- So you have a scene, let's say an environment scene that you put a lot of hours into. I mean, really, really
put your heart into it. You did everything right, you started from the blocking stage, you practiced foreground, mid ground and background division. The tree is right here around
the golden rule sweet spot. Everything is pointing towards it, you then added all those
little details like stones and fallen trunks, grass,
and even dandelions. And then you hit render and yeah. So then you work some more on
it and this is what you get. Yup, pretty boring. At this point the whole
thing is getting frustrating. You spent so many hours making the scene, you are completely exhausted
at this point, for this. Well, it happened to me many times. If I was to tell you how many times, I'd probably be embarrassed,
twice, just for this video. Oftentimes I hit a stage
where it almost seems like some sort of
good-looking final result is just not possible. Well, fortunately, there is
always something you can do to make things better. Things you can add to really bring your 3D renders to life. Now, this video is not going to be about all those important
fundamentals of composition, camera work and lighting that every 3D artists should know. We discussed those in
my previous two videos, focused on the topic, so check them out, if you haven't already. Instead, today, we will have a look at something slightly different, something more superficial, you might say. Nonetheless, something I use every time for every artwork I make. So without any further ado, let me introduce six ways to make your renders
instantly cooler, like this. (birds chirping) So what I did to achieve this result, was I edit a blurred foreground element. Then I let clouds cast
shadows on the ground. I brought the mighty
weapon known as godrays. I then added falling
leaves and flying birds. And last but not least adding
atmosphere always helps to bring your scene together. After a bit of Eevee
tinkering and compositing, both of which I showed you
in the previous videos, I did achieve something that
I was reasonably happy with. And now I will quickly break
down all these six steps. (upbeat note) One little note, before we start, when creating this image in Blender Eevee, I relied heavily on the grass element from the add on Graswald, generated trees from Grove add on an amazing photo scan
assets from Megascans. without these it would
take days instead of hours. I also used these awesome
VDB clouds by Travis Davis, which give you a ton of options for quickly filling your blender skies. Now this first step may not
apply to every 3D artwork, but I, myself I'm heavily
influenced by movie compositions, probably because I studied filmmaking, and some of that stuck with me. What we learned at school
and when composing our shots at everyday shoot, was to add
a bit of foreground element to your scene and ideally make it blurry. What this does is it adds
an amazing sense of depth to our shot accentuate it even more, when you start moving the camera. If you look at these old
masters, they rarely did it. But I think that after
a century of filmmaking, this technique seeped into every area of entertainment industry,
especially modern concept art. So if you go for example, at art station and browse some artwork, you will often find this element present. Here it is, and here and here, here too, you get the picture. So what I've done in my scene
was to take a tree model and put it towards the
camera where it works nicely. For example, here, around the side here. Then I switched on the
depth of field option and right of the bat, things started to work much nicer. Not only does it add more depth, it can also frame your images nicely. And that's just step one. For my 3d work, I like to gather all sorts of reference sheets. And in this case, looking
at many, many images, it became obvious that landscape
shots almost always look more epic when there are
these huge cloud shadows moving across them, especially when you compare
it to a photo without shadows, it becomes quite obvious. This technique is actually very easy, in Blender, it won't take
you more than a few minutes, but it adds tons of
awesomeness to your images. Let's demonstrate here on a simple scene where I have this ground
plane and a plane above where I want my clouds to be. Let's actually switch to Eevee, now you can already see that when you have a top down light, your top object is of course, casting shadows onto the bottom one. Now I want this shadow to
be more cloudy and random. For that purpose, I used to import various
images of clouds with Alpha, making light cast shadows through them. However that proved more
performance heavy than necessary. There is an easier and foster solution, one that I nowadays
use almost exclusively. All you need to do is
to plug noise texture into the Alpha socket
of the principal shader, and to make it work in Eevee, you always need to go
to the shader options and set the Blend Mode and
Shadow Mode to Alpha Blend. And for example, Alpha Hashed. Only then will the opacity take effect. Okay, then play around with the settings and plug in the Color Ramp
noDe to drive the softness and hardness and with
the noise node selected, if you hit Control + T, of course you must have
the Node Wrangler add on, active in the settings. You get this mapping node where you can simply move your
cloud shadows to the side, rotate them and even scale
them super fast, super easy, and also tileable. And you can really get
creative with these, darkening areas you don't
need the viewers to look at, highlighting those most
important spots of your image. Not to mention you can use
them in all your 3D scenes, not just landscapes. For example, here, let's jump back to the previous tutorial
scene with Shaolin Monk Su, by Juan Hernandez and use the same clouds in smaller scale to cast
shadows on his face. Of course, filling your
scene with glow and blooms and light shafts of all sorts,
is generally frowned upon. If you do not have a good
image base to start off, well, then no amount of glow
or rays will save you. But let's say that the
base of your image is okay, then adding this little detail
is something I love to do. Basically on all of my images, be it in more or less prominent form. Creating light rays that
you can put directly into your scene is pretty easy. First, you will need a
black and white image with these rays, which you can create, for example, in Photoshop, Gimp or just download them online. You then put this image into a scene with the import images as planes option and just plug it into the Alpha. Again, don't forget the blending modes in the shader set up, and done. There is something about leaves
falling through your scene that is just so damn amazing and poetic. Lately I've been playing
the new samurai game, Ghost of Tsushima and
watching the leaves fly and fall everywhere really
made me think how much it adds to the overall atmosphere. A little thing, but so powerful. So let's make our own falling
leaves in Blender, shall we? I started with getting
some nice leaf textures. In my case, I downloaded them with free credits on textures.com and you can do it too. There, I found these maple leaves but you can definitely
use different sources. Many you can even download
for free from Blendswap, some even premade in Blender. Other you can find among Megascans assets, if you are subscribed to Quixel. In Photoshop, Gimp, or any other photo manipulation software, you put all these images
together to a texture atlas, save it as PNG with Alpha. You then import it as a plane to Blender and cut each individual leaf. You can subdivide the planes, shape it a little bit and even
play around with the shading, maybe adding some specular and bump. Let's make a camera here
and aim it somewhere in the air and then put all these leaves into a separate collection and then add a simple object, for example, plane and onto it, put
particle simulation. Activate the collection parameter here and choose our leaves
collection to be the source and to make the particles not disappear throughout the simulation, make their lifetime something
larger than your timeline. In my case, it's 2000. Also let's increase the
damping in physics tab that will make the leaves
fall somewhat slower, like they're very light, which they are. 0.5 seems to be about right now, and also I don't like that
they're all falling uniformly. So let's add some rotation here and activate this dynamic
checker, open up angular velocity, leave this velocity value here and set a value of four down here or less or more if you like, depending on how fast you
want to leaves to spin. To add more randomness,
play with the values here. Now that's looking better. And looking at this, there
was still a lot of uniformity in the simulation. One thing I've done to fix it was to add in several physics fields. First, wind, making it
blow a little stronger to the side with a little
stronger value here, like 22. The plane then needed some
repositioning for the leaves to remain in the shot. Then adding turbulence
field with size of two, a strength of about 50, helped
with the randomness too, creating these very nice
pathways in the air. Really almost like in Ghost of Tsushima. Limiting the number of particles and putting them out of focus,
finalized the result for me, which I then upended into my
scene with the fields and all, catched it, and bam falling leaves, right at your fingertips. This next step may be a
little bit more advanced. Nevertheless, it's another
one that I like to use, maybe too much, adding birds. To add birds into your still renders, you may of course simply use an image or for moving shot, you may let's say go out in the nature, away from your computer. So that's what outdoor looks like? Take your camera and
film some flying birds, then get rid of the sky, and here you go. Or you can stay home and
create your birds in Blender. There, you can really control the number and movement of your flocks. So it can often be the best option. For that purpose, I downloaded this seagull
model from Blendswap, made by a user called FnaX, and I added a very simple
shape key animation to it. In edit mode, I edited
the mesh to be this shape and with it, I created
this basis default state in the shape keys menu. I then jump again into
edit mode and by tinkering with the mesh again, I created one shape key
where the wings were down. If I then started scrubbing
through this value, it looked like the bird
is flapping its wings. You can of course make this
animation look much nicer than me, but I figured my
birds would be too small to notice a bad animation. I then key frame the shape
key at a value of zero and frame zero. I went to frame 20, key
framed it at value of one and then at frame 40,
added again value of zero. This way, we create a very
simple flapping cycle. To make it repeat infinitely, I selected all my key frames
with A and hit Shift + E activating this super
useful cyclic command here. Never ending flapping, here we go. I then put my bird into a collection and called it Bird Particles. And with that, I duplicated
the model several times and made variations through
the cyclic animation for each bird, in some
cases making it faster or adding second cycle of animation, with different shape key values so that they appeared
to be different birds. And thus, my bird particles were ready. Now, I created an object, this big sphere, and I made an emitter particle system, using collection setting and a birds group in this render section here,
but nothing was happening. Well, watch out for that, because Blender remembers
the last active collection and it puts new objects in it. So this sphere where we have
our particle simulation, was created inside of
the Bird Particles group, and then the simulation can't really work. So take it out, and whee, it's
raining tiny little birds. I made them bigger here and
then the real fun started because when I activated
this Boid's option in the physics section, all sorts of weird
stuff started happening. First off, it's better
to hide the emitter, both here and also in
the viewport display, so we can see better what's going on. The birds at this point
started rotating and focusing on the emitter object, basically like some sort of flying insect. That's however not what
I wanted, I wanted birds. So we need to change the
behavior a little bit. Before that however, I checked the object rotation option here and then rotated my original
particles 90 degrees because before that, there
were flying sideways. Now while this looked cool, an
awesome flocking bird chaos, this is actually not how flocks behave. They tend to flock
together following a goal and often one leading bird. Fortunately, that's
exactly what you can set up in these Boid's settings here. So I wanted the birds to cross the scene, heading towards this cube, behaving in a somewhat less mothy way. In this Boid brain settings here, you have all sorts of
fun rules to play with. You can add goal and specify the cube to be the bird's destination. You can add separate command to make them fly away from each other and flock command, making
them do the opposite. And also a follow leader command. Take note, the order in which
you add these is important. With this fuzzy option set,
it happened from the top. So for example now,
first they will separate, then they will realize they
have to follow the leader, upon which they will try
to follow their goal, while following the leader
and flocking together. It is really very straightforward
and awesome fun playing with these particles and their behavior. I went through numerous settings, also tinkering with the movement tab, lowering some of the max air speed, max acceleration and angular velocity. And you can decrease the personal space to make the flock tighter. And by the way, you can
very quickly add a new flock of birds by simply going to edit mode and duplicating the sphere, then putting it somewhere else. These were my final settings. I went with much lower number of birds, lower personal space for them
and this order of commands. And then I added some music and let them chase this
irresistible, invisible cube. (playful music) We talked about atmosphere
and how to create it in the 10 tips to make
our scene more cinematic. And in this new scene, I even used a similar way
to add the atmospheric depth as I did there. I used cube, put a pretty
simple volume shader on it, and with some very low numbers, it gave me this nice misty effect. However, let's now
demonstrate some other methods you can do this. Apart from this 3D fog, which is awesome, especially with light sources, higher anisotropy and some bloom effect, you can also achieve this in other ways, some even more performance
efficient than this. For example, with 2D elements, let me quickly add a terrain
with ANT landscape here, some mountains and a
lower a mountainous area in the foreground and duplicate this one. And now we have basically three planes, a foreground, a mid
ground, and a background. Then I can add the customary cube with principled volume shader, make the density 0.02, anisotropy 0.5 and have a very strong
spotlight shine through it. Now this may function
both as an atmosphere and with higher density
as a mist or a fog. However, if you have more
defined ground planes, like I have here, I can divide those by
2D layers of atmosphere. You simply make a plane, plug a gradient texture with linear mode into the Alpha socket. And I will repeat myself, but please don't forget
to set the Blend Mode and Shadow Mode here to make it work. With this setup, it's
just a matter of rotating to gradient placement negative 90 degrees, and with Color Ramp, slightly limiting the
area with black point, bring the intensity of the whites up. Place your atmosphere plane on the borders of the foreground and mid ground, and then one even in front of the camera. And while this is sort of a cheat, not really how a true atmosphere works, I think it serves the purpose quite nice. And there is actually one more, slightly advanced thing you can do here. I have this fog extra right here. Again, I put it on a plane
and set it up the way I set up my previous transparent planes. Then I create a large ground plane, spanning almost a whole scene. And on this plane,
create a particle system where I use this fog plane
to extend it many times over the surface and
rotate the image planes to face the camera with the rotation here. This combined with the
other atmospheric planes and the mist volume usually
gives a pretty cool result even on an ugly scene like this. In the final scene, I use the atmospheric plane
to divide the mid ground from the background. I added a mist volume to have a bit of that volumetric light catching effect, and also added a little bit
of dust planes here and there. And that was it with a
bit of compositing work, added contrast and vignette, the final image went a long way from where we originally started. All that, with just a few techniques, ones that are helping to
bring my artwork to life for many years now. I definitely recommend streamlining these. So create our own
collections of flying birds, falling leaves, planes with
light rays and atmosphere. And whenever you are close to
finishing a new 3D artwork, you just append them into your scene and reuse them whenever you like, because I guarantee you
when you use them once, you will be using them always. To get some of these assets
are used in this video, you can subscribe to
the CG Boost Resources at cgboost.com/resources and
download them from there. Actually do youhave your own ways to bring 3D artwork to life? Definitely share your
tips in the comments, I can't wait for them. But with that, stay creative my friends and until next, time Martin out. (upbeat note)
