How To Create a Pulsing Energy Material in Blender

 

In this tutorial we will be making a cool animated material. It is part transparent and part glowing and it pulses from bright to dim. To see it in action play this short video clip.

Pretty cool.

To begin launch Blender, add a new material and give it a name like, "Energy Material", or something like that.

Switch your main viewing area to the Shader Editor. You should see the Principled BSDF node attached to the Material Output node.

Pick a Base Color. I made mine a deep blue. Then lower the Roughness to 0.000 and lower the Clearcoat Roughness to 0.000. Next change the Emission color. I made mine a really dark blue.

Next press Shift + A, to bring up the add node menu. Search for a Math node. Switch the Math node to Power then give the Base a value of 10 and the Exponent a value of 3. Now connect the Math node to the Principled shader's Emission Strength. This really cranks up the emission strength.

Now we want to add a Mix Shader and a Transparent BSDF shader and connect them to our Material Output.

To make the transparency work, we need to change a setting in the Materials tab. Change the Blend Mode from Opaque to Alpha Blend.

Now add a Gradient Texture and connect it to the Mix Shader's Fac. Make sure the Gradient is set to Spherical.

Next, add another Math node and again switch it to power and set the Exponent to 7.500. Also, add a Layer Weight node. Connect them together, and connect them to the Gradient Texture.

We are almost done, but we still need to animate the pulsing effect.

We need to add a Map Range. Set the From Min value to .250, set From Max to .750, set the To Min value to .250, and the To Max value to .750.

Then add a Wave Texture. Change the Detail Scale value to .500 and the Detail Roughness to 0.000.

Finally we will add a couple more Math nodes. The first one set to Divide and connect it to the Wave Texture. The second one set to Power. Change the Base value to 10.000 and the Exponent to .500. Connect the Power node to the Divide node.

The last node to add is a Value node. Set its value to #frame. This will cause the value to equal the animation's current frame number. Then, when you play the animation, the value will update itself with each frame.

This concludes the Pulsing Energy Material in Blender Tutorial. Thank you for reading along.