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Giving 2D Steam Elements 3D Looking Shadows (Patreon)

Published:
2022-04-01 23:17:04
Imported:
2026-06
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Content

Just a quickie, cause I didn't know when else it'd come up! This is super handy for me; hopefully it's useful to some of you, too.RELATED:My first "Working with Steam" post (includes Free Steam Elements)Full Steam PackMaking Steam Elements not Clip Through Camera Heat Distortion/Refraction and Other Optimizations  

Files

Giving 2D Steam Elements 3D Looking Shadows

Just a quickie, cause I didn't know when else it'd come up! This is super handy for me; hopefully it's useful to some of you, too. RELATED: My first "Working with Steam" post (includes Free Steam Elements) https://www.patreon.com/posts/tutorial-working-37050460 Full Steam Pack https://www.patreon.com/posts/asset-steam-37054986 Making Steam Elements not Clip Through Camera https://www.patreon.com/posts/quickie-making-55192869 Heat Distortion/Refraction and Other Optimizations https://www.patreon.com/posts/refraction-tut-57007748

Comments

Dave Weinstock

Hey Peter, I know this is an old comment but I wanted to give you some insight into some of the tools you mentioned. Going into another program like Embergen would just be a roundabout way of getting back to a card with steam on it, like Ian has already done. You could go into embergen, import the scene camera, and rebuild the lighting but again it's spending a lot of time to get a similar result. Simulating smoke as VDB is one of the costliest things you can do in 3D. It staggeringly increases render times and requires very large sim caches(gigabytes worth) to get the detail required. Wispy steam is also hard to sim and to get the photoreal detail required usually requires tools like Houdini, Embergen falls apart at smaller scales. It can also be time consuming to simulate in tools like Houdini. All that being said, in a lot of cases it's just better to take a card and slap footage of real steam on it :D

Andrew Sutton

Once I create a 2nd transparent material and change the Mat offset in the solidify modifier - I just get black. Anyone else had this?

Nahuel

For some reason this is not working for me. I have copied all exactly but no luck. Does anyone know if this technique still works for blender 4.5.1 ? Thanks to all !!!

Mario Taylor

This is awesome and super helpful!

Jay Gonzalez

did you try running it through that hologram asset you posted recently to give it that depth? and instead of emission give it that sss node? could that be a possibility ?

IanHubert

Ah yeah! A lot of my tests involved the parallax shader! And it's possible there's something that could get it to work, but in general I ran into the same issue as with the steam; even though all the parallax stuff was working nice, once a shadow hit it, it would fall across it perfectly crisp/straight, revealing the whole thing was secretly flat.

Jay Gonzalez

guess we'll just have to stick to messing with the angle option in the sun tab under the strength for now

IanHubert

Or- oh! I may not be understanding you! What are you trying to do?

Levy Bergman

Ian, let me ask where can I find that amazing huge parking lot tutorial with the buildings you posted a long ago? Seems like it's not here anymore :( Thanks, Levy

Jay Gonzalez

no you did understand me perfectly fine haha but i was just saying that when you increase the angle in the sun's settings it kind of feathers the shadows a little so that theyre not as sharp and crisp, thats the only other work around i could think of

Florian Huber

Like many of the things you come up with, this is something I didn't know I needed until I saw it. Now I think: why of COURSE I'll use this SOMEwhere now. Thank you!

alex

Hi. just wondering if your planning on making a video about matching greenscreen footage and cg enviroments? like the ”correct way”. Im using lumetri color on AF rn and its kind of working but there gotta be a better way.

Felicia White

So I took this idea and ran in a different direction, I was gonna try and explain it but I just made it and a video showing it off. You can see it here https://www.patreon.com/posts/64619123 basically found a way to convert the image to a volume!

Jostein Lie Svalheim
>>81095870

Holy shit, WIZARD! I'm playing with your file and this is pretty amazing. Works perfectly from every angle, plays real-time in cycles and looks as good as anything I've seen...

Shachar

Have you tried using the luma values as z extrudion depth-map? (I don't now if this centence make sense 🤷‍♂️ I'm an Ae kind-a-guy ... i don't speak blender😬)

David McSween

Blenders modifiers for extrude don’t use the same texture coordinates so it can be quite painful to achieve

Felicia White
>>81095870

You know the logic that got me here was: the parallax shader you had I thought, I wonder if I could make a volumetric hologram, and I totally did that! then when you mentioned this issue, it dawned on me I could just make it smoke instead. ALLLLLSO you could probably do fire the same way!

Shawn Hawkinson
>>81095870

Felicia, we are kindred spirits. I did the exact same thing for a project recently based on this same idea. It's pretty cool that you can take a tiny png or image sequence and get that depth and detail for free. Pretty cool stuff. Your result is excellent!

Shawn Hawkinson
>>81095870

I plan on using this technique to do gas cook top flames for a project that I'm working on.

Pete Burges

I'm sure you've tried using volume shaders with cloud displacement; have you tried emitting them as particles (you probably have I bet)? Perhaps even metaball particles, although that might end up being slow. If you need more realism, you can get ready made VDB smoke simulations and use them in Blender. I copped it on here before for recommending Embergen, but with that you can generate realistic smoke or fire simulations in minutes and export it as images, spritesheets or VDB data which you could then use in Blender. I don't know that any of these suggestions would give you more efficient or better looking smoke than what you already have, but you might get smoke-like behaviour and lighting out of them more easily.

James Combridge

Nice. I've recently used the cloud textures and just plugged them into volume instead. It's not as crisp as 2d textures but was a fairly cheap way of placing some mist with some shape to it to a scene without having a harsh cut off where it intersected with geo.