Blender Jellyfish Animation Tutorial

[@believingdaydreams]

For those of you having issues once you hit the cloth simulation phase! Your whole model glitches out and explodes. And / or your model still moves as animated previously animated but the cloth simulation doesn't work. 1) Deal with any duplicated vertices. Switch to edit mode. Press Alt + H to make sure there is nothing hidden. Then select all vertices A and then press M to merge them by distance. 2) Redo the steps from the tutorial to enable cloth and add the Pin vertex group etc. Check Physics > Cloth > Cache and hit "Delete Bake" then try "Bake all Dynamics." If you get "Cache is outdated!" error messages in the Cache panel (Physics > Cloth > Cache), delete your bake, move your playhead to frame 0 then to frame 1, then try Bake again.

[@norbertszalko]

We are very grateful that you made this for us, thank you for your time and energy! :)

[@brih.2947]

Thank you very much for this tutorial!! Ive been wanting to make a little jellyfish animation for an alert on twitch, and i was dreading the idea of doing it frame by frame in Clip Studio Paint, thought blender might be much better. And this is a much more complex jelly than what I had in mind!! (Something like a moon jelly, with very short tentacles) Suddenly, its not seeming so daunting!! So, thank you!!

[@legacylee]

I came over via Clint's post about your submission to the moderator challenge on discord, dude that was so amazing I felt I had to stop by and let ya know. Love this tutorial btw will give it a go

[@RG36c]

Thank you! Clint even got my render and photo mixed up when he messaged me about posting them:D

[@legacylee]

@@RG36c dude you did a killer job on that, I can only hope to get that good some day, it was so spot on I couldn't tell either at first, again amazing work my dude. Modeling was my weakness but every day I try to model something new trying out new techniques and challenging myself to keep learning. It's folks like Clint and you that keep me pushing to get better. Thanks for the inspiration!

[@DominikWysocki-ml2he]

Looks incredible! Damn I have a looong way to go to get as good technically.

[@HenMor]

Love the process.

[@mostdata]

Great tutorial, learned a lot of things ❤

[@SourceAwareness]

Infinite Thanks for this, excellent work!! Wishing you a Wonderful Year 🙏🏾

[@khairulanam6536]

Amazing!

[@user-bt3um6pj7x]

Amazing work!!!

[@psynapticvideos]

Amazing! Awesome tutorial! Thank you!!

[@ace280671]

Superb techniques for that, thanks!

[@phillparkinson4671]

This has been an awesome tutorial. I've just got to the texturing point snd was wondering if you have done a tutorial just on texturing as I've learnt a lot from your choices and explanations of your process in the modelling and physics stage and think I could learn a lot from your decisions and explanations around texturing. Also do you have tutorials around the camera shots, transitions etc as well? Thank you for your time and help

[@AspandDos1]

LOVE IT!

[@narazieniemam]

Great tutorial - simple and straightforward. Have you ever encountered a problem after adding a cloth simulation? I'm struggling with a gliltches in animation - vertices of my jellyfish "jump around" in some frames...

[@RG36c]

Thanks! Yeah a big part of working with blenders sims is dealing with that kind of stuff. It could be a too low weight or quality setting

[@rudeloo2021]

Thank you!

[@kotakuk6533]

👌

[@LegiTzMacinima]

Incredible! Loved the tutorial, i have an issue with the tentacles, i tried moving settings around a bit to fix it but they skip frames in animation, any tip on fixing this gitter. And whenever i try to Bake my Cache the mesh is completly distorted although before baking the mesh looks fine. Any suggestion?

[@RG36c]

Thank you! I got some weird distortions when the sim was cached/baked for a different number of verts from what i was actually viewing. That can happen when a sub d or other modifier before the sim has different settings for viewport and render or you change them after baking. For the skipping frames my only ideas are increasing the quality steps and checking the frame steps in the file output tab.

[@zoecailastan4735]

Thanks so much for the cool tutorial! I have some issues with the cloth simulation as more people on here, but I tried several settings and it keeps coming out strange. I've applied the scale as well. Do you have some tips for the cloth sim settings that could help me out? At this point the simulation just explodes or goes out of control at several frames. You told someone else it could be low weight or quality but I put them higher and tried different values and it keeps coming out strange...

[@RG36c]

Thanks! When it suddenly goes really really wrong you might have some left over frames in the cache. Blender sometimes doesn't really clear it. Rebaking usually helps with that. Or do you have a modifier (most likely Subdivision) before the sim that changes the number of verts differently for the viewport and render?

[@andrewrooke6551]

Did you ever sort this out Zoe? Everything was looking good and I was so excited to hit bake, then it all went to hell.

[@MuhammadAli-hb1dm]

2:47 when I counted it the other shape is becoming smaller and smaller plz anyone help

[@RG36c]

Sounds like you have scaled either the whole mesh or the Empty at some point. You can apply the scale by selecting it in object mode, pressing Ctrl+A and then selecting Scale. That should fix it

[@isaschulte6709]

Awesome tutorial! i was just wondering if you have suggestions on making the animation loopable?

[@RG36c]

Thank you! Making the simulation loop will be pretty difficult since you don't really have control over all the individual movements. You could try to find two very similar frames, use those as loop points, turn the sim into shape keys and edit them with the sculpting or proportional editing to get a seamless transition. That would be pretty fiddly though. I made a loop with a bunch of those jellyfish once where they each aren't on screen for the whole scene since the viewer moves a lot. That way the simulations didn't have to loop. Maybe something like that would be an option for you too

[@isaschulte6709]

Interesting! I was looking for a game-ready solution, so in the end I chose a different way of approach. Thanks for your reply though! @@RG36c

[@scipie7802]

I have a problem getting my mesh seamless when applying the array. I erased the faces as shown and followed all the steps thereafter, but for some reason the mesh looks junky after the array. Has anyone an advise?

[@RG36c]

If merge doesn't work, the verts probably aren't quite aligned. You may have moved the verts themselves or the rotator axis. Increasing the merge distance might help.

[@seanmoore1445]

Awesome tutorial, thanks! I'm interested in how you modeled the oral arms in the original animation. Would you be willing to outline your approach?

[@RG36c]

Thank you! I just made a plane, tapered it towards the bottom, added a bunch of loop cuts, moved the outward facing verts around a bit to get that wrinkly look and arranged the tentacles with the same kind of array. Hope that helps

[@seanmoore1445]

@@RG36c Great, thanks for the info!

[@Sakirogrono]

3:23 hey I'm confused when I extrude nothing shows but just a bunch of black lines?

[@RG36c]

Sounds like you created edges by extruding single vertices. Try extruding the whole face instead

[@Sakirogrono]

@@RG36c That fixed it thank you so much!

[@JUICE-wk2tz]

is there a way to animate the light of the jellyfish to react to music and if i export an audio file of just a kick, bass, and snare track can it be linked to the jellyfish glow? lol that would so cool as part of an 3d video audio visualizer

[@RG36c]

That sounds really cool, I'd like to see it when you manage to do that! I've never done anything like that so idk how to do it but I think there are addons for that.

[@aetherropes]

When I apply the array mod it scales the segments of the bell making it impossible to recreate the bell shape with the array mod

[@RG36c]

I guess you scaled the axis or the model. Applying the scale might help

[@ItzD4nte]

Can you please make a beginner blender series🙏

[@RG36c]

No, sorry. For the basics I recommend Blender Gurus donut tutorial series. It's what I started Blender with and it helped me so much. I'm happy about any slightly more specific video suggestions though

[@norbertszalko]

​@Roman Grzanowski I'm also starting with the Blender Guru donut tutorial series and it's perfect for beginners :)

[@ItzD4nte]

@@RG36c How about Something on NFT Artwork?

[@user-zc3ph3kv9i]

Why isn't the jellyfish moving?

[@RG36c]

You may still have a baked/cached simulation from before you animated the movement

[@amareshchary8149]

In blender mix GRB options is not please help any one

[@RG36c]

Late reply but in case you still have the problem: make sure you type RGB (not GRB) and if that doesn't help try to search for "Mix Color" or just "Mix". You can also find it in the "Color" category