Mind-blowing visual illusion created with Blender

Realtime Materials - blendermarket.com/products/re...
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In this #blender tutorial We will be using #geometryNodes to create a visual illusion in animation. We will start by looking at the animated reference and figuring how to remake the movement in Blender. After that we will model the gutters the spheres will be sliding into! Then we will do some simple HDRI lighting and a one light setup. Lastly we will add materials and render in cycles!
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Anna Marinenko
Instagram - anna.marine...
Twitter - / marinenko
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My links
Patreon - www.patreon.com/user?u=9011118
Website - www.ducky3d.com/
Twitter - / ducky3d
Instagram - / ducky3d

[@TanjoGalbi]

Mathematically the movement of each single ball is a sine wave. Their phase is dependant on the angle of the path which makes them move in synch with each other. The circle we see is a trick of the eyes. What you have shown here is a simple shortcut to do those maths using the tools available in Blender. It just goes to show you do not need to know maths to do complex maths 😄

[@TheDucky3D]

Said beautifully

[@lafudge2929]

The phase actually has nothing to do with the path. If their phases were aligned, the balls would collide no matter what the angle of their trajectory was.

[@TanjoGalbi]

@@lafudge2929 And that is exactly why the phase is set according to the angle of the path like I said! Because the phase is set according to the path angle the balls do not hit and the balls look like they are in a circle. Any other phase settings and they risk hitting and the circle effect is lost.

[@chryssdale5747]

i like balls

[@lanzak7677]

I just followed a houdini tutorial on this same exact animation but it used coding and a lot of math it made my head hurt and I didn't understand anything. This method is much simpler and easier to understand.

[@BlenderRookie]

That's a good satisfying illusion.

[@pete3d408]

Amazing as always. Your tutorials are a good way to learn geo nodes

[@maxwindsor_]

Looks great! It's crazy I just learned to create this almost exact shot in Houdini! Great to see it's possible in Blender, as well.

[@nanaagyemang4097]

Beautiful!!!Keep making these stimulations 💪💪

[@opticonor]

So many valuable nuggets of info in here for such a simple animation ❤ thanks Ducky

[@jamesriley5057]

Ducky! the FOV blur on the wood grain, combined with the chrome reflection is awesome. I love your work!

[@TheDucky3D]

Thank you!!

[@shanabenjamin8945]

Thank you!! Brilliant work! :)

[@oldman8277]

That’s incredibly good!

[@StefanWolfrum]

Totally frickin‘ awesome!! 🤩 Challenge for a future video: make the spheres actually rotate while they move on the ground so that we can use other materials than just perfect mirrors. 😉

[@iamhozaayy7284]

Wow, I am just a beginner like a month and a half in on blender and seeing this, the way you explained was so clear and beginner friendly as well that I could understand everything. It gives me a big boost of motivation to continue. Thanks Nathan

[@TheDucky3D]

Dude this is why I make these videos! I’m so glad you liked the tutorial!

[@garrettsmith315]

I remember seeing the preview of this, glad you got it all figured out. It turned out nicely!

[@TheDucky3D]

Thanks!

[@Ayden3D]

Definitely making this!

[@damienduvivier585]

Everyone here talking about how amazing the animation is (and it is, don't get me wrong) but the relationship with the cat is even more amazing :)

[@TheDucky3D]

She’s the best

[@manjunathsutar6483]

Love your Tutorials bro.

[@TheDucky3D]

Thanks dude!!

[@johnny166]

just wanna say you're amazing man

[@gerdsfargen6687]

Far out! So realistic!

[@kareemalmkahelah5338]

I did it fully procedural in geo nodes , but the way you achieve it is clever

[@madebyjonny7637]

This is a cool project for someones first Geo Node project

[@engelbrecht777]

This animation is based on Copernicus' perception of the Tusi couple. It has been made thousands of times with code or any animation software since the 80's.

[@raycarroll3150]

Always appreciated my dude! Love your content and how intuitive it is for dummies like me! LOL. Keep on keepin' on!!

[@TheDucky3D]

I appreciate that man!

[@BakamonNO]

freaking beautiful

[@dallasscandling6329]

Damn that’s mesmerizing dawg!

[@user-ku5oo2cl3z]

Awesome idea, great execution, great tutorial. I managed to complete it. :))

[@3DVladislavYordanov]

Once again fantastic render man! Keep it up and spread the beauty of geo nodes❤ Can we be interested in seeing a driftaway from your comfort zone and witnessing some extreme jump in a direction where you want to develop yourself even more? ( Maybe renders on a topic dear to your heart?)

[@TanjoGalbi]

It's a week now and I have come back to this with an idea (that came to me while I was in bed!) and whilst looking at it again today I noticed something you did that was not necessary. When you wanted to show them appearing randomly you added a Separate Geometry node to make the selection and added a Random node set to Boolean as it's selection input. The Separate Geometry node was not required because the Instance on Points node already has a selection input you could have attached the Random node to and does the same thing you wanted!

[@mystery_guy]

good eye!

[@orcanimal]

Never knew about the tilda menu. Such a time saver!

[@TheDucky3D]

It’s awesome

[@normietwiceremoved]

I like you because you show that you had to figure something out instead of pretending that you know everything.

[@TheDucky3D]

Always learning

[@ayoubthegreat]

Awesome tutorial! You're a pro at Blender. Please put the animation again at the end 😭 I was waiting to see the result again

[@TheDucky3D]

Ur right!! Should have done that

[@aype72]

Conseguido. Gracias por tus enseñanzas. Un abrazo desde Granada

[@zachhoy]

omg your face when "I clicked it again and now I'm going to have to wait" (when you accidentally double-clicked on display in viewport setting), classic. A true Blenderer.

[@TheDucky3D]

Haha we can all relate

[@aryankaushik9373]

i made this too just now and rendering it you are the best :))

[@shmuelisrl]

Btw you can just use the selection on the instance on points instead of using a separate geometry (pr delete geometry) .

[@1980kcom]

I'm impressed with your consistency Ducky. Inspiring stuff I had to join your Patreon just to support. Keep up the great work

[@TheDucky3D]

I truly appreciate that!!

[@Mr.Doruko]

So good🎉

[@shakh_3d]

*13:28** You can Press (CTRL + Shift + T) to import all material files automatically, instead of doing it yourself one by one. Anyway, good tutorial buddy* 🔥

[@craigbaker6382]

Thanks for this clear tutorial. I am sometimes entertained by those who try to make Blender Tuts like some zany comedy bit but in the long run I know I need "straightforward" vs goofy for tutorials that will be useful. I wondered if an alternate way to approach this would have been to set up one ball animating along a boolean-cut trench with a parabolic acceleration and deceleration function parameterizing its animation rolling speed in a looping cycle and then copy that whole collection into an array with 8 total copies and then offset the rotation about the center plus the start / "pop-in" moment for each ball to be at the correct offset for each ball not to intersect with its neighbors. Same result. The illusion of the ring of balls rotating is an illusion as the path of each ball is simply a straight line. Many ways to skin a cat.

[@TheDucky3D]

Your method would definitely work. Definitely a lot more complex, but would probably open up some really cool opportunities

[@trstampf7854]

Reminds me of a synchronized multi pendulum animation I did a few years ago.

[@pv8685]

the best problem solutions often comes, when you go to bed! or in the bathtube... or were ever you continue to think about this problem in a quiet space.

[@mahabbat1960]

😮 wooow

[@3dmva]

my man got the drip🔥🔥🔥

[@marcuswill5414]

Nice

[@sanketsbrush8790]

Most satisfying thing in this video is a probably this cat.

[@victorrosseland7958]

what an beautiful video man, how did u fint out it was 16 ? is it just always multiply with to ? if I have more balls :)?

[@nateorona6787]

Hey i had a question and was wondering if anyone had the same problem. I played around with the random value and when i went to render the other spheres would fade in and out really quickly in a glitch effect any thoughts to fix it?

[@ChunribuGame]

you guys may be interested in this: Unraveling the magic behind Do Nothing Machines

[@W1zardRyan]

Is it really a visual illusion, or is it just another way to describe how points on a circle would transform if it rolls around the origin?

[@marinero0]

Thank you for the amazing Blender tutorials! I have a quick question: How can I make the sphere rotate/spin according to the movement? Any tips or guidance would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

[@bvs1q]

I don't know the proper way to do it, but for instance local rotation I did a capture attribute node to get the vert id and then a bunch of switch statements on them with the individual angle offset i wanted. You should be able to do it just with like doing tan^-1(tan(y2-y1/x2-x1)) to get the angle between 2 points, and then adjust for the difference between the current direction and target direction. Where that math is done per instance when it goes to an input like rotation or location, from an attribute capture node

[@mystery_guy]

@@bvs1q brilliant! Now show us the nodes you use so we know what the heck you are talking about. Please.

[@rayt5788]

👍👍👍👍

[@user-qr7mi3uy1d]

I love ducky

[@thomasaull]

The wood material looks wrong to me. If you were to carve this structure in, the grain would change depending on the depth. This looks like it‘s just projected from the top (which it probably basically is). Really hard to get wood right in 3D. A procedural material might help 🤔

[@TheDucky3D]

Thanks! I’ll look into that! Sounds like it would work

[@gottagowork]

The "correct" way to do it would be using a 3D texture which can become ridiculously expensive to render. Alternatively if this is something I was worried about, I'd try to noise up the coordinates based on the height dimension and maybe expose pores/saw marks from the cut. I did notice though that a normal map - in sRGB mode even - was used to drive bump height (instead of normal map node), and that bump node was used incorrectly. Oopsie. Tip: If using normal maps, use normal map node, as is. If using bump maps, try the map out first using microdisplacement (displacement only) - whatever goes into displacement scale goes into bump distance with bump strength set to 1. The normal modification will remain the same. Distance (scale) for me typically ends up in the sub mm to a couple of mm big (covering 0 - 1 input range).

[@DaellusKnights]

I almost feel like I should be kinda mad at you for figuring out that shortcut on this.... a few years ago this optical illusion was one of the first things I ever tried animating... only I was stuck doing the actual sine wave propogations and offsets, etc. IT WAS NOT EASY! 😸 Either way it's cool to see there's an easier method for pulling it off. That, and your cat makes everything okay. I don't trust developers that don't belong to at LEAST one or more cats! 😹😻

[@TheDucky3D]

maybe the cat kept you from being mad at me!

[@decade-gaming8188]

U welcome...

[@3dmva]

really glad to see that ducky got 90k views in 2days

[@karlspear6729]

Don't forget that all of the balls move in straight lines. The circular motion is just an illusion.

[@bvs1q]

There are 2 rotations going on here though, and can be 3 if you want instance local too. I did it fully in GN with only 1 main rotation keyframed for the main object translation and 2 more sets of rotation to rotate all the objects around the translation point and local instance point, to get cubes to face in a straight direction. Its kinda funny, but it can be both ways, you could have straight lines approximating a circle or circles approximating straight lines.

[@yonlaycabrera4431]

Why to rebuilt everything in the shader? With the same node wrangler enabled you can press CTRL+ALT+T and select all the materials textures and it automatically put everything in place.

[@mrjaffa7354]

Say i wanted this 500 frames. What value would i put in the rotation and for the circle? Would it be double the values?

[@TanjoGalbi]

I think I found a bug in Blender! I decided to experiment a bit with this idea and after making the balls move round in the circle by following the Bezier curve I decided to make the Bezier an ellipse by scaling it down along the X axis by 75% (Yes, I only had the Bezier selected). The result was not what I expected. It also scaled the mesh circle inside the geometry nodes for the balls making it an ellipse. Not only that but each ball was also squashed 75% on their X axis too like the scale was also applied to the Ico Sphere object in the nodes! That scale command should only have affected the Bezier curve and thus the path the circle of balls takes, not the shape of the balls and their circular arrangement!

[@Zertox3D]

What if you apply the scale of the curve?

[@TanjoGalbi]

@@Zertox3D That works. But the scale should not have applied to the other items in the other object in the first place! lol

[@fusion1203]

You should make a video on how to make your cat in blender :3

[@TheDucky3D]

Good idea

[@fusion1203]

@@TheDucky3D thanks ^.^ (thats also probably the first time i have ever done a colon three.)

[@R3DBLAZE]

Can we make them join from outside instead of appearing from nowhere??

[@cyrkielnetwork]

You don't need to rotate them. The point of this optical ilussion is that the balls go in straight lines.

[@vinztsa]

its amazing, but i have a problem when using bevel in edit mode, when i select a line with crtl hold and alt it can't select the whole part, i don't know why it can't ?

[@christiangschweng1552]

you can instead select the caps in polygon mode. I had the same problem, the bevel behaves the same way, if you apply it to the caps instead, though.

[@pedro_h3895]

its because of your scale, it should always be 1, you can see by clicking 'n', to set select the object ctrl + a and then scale, it should work after this

[@KatJustice97]

It looks like the balls on Anna's animation appeared when an empty spot on the "circle" crossed over the center. I wonder how you could set that up

[@worldsbrother9704]

What method do you use to minimize damage to your eyes from the computer?

[@TheDucky3D]

I have blue light protection in my prescription glasses

[@theMarkofArt]

I tried doing this today and everything went well up till the Boolean Modifier. It wrecked my plane and I spent a lot of time trying to figure out Booleans. Do you have a solution for this, please? I'm on 4.1

[@theMarkofArt]

Update: After 2 hours of this it finally worked but I have no idea what I did.

[@user-wy5bz7cx3t]

I was going to create the same scene in blender...

[@TheDucky3D]

Yes!

[@shmuelisrl]

Why did you use the normal in a bump node? That's not how you use a normal map.

[@Logans_Animations]

5:23

[@muhammadali_st]

hello, I did everything half a number, but there are no balls in the render, why

[@fusion1203]

Cat :)

[@atharvabhalerao9877]

pssst 🐈

[@decade-gaming8188]

Don't be afraid I will just ...🥊🥊🥊🥊🥊🥊

[@mikeagoya]

Hii

[@decade-gaming8188]

...😴...🥱...thx

[@robhindley3228]

Another idea. Please show how to do this in Blender. kzbin.info/www/bejne/qXvLlYqEecp5fq8 using Geo Nodes

[@Shaaaaade]

UV is wrong

[@Shaaaaade]

Bruh, pin of shame

[@bitspacemusic]

Honestly, you could just post cat videos and that would be fine too.

[@inb4goldenage848]

Anna is a WOMAN. Thanks for featuring HER artwork. Let's stop all this insane hate towards WOMEN and use female pronoun for FEMALES. Other than that, great video.

[@TheDucky3D]

I used they them pronouns as to stay gender neutral as I don’t know what Anna identifies as. I’m sorry you feel like that’s hate towards women, but that’s absolutely not correct, nor my intention to come off that way. Had I known what Anna’s pronouns where I would’ve used them. But I know just because someone presents a certain way doesn’t mean that’s how they identify and I was only trying to be respectful.

[@craigbaker6382]

Please refrain from extolling gender/sexual politics into something that is irrelevant to them. I would prefer not to know one way or the other how an individual identifies but I am completely exhausted and resistant therefore to people who will announce things in an imperative tense about how we "should" do some thing some way blah blah about [x-random concept] while we appreciate a computer graphics animation.

[@dif7051]

incredible work ! can you make a tutorial how to make ball music animation like @victordemartrin 💙

[@learntobecomeananimator]

I really Love all of you tutorials and I learned lot of geometry nodes and blender. I also keep taging you on insta . I dont know are you getting or not. thanka a lot.

[@dzomlamasina1560]

Great ! But why so bad uw map on wooden board.