The ultimate course for making highly customizable audio visualizers in Blender
Learn advanced techniques and workflows for controlling 3D objects and shapes using audio data. In this course we'll explore many powerful customization options to create audio visualizers in extremely high quality.
▶️ Watch the launch video here!
If you are a 3D artist, a musician, or just passionate about making audio-visual experiences, this course is for you!
Here's a 5 min video to give you a quick overview of the course:
I'll be your teacher!
My name is Asbjørn Lote (also known as @Polyfjord), I am a Norwegian 3D artist and I have a strong passion for making audio-visual experiences. I've been making Blender tutorials on YouTube as my full time job since August 2021, and with over 100M total views on my channel, I have taught hundreds of thousands of people how to improve their skills with this amazing open source software. I am very much looking forward to having you as my student as well!
Here are some of my favorite audio visualizers we'll be creating:
Rippling Keyboards
A highly customizable frequency band visualizer, where any multi-part object can be animated by any audio file. This is technique is extremely versatile, and thanks to the included Audio Visualizer Assistant add-on, it is fast to set up and easily customizable to fit your ideas.
Melody Visualizer
A curve-based sheet music visualizer where energy trails are bouncing between the note heads in your own sheet music. An elegant way to build anticipation between each note in a melody.
Lyric visualizer
A fun project where we use Rigid Body physics simulation to animate every single letter of every single word in any chosen chunk of text. And as a cool twist, we can make this visualizer reveal a hidden word at the end.
Light your visualizers like any 3D scene
All the projects can be lit with existing lighting techniques. Using the powerful lighting tools available with the Cycles render engine, we can create visualizers that stand out in the crowd. For example add a perfectly timed dramatic lighting change to sync with your music's climax!
Data driven animations
The Topology Waves project features a powerful variation of the frequency band visualizer, where we can see the history of the respective frequency bands of the audio file. Each curve represents a specific frequency band, and is drawn procedurally using Blender's versatile Geometry Nodes tools.
Highly customizable
All the core audio visualizer projects have customization options. For example adding a realistic sky texture to the Melody Visualizer project can change the vibe of the scene completely.
Difficulty: Beginner friendly with advanced customization options
Artists of all skill levels should be able to follow at least the first two modules in this course. And if you're willing to go the extra mile, the customization module contains many powerful techniques you can really sink your teeth into.
Custom Blender add-on:
Audio Visualizer Assistant
Based on Blender's built-in Sound to Samples operator, this addon allows you to quickly generate visualizers with multiple frequency bands, and use an audio file to animate any transformation channel of selected objects. It also offers a much easier way to import audio to your projects, as well as powerful frequency distribution customization options.
Hardware: Yes
You'll need a computer to follow the course (phones or tablets won't work). It is recommended to have a semi-powerful laptop or desktop PC if you want to create audio visualizers that are longer or in higher resolution.
If you have a very powerful computer, this course should be able to push your hardware to its limits.
Required software
🎨 Blender 4.3 or 4.4 (Free)
Optional software
🎹 Reason 13 ($1 first month)
🎼 MuseScore Studio 4 (Free)
🎙️Audacity (Free)
🎛️ Sonic Visualiser (Free)
🎬 DaVinci Resolve Studio 19 (Paid version)
Operating system
The lessons in this course have been recorded on Windows 11, and works with Blender 4.3 and 4.4. All course assets have also been tested thoroughly on Mac and Linux, and no workflow issues has been found so far.
Note: Reason 13 and DaVinci Resolve Studio 19 are not supported on Linux.
14-day risk-free enrollment
If you have technical issues or if you’re not satisfied with the course for any reason, simply ask for a refund within 14 days, and you'll get a full refund!
