Hey guys welcome back to another blender 2.8 tutorial and today I'm going to be showing
you how to make acoustic foam all inside blender.
So acoustic foam as you know is this sound-proofing on walls which kind of looks like spiky foam,
is what we're aiming for.
So we're going to start off with modeling, so this tutorial is going to cover modeling,
shading, and also a bit of uv unwrapping.
So starting off with modeling we want to select everything a, x, delete.
So we got rid of everything.
Keyboard shortcuts up here by the way.
So we got rid of the default cube just so we can add it back in.
That's what the professionals do apparently.
So shift a, mesh, cube.
So efficient.
Ok so now that we have this cube, we want to flatten it down.
So s for scale and then z.
And then we'll do something like 10% so .1.
And now what we want to do is add some spikes coming out of this.
So easiest way to add spikes, tab for edit mode, control r for adding some loop cuts,
and then we're just going to scroll up.
And we want an odd number because that's what is going to let it work out when we pick every
other edge to become a spike.
So I'm going to go with 13 as my odd number.
Click and then right click to center.
Go into edge mode which is 2 or hit this button.
And then we're just going to select every other edge.
And these are the edges that are going to form our spikes.
So we want to bring them up, so g for grab and then z.
Something like that.
And then when we still have them selected we can bevel them, so control b to bevel.
And it seems like I already have the right amount of segments but generally you want
to scroll up until you have the right number of segments.
And then just make sure that everything looks about right.
Going to add a couple more, there we go.
So now we have these rounded out spikes.
This is already pretty much looking like acoustic foam.
Couple more adjustments we need to bring down, or bring up this area right here.
So 3 for face mode, I'm going to click this and then control click this.
And this is the shortest path.
Or you can just do a bunch of shift clicks but this is the fastest way to do it with
the control click.
And then I'm just going to bring this up like that.
Ok that's already looking pretty good although it is flat shaded technically.
As you can see when we come up really close.
To fix this I'm going to hit search, for me that's spacebar depends on your hotkey.
And I'm going to type in shade smooth which fixes the issue except it makes everything
else a lot worse.
So to fix this go into object mode, normals, and enable autosmooth.
And this fixes the issue and it really depends on your angle value right here.
Our default 30 does the trick.
If we bring this up a lot you see that it breaks again.
So 30 is a good number.
Ok so I think we are done with the modeling.
You might want to bevel this face right here, this side area.
But we're going to do a trick in shading to smooth that out.
So let me actually save our project, control s, desktop, and then we will call this acoustic
foam.
Make sure to save just in case we have a crash or something.
Hopefully not, we're not doing anything too intense here.
Ok so now we have done the modeling and I'm going to do a bit of uv unwrapping and I will
tell you why this is important.
So uv editing.
And now what we want to do is mark our seams.
So I'm thinking one area can be the spiky stuff up here.
Then we can have this base and then we can also have some stuff on the sides.
So 2 for edge mode.
Let's block off this area right here.
And then control click to bring this all the way here.
And then same thing on this side.
And then control click, spacebar, mark seam.
If you don't want to do that you can also go into uv and then mark seam over here.
And then we also want to separate the sides.
Now let's see, will control clicking go around this bend?
It seems not what if I go up here, there we go.
So this is going to take a bit so let me actually explain why we're doing this.
So we're going to be using a lot of procedural shading.
We're going to be using a lot of noises.
And generally noises work out best when we do some unwrapping.
We want to use uv coordinates so everything kind of looks even and nothing looks stretched
out.
You can make generated coordinates kind of work out but this is a sure-fire method to
get the best results.
So we're going to keep going along here.
I'm control clicking to make sure I'm not selecting everything, like that.
And then mark seam.
And then we need to do the same thing on this side.
So as I mentioned all this shading is going to be completely procedural.
Which means we don't need to have any texture files and we can zoom in a lot further without
getting any loss of quality.
Which is always a good thing.
Plus the shading for this isn't going to be too complicated.
We're going to have basically a color and this, if you ever look very closely at acoustic
foam you're going to notice that there is some little shiny bits.
Kind of like if you look at a rock there is these shiny little gem area, is a way to describe
them.
Same thing with acoustic foam.
So here we're going to mark seam, perfect.
And now let's just select our object and apply object transform.
This is important to do before you unwrap to get the correct results.
Back into edit mode, select all your faces, u, unwrap.
And there we go we have a, honestly this is probably one of the best ways to unwrap this
object, but we have a unwrap.
Perfect I'm going to save.
Back into layout, so now we have our unwrap and we want to do some shading.
So I'm going to go into shading and zoom in here.
So we're going to start off by changing our environment.
So we're going to go into world.
Delete this background with x.
Shift a to add texture, environment texture.
I'm going to be using an HDRI you can just use a fancy lighting system but I find HDRI's
work best.
And I'm going to leave a link in the description for free HDRI's.
You can even get this same one that I use.
So environment texture, we're going to open and then let's see, I have a HDRI.
And then this one.
And I think I will also make the project files for this available.
So link in the description to actually download this project and hopefully I can actually
put this HDRI in it.
Ok so now we have our HDRI set up.
Go into rendered mode and you can see perfect.
We're going to do cycles just so we can get the most accurate results during this.
There we go, we have our ambient occlusion all all this.
Going to save.
So now we're going to get into the shading of the object.
So in cycles I'm going to hit film, transparency to hide that.
I'm going to go into the object shading.
Add a new material and I'm just going to call this acoustic foam and then in this case orange.
We're going to make an orange and black version.
Ok so we don't need this we'll just delete it.
We'll start off with a diffuse.
So diffuse, connect that in and we want to start off by getting the right color.
Which is this redish orange type thing.
Something like that with a whole bunch less saturation.
That's looking pretty accurate at least to the foam that I have at my house.
So now we have this foam.
I'm not going to play around with the roughness that's fine.
Let's take care of this beveling issue I already talked about.
So fancy node in blender is the bevel node.
So shift a, we're going to add a bevel.
And you take this bevel and you just feed it into the normal slot of whatever you're
using.
So I'm using diffuse.
And you can see there is a very subtle smoothing of you know this side right here and same
thing on the other side.
We can up the quality by maybe bringing this up to 6 and we can also change the radius
but I think this is fine.
Ok so now we have a bit of bevel.
And now we want to add the sparkly stuff I was talking about which again is the whole
reason we did this uv unwrapping in the first place.
So shift a to add a noise which I think is inside texture.
Is it In here?
Ya, I want the voronoi noise so I'm going to add that.
And make sure you have node wrangler enabled.
So that's edit, preferences, add-ons, and then node wrangler.
Make sure this is enabled.
This is probably the most common add-on that everybody uses.
And one thing that it let's us do is control shift click any node to see what it looks
like on the mesh.
So if we make this a bigger scale you're going to see that we have our voronoi on this.
But it's also very stretched.
Which again is why we did this uv unwrapping in the first place.
So now let's actually use our uv unwrap.
So shift a, input, texture coordinates.
So right now I think it's using generated by default.
Ya, so we want to change this to uv and all of the sudden everything looks a lot better.
Of course we need to make it bigger.
But everything is not distorted at all, which is why we did this.
Ok so now we have basically what looks like a bunch of dots which is going to help define
where we have our little spark-lies.
But we have way too many dots.
So let's do a shift a, or you know what let's not do that quite yet.
So another thing I want to do is have this foam be, woops, I want this foam be bumpy.
Because foam is kind of, pretty much like a sponge it's very porous.
So here is what I'm going to do, I'm going to select this node, this node, and back them
up with g.
And I want to turn this into a normal map so easiest way is shift a and then add a bump
right there.
It's found in vector, bump.
And we can take this black and white image, this voronoi and plug it into height.
So not into normal but into height.
And then it converts this into a normal which we can feed into the bevel.
And we'll see the results.
Ya, it's a bit hard to see with the noise from the cycles but you see that there is
definitely a lot of noise here now.
And it looks a lot more spongy and foamy.
So what do we have so far?
We have our uv coordinates in our voronoi texture which we turn into a normal map, feed
through the bevel.
So now we have the bevel normal and this normal combined.
And we bring it into this diffuse bsdf.
So next we want to add spark-lies.
So I'm going to have that be a glossy, a glossy bsdf.
And then we want to mix these two together so shift a, shader, mix.
And that's going to mix these two together.
Like that, you see that it's actually mixing them everywhere and making this shiny mess.
We only want to mix them wherever we have these dots.
So we take, we take our voronoi and bring it into our factor.
And that kind of solved the issue but again we have way too many, or too much of this
is shiny.
So how are we going to solve this?
The first thing we are going to do is we're going to add a subtraction.
Add a subtraction that's pretty weird.
But either way, shift a, math, put that in here.
And we're going to change this into, into subtract.
So now we are treating this black and white image as kind of like a map between 0 and
1.
And at each point we subtract in this case, you see we subtract .5 like that.
Ok so we can actually subtract a bit more maybe .7.
And now you see wherever this map is white the glossy is actually going to come through.So
let me bring that back in.
Like that and now our little spark-lies are a lot less frequent.
And we also want to take this normal map and make it a lot less intense.
So take the strength in this bump, bring it down to let's say .25.
Make it a little less, or a little more subtle, .2.
Let's zoom out a little just to see what we have going on.
I am liking the look of that, ok.
So this should be our node set up.
So we have our, one part of this voronoi texture is going into the bump and it's basically
turning into a normal map, and then the other stuff is being subtracted so there is a lot
less of it.
Only little bits and pieces everywhere.
And that is going to be the factor for where we want this glossy bsdf.
Which we can make a bit shinier so something like .3.
So the areas that show up are going to be shinier.
Feed that in, there we go.
Ok I am happy with that so let's do a save.
And now we want some variation once we're happy with this.
So click this, let's go into layout.
Actually no we can go back into shading it will be faster.
So click this, shift d to duplicate.
And then right click to center it.
And then we're going to hit g, and then it's either x or y let's see, x yes.
And we're going to bring this 2 to the side.
And then we're going to rotate it with respect to z by 90 degrees.
And then for this one I'm going to make anything going vertically black and everything that's
going horizontally orange.
So select this one, and notice that if we take this and change the color it's going
to change both of them.
Which is not what we want.
So to make this kind of independent of this one you're going to see this little number
two up here.
You click this, this is display number of users of this data block blah blah blah.
Click it, and that's basically going to make it independent for this.
So now we can make this a lot darker and it's only affecting this one.
So in fact I want 0 saturation.
And it's kind of this gray black color you want.
And then everything else we can actually leave the same.
Ok there we go.
And I actually, I'll go into developer mode right here so it's not taking as long to render.
I actually want every other one to be alternating.
So I'm going to select these 2, shift d, right click.
And then g, x to move them, 4 meters.
And then select all of them, shift d duplicate, g, y, and then move them down here by 2.
Or I guess I moved them up but that's fine.
And we want this kind of to be a checkerboard so we're going to offset this by 1 tile.
So g, x, by 2.
And then of course we need to take this one and bring it back.
G, x, and that is 8, no that is definitely not 8, that is g, x, -8.
There we go.
And then we just select everything, shift d, right click.
And now it's going to play nicely, it's going to tile automatically.
There we go, so now if we go into cycles.
We have this grid of foam that you see on every commentator's wall, every singer's wall.
So we are, so once we're happy with this I guess we can select all of them and then join
them.
So now they are one object which I can call foam.
Just going to save that.
And we want to center right here.
So the cursor is already in the world origin.
So for this we're going to take the origin of this object.
So object, set origin, and we're going to put it in the center.
So origin to geometry.
And you see the origin is now centered here.
Actually let me use the draw feature like that.
That was horrible, whatever you get the point it's there.
Ok so now we want to center this to the world origin or basically to the cursor.
So shift s, and then selection to cursor, there we go.
And that did the trick.
Ok so now in terms of rendering we're pretty much there because an HDRI really takes care
of all the lighting for us.
One thing I would say is that everything looks a bit dark so cycles, render setting.
Going to change this to GPU actually it will be faster.
There we go.
Color management and let's bring up the exposure by .5.
Something like that.
Maybe use this angle instead.
And then we can also play with the contrast.
See if a higher contrast makes it look better or worse.
So let's try high contrast, that's a bit intense.
Let's do something in-between, medium-high.
And I really like the look of that, let's hide all this.
And there you go you've made acoustic foam in blender.
Really quickly, the modeling was easy.
A lot of the beveling was kind of outsourced into the shading.
And if you go into the geometry here.
Let's go to solid view.
The geometry is very sparse.
Overall we have, let' see does it say it down here?
We have 3616 for 16 of these.
So let's actually bust out the calculator here.
3616 divided by 16.
Each one has 226 faces.
Which is really, I guess it's really not that bad all told.
So let's go back into cycles rendered view.
And there you go that is how you make acoustic foam, at least my version of it in blender
2.8.
So hopefully you found this tutorial helpful.
Thank you guys for watching and I'll see you guys in the next one.