minutes per frame), although there are a lot of overnight renders (and the occasional two night renders).

Dewi
>>36923467

A general efficiency type tutorial would be appreciated here - ways in which you've learnt to shave the minutes here and there on repeated tasks. Epic stuff you keep showing...

Dewi
>>36923467

I think he’s posted it as an answer before: threadripper plus 1080 Gtx is what I can recall...

Anonymous

Hi Ian! Thanks for sharing these. I was wondering what kind of settings (dimensions, codec) you recommend for video assets such as these? Want to try my hand at making some myself.

IanHubert

I want to, yeah! I try to get it as much good-to-go in the viewport as possible, these days (If I don't have to composite afterwards, I'm happy). But most the the setbuilding is also tied in with composition and lighting, and how all of that interplays. The actual technical stuff is usually reeeelatively straightforward (block stuff in, then start replacing the blocks with actual assets (or refine them a bit and slap image textures or whatnot on them)- I just kind of do the same stuff over and over, honestly. But most of my time is just spent not really liking the scene in an ambiguous way, and moving stuff around until I do, which I've just always figured wasn't particularly great television. But yeah! I might just record the whole process at some point and upload it- it'll just be fairly uncurated :/

Carter Burr-Kirven

You sure can! Using a rotomated 3D double for shadows and reflections is super common nowadays (and it goes way back, even before CGI! There's a scene in The Last Crusade where Indiana Jones' shadow on the miniature stone bridge is actually that of a stop-motion puppet animated to match Harrison Ford's movements). The one thing you gotta watch out for is that your steam clips are still flat planes, so shadows hitting them too harshly or at the wrong angle will make it painfully obvious that they have no real volume

IanHubert
>>37012755

Soooo- I haven't been able to find totally specific information, but I've been using ProRes files and that's been working alright (I think (based on very little)), that ProRes is less keyframe-based codec, so it works better for scrubbing around. The resolution/quality totally depends on what I'm trying to compress, but I usually try to keep stuff pretty darn small (I hate it when the viewport starts lagging too much, although that can happen before too long with too many video textures, so I usually stick them all in one collection so I can toggle them off/on).

Syd

Dude, anything you do would be THEE best television! And I appreciate the reply! Can't wait to see what you do next!

Elie Dubois

Hi, is there a way to render and export the smoke outside of Blender ? I have no problem making the black background disappear inside Blender but if I try to export in PNG with alpha or a movie format with alpha in either ways I still have the black background or just nothing. Same problem even if I coche the transparent in the film or in Compositing with coching the compositing in post. processing

Andrew Roberts

Having the same issue. I checked all of my holdout collections and switched to Eevee but nothing is coming out. I'm rendering .PNGs with an alpha. It worked for my live action plate in Eevee but for some reason the smoke elements aren't rendering out.

Mari sur

is it possible to loop these at the end of a 450 frame animation?