A Quick Trick For Extra Realism (Blender Tutorial)

what's up guys rob here from decoded i'm just working on some assets for the star wars animation that i'm making and when i came to do the building i noticed that i had a common problem that a lot of architectural renders have in blender and the problem is that the building doesn't really look like it lives in the world it doesn't look like it's connected to the floor plane and the reason for that is because in real life wherever you have a wall that makes a floor you tend to get like dust and dirt and grime and litter and all sorts of other crap building up in between the crack where the two surfaces meet and that kind of blurs the edges between them two where as you can see here we have a very sharp edge where the building meets the floor luckily that's really easy to fix in the shader tab so we're going to go over to that now with the building selected and you can see we've got a basic material set up here for this building what we're going to do is we're going to search for a new node and that's the ambient occlusion node ambient occlusion basically just calculates the distance between two different surfaces in blender so if we take a look at this node the ai output you can't really see much going on but if we put this through a color ramp and we just press in both of the handles a little bit you start to see what's happening here wherever there's two surfaces near each other they get a darker color so by default this uses 16 samples i like to put this down to just like 10. you don't really need those extra samples and it'll speed up render times a little bit but if we move this across here and we add in a mix rgb what we can do is we can get our base color for this building and we can put this in the bottom slot and then we can get the color ramp output use that as the factor if we take a look at the mix node now it gives us this white barrier around the edges but if we change this to be like say a dark brown i've actually already got a color here that i like so i'll just paste that in then we've now got this dark edge that goes all the way around and you can change the distance on this you can put that up to like five and have it really strong i'm just going to leave this on one another thing you can also do is use only local and what that'll do is it'll make sure that only the uh the parts of the mesh will affect other parts of the mesh if you leave that disabled then other meshes will also affect it for instance you can see here the floor is projecting some ambient occlusion under the bottom but if we select only local that disappears now it only takes into account other parts of the mesh like around here so we're going to deselect that because obviously we want the floor to be interacting with this and if we plug this now into the base color we take a look at the shader you can see we get this nice dark edge going all the way around the side and then what we can also do is we can select the ground plane in fact let's copy these nodes first just copy these three select the ground plane paste those in and we can connect the color of the ground plane up instead and we'll have the same thing going on with the ground and you can see that's all the way around i think it's a little bit too strong on the ground so i'm going to turn that down just by making the black color a little bit less black more towards the gray and you can see now it looks like the building is more connected to the world it looks like dirt building up and grime and things like that the only thing you want to take into account with it's something you have to bear in mind is that if you don't have only local selected every object in the scene will be projecting ambient occlusion under these objects so for instance you'll get a little bit of a dirty mark around every object on this scene and if we go over here you can see that this pipe has ambient occlusion being projected around it because it's close to the mesh so anyway guys that's just a really simple method that you can use to really enhance the realism of your seams if you like this video please hit the like and subscribe button you can also follow along with my progress when i'm making this animation on my patreon would be putting loads of regular updates on there where you can see exactly how the animation's coming along i'll probably have a few tutorials about how i do little things along the way too thanks for watching guys catch you for the next one you

Channel: DECODED

Views: 107,733

Rating: 4.9754148 out of 5

Keywords: tutorial, DECODED, Blender, blender 3d, software, computing, classes, blender for beginners, blender online, free 3d modeling software, open source software, 3d software, Star Wars, blender star wars, Ambient occlusion Blender, Blender realism, Blender photo realism, blender dirt, Blender grime, Make renders more realistic, Blender 2.9

Id: JM59HtNlPyU

Length: 4min 17sec (257 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 03 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/FiloBlends]

A great tut!

[u/cm_al]

This is very handy. If anyone with an RTX card wants to do this, you should know that the ambient occlusion node doesn't work with Optix, so you'll need to switch to CUDA.

[u/_YetiFTW_]

Moths.

[u/EddoWagt]

This is great stuff, actually really simple but you gotta know it exists!

[u/OhSirrah]

Thanks. I has assumed that AO was unnecessary or wouldn’t do anything for a raytraced render. Looks fantastic tho.