Blender 3.5 Beginner Tutorial - Part 3: Stone

this is the finale of the blender Fast Track series to start we're going to set up our camera and add in a volumetric lighting setup then we're going to get into geometry nodes using them to build out the environment and set up a flaming fire effects on the sword then we're going to wrap up the series by adding in a character animation if the scene looks intimidating to you I encourage you to keep going we're going to make this as simple as practical for you to follow along with me so let's get going [Applause] [Music] oh foreign as we work our scene we'll go from being very small and it will get larger and larger over time in one tool we're going to be using is our outliner which helps us isolate parts of our project and work more efficiently and before we get going be sure to jump back out to the layout tab that's where we're going to be working for the next few chapters then if you need more space to work in the outliner reminder that you can always drag in any panel in blender to make them bigger as I click around my outliner we'll see that we have a list of all the objects that we've created so far throughout the project and right now we see in our outline we have orange objects and we have white objects the white objects are a collection so you can think of these like groups for objects and everything that is orange or objects that we've currently created in our 3D viewport so step number one I'll create a collection and we'll organize it for our sword first I'm going to select my topmost collection this is our scene collection whatever we create will be put into our currently selected collection then I'll click the plus icon in the top right of the outliner to create a new collection great there we go we have our new collection and I'll go ahead and double click on that to rename it it to sort and now we're ready to start organizing so I'll go back to my 3D viewport I'll select all of my sort objects then once I have them selected I'll go back to my outliner I'll see that my selected objects are now highlighted in blue and I'm going to select those blue selected objects and drag and drop them into my sword collection that we just created and super important note here you need to drag and drop using the text of the object in the outliner not the sides or the other highlighted areas the text great so outside of organization what this does is it gives us the ability to turn off the entire sword using this checkbox icon this will be incredibly useful because as we continue to work we'll constantly need to turn things on and off so we can work more efficiently focusing on certain parts of the scene at a time great and then we'll just repeat this process for the rendering collection so step number two I'll again select the scene collection at the very top I'll create a new collection with the plus icon at the top right in my outliner then I'm going to double click on that new collection and rename it to rendering and this is where our camera our lights any rendering objects are going to go in here then I'm going to find my camera and in my light I'm going to shift select both of them back to my outliner and I'll find them selected in blue then I'm going to drag and drop them into my rendering collection if you've accidentally deleted your camera or your light no worries you can always go back up to the add menu and then there you can create your camera and then if you deleted your light as well you can go to your light and create another Point light but for now I'm going to use the ones that were in my scene when we loaded blender then for step number three we have our sword reference collection that we imported earlier into the scene so this is what we use during the modeling process I'm going to go ahead and drag and drop the sword reference collection into my scene collection that'll automatically put it into the default collection so we can then delete the default collection that blender gave us and I'll delete that with using X on my keyboard then I'm going to disable my sword reference since we're now done with that and we'll continue to use the outliner as we move forward and we'll continue building this in the next chapter the first step to setting up our scene is the camera composition in our sword layout and we're going to run into a problem really quick and that's our objects currently they move independently so there's no easy way to lay these out so our goal now is to set up the parent-child relationship a child object is an object that moves independently but doesn't affect other objects and a pair object is is an object that moves itself but it also moves other objects this is a parent and child relationship so while we're in object mode step number one we need to we need to make our selection I'm going to select my child objects first and then my parent object lasts and our pair object is going to be the blade object so I'm going to select the guard and then everything underneath it making sure that I do not select my blade object yet then I'll shift select my blade and then that'll be my last selection and we know that it's our last selection because blender tells us this because the little orange highlight that goes around it will be slightly lighter that is how we know this is going to be the parent object the step number two we need to set up the parents I'll go to my object menu I'll go all the way down to parent and and then I'm going to select the top option which is our parent object and then that's that and once we have that selected we'll see that we then notice that our outliner changes something's changed in our sword collection we now only can see our Cube object which is our blade object if I expand the cube blade object we will then see that the objects are now nested under this object and then in my 3D viewport if I move the blade around you'll notice that the blade is now moving all the other objects as well this is our parent and child relationship then for step number three we need to set up our layout for the sword I'm going to select the blade that I'm going to go to my object properties and then I'm going to rotate this 90 degrees in both x and z so 90 degrees and then I'm going to leave the y value a value of zero now currently our sword is way too big our one grid unit in blender is one meter big so our sword is massive and when I fix this by setting our scale value and I'll set the scale value to 0.23 so it's 0.23 and scale X Y and Z and a bonus tip here the location values are also set to the default value of 0 and x y and z so we're going to keep the blade object directly in the center of the world and that'll make it a little bit easier for us moving forward and then there we go that's going to be our layout for our sword and everything else will be built around this initial layout and we'll continue that in the next chapter the goal now is to set up our composition and we're going to do so with the help of our animation tab our camera and our composition guides for step number one I'm going to jump over to my animation Tab and here we have a few extra options for us on the left side we have a custom 3D view set up for our camera view that is the main difference between this tab and our layout tab down below we'll see our dope sheet this is the custom animation tool we're not going to be using this so what I want you to do right now is switch this dope sheet panel over to Geometry nodes we're not going to be using this dope sheet and a few chapters we're going to be using geometry notes however so you do this step for me I'm going to disable it by right clicking on the bottom of the panel and then choosing join areas that will just close it and make the screen recording a bit less cluttered for you for step number two we're going to set up our aspect ratio in our render resolution I'm going to jump into my output properties it's the panel right below our render properties that we have used in the past then at the top we're going to see our format options I'm going to change my render resolution to 1080 in the X and then in the red resolution y I'm going to choose 13 52 and that's going to create our vertical aspect ratio then I'm going to change my percentage to 50 and making this 50 what this does is instead of rendering the full resolution it's going to render half the resolution rendering in 3D can be very very very heavy on your computer and a good workflow that I like to do is set this to 50 now then I'll work low res and then when I'm ready for the final render I can change this back to 100 to get our final resolution and then step number three we're going to view the camera now by default the left 3D view is looking through our camera we know this because we can see the composition guide the dark overlay around the outside edge of our 3D view this is all the non-renderable area if your view looks more like this with no dark overlay that means you're not actually looking through a camera now by default it should be looking through the camera but you can also very easily get out of this view just by simply orbiting around and on our hakichi we have two more keys to get to know our frame camera window and our look through camera hotkeys and very important note here huskies and blender depend on where your mouse is located so be sure to bring your mouse over to the correct panel before hitting the camera hotkeys now we're going to toggle through the camera by hitting zero on the number pad now we should see the dark overlay jumping in and out this is us jumping in and out of our camera and that's while I got my mouse over the left 3D view if you don't have a number pad you can use the view menu I'll go up to the little three the three bar sandwich menu button and I'll go over to view then I go down to viewport and then select camera that's the same thing as our number pad button and now step number four we're gonna adjust the composition guide so that there's a dark overlay around the camera view and we can't see anything that the camera can't see first I'm going to hit the home key to maximize this and that's just going to expand our composition to take up the full area and if you don't have a home button on your keyboard you can always do this manually by zooming in and out on your scroll wheel and next we're going to make the composition guide completely black so I'm going to select my camera I'm going to go down to my camera settings and then under viewport display above composition guide we'll have a very strange name called passer part and I'm likely pronouncing this very very wrong long story short setting this value all the way up to one will darken the entire outside of the camera composition so that we can't see anything that the camera cannot see great now we can finally set up our actual camera composition for step number five so while my camera is still selected I'm going to go to my object properties and then set my location and rotation values I'm going to set my location to a value of three zero and zero and then my rotation values to 104 0 and then 90 degrees now you could in your viewport manually move your camera around and create your own composition but I'd recommend sticking with these settings for now as some of the future values that we're going to be using are going to be based off of this these are the exact values that I'm going to be using and so how did I get these values originally the main thing here is that my camera is going to be a low angle slightly rotated upwards a low angle like this makes our model feel a bit more heroic and the scale of it feels a bit more Grand as well then in the composition I have the guard hitting that top rule of thirds if you're not familiar with the rule of thirds I highly recommend checking out the art of lighting which is another course that we have that goes more into this composition lighting rule thirds all of that alright so that that was a lot of manual setup and we want to test this out before we move on to do so I'm going to go to my render menu and then I'm going to hit render and what we should see is that the render view is now looking very similar to our camera view but it's looking very gray and weird and we're going to continue working on that if your camera view and your render view both look like this you're all set if your render view does not look like this here a few bonus tips to help you check that out in bonus tip number one in our outliner make sure you have all of the eye icons and the camera icons enabled for everything that isn't our sword reference the eye icon is what's visible into the viewport and the camera icon is what's visible under the render and sometimes these get mixed up in bonus step number two in our scene properties check out the camera setting at the top this is our active renderable camera if this is blank there's no there's no renderable camera so be sure you have that selected to One camera and if we look in here we should only see that there's one option with our within our scene if you have more than one option that means that you have more than one camera in your scene and that's where app and we'll continue this in the next chapter our goal now is to add lighting to give the render a more Dynamic look which will add a bit of shape and visual Clarity and we're going to do so with the help of an hdri this is what a typical scene looks like before we add an hdri looks a bit flat looks a bit muddy a bit hard to see and then after we add an hdri it looks much more believable better Reflections better colors and hdri is simply just an image texture that we bring in to our scene to use as our lighting Source the term hdri comes from high dynamic range meaning you can expose up and down beyond what a normal image can give you a great online resource for hdris is hdrlabs.com and polyhaven.com both are free and I use both of them very frequently frequently for stem number one we're going to jump back into our shading Tab and set up our rendered mode for our viewports I'll jump back into my shading tab then while my mouse is hovering over the viewport I'm going to hit the number pad 0 to jump into my camera view or you can use the view menu and then viewport and then camera and that'll snap us to view through our camera then again while I'm Mouse is hovering over the viewport I'll hit the home key to be able to frame the camera into my window and a reminder here if you don't have a home key you can always middle Mouse scroll to frame this window manually but we notice something is different right if we compare our shading tab to our render the render looks very flat but the shading tab looks better so what's going on here and this is a very confusing part of blender so let's take a look at this the shading tab by default has a built-in hdri because we are using material preview mode currently next to our solid and wireframe Views that we're using during the modeling polish we can see our material mode is active and material preview mode is really just a way for us to add quick materials textures it's not meant for us to do final rendering and final lighting to preview our final lighting our final rendering we're going to switch over to rendered mode the option all the way to the right then you'll notice our viewport looks flat and muddy again just like our render this is the option we're going to be working with from here on out then for step number two we're going to jump back into our Shader editor and we're going to jump into our World Properties object mode in our shaded areas where we build materials for our objects then the world mode is for building materials that belong to our world such as hdri environments after you switch over world if you don't see anything you can go ahead and go to the view menu and go to frame all and that'll snap all the existing shaders into our view and by default what we should see is that blender gives us our background Shader and our world output this is what's given us our gray muddy look right now and we can adjust the strength to brighten it up and down and then we can adjust the color to change the color of the illumination of our environment now of course this is now what we want so we're going to add an hdri into here so step number three we're going to set up our node Network for that and we'll need three new nodes to do this I'll go back up to my at my ADD menu I'll search for environment texture note that we're not using an image texture here we're going to want to use an environment texture since this is going to be for our environment hdri I'll add that into my scene and then I'll next I'll search again for mapping this is the same mapping node that we've been using so far I'll add that into my scene then I'll do one last search for texture coordinate at the same texture node that we've been using as well great and then I'll add that into my scene and then I'm going to make my connection so I'll connect the generated from our texture coordinate node into the mapping Vector of our mapping node then the out Vector of our mapping node into the environment texture then the out color of our environment texture into that color input of the Shader and then there we go if everything's working we should now see that the render is now looking pink so why is it looking pink at this point if you ever see a pink render whether it's a pink material or a pink environment this is blender's way of telling us that we are missing a texture usually from when we accidentally move textures on our hard drives this comes up frequently in this specific case is because we need to add an environment texture because it's not connected to anything currently so click the open button on my environment texture I'll go to my downloads I'll find the hdri folder that I'll choose my Narrow Path blur hdri this is what the hdri looks like that we're going to be using except we have a blur on it and the blur just helps soften the lighting a bit I do this sometimes for interiors which in this case is going to be the interior of a cave environment then for stepping before we're going to do the final tweaks to our parameters I'm going to set my value on my strength of my background Shader to a value of 2. that's just going to help properly expose it for what we're looking for usually for hdris on the strength I set it to one for exteriors and then two for interiors then under my mapping node on my rotation on the rotation of the z-axis I'm going to click and drag on this left to right and as I do that you'll notice that we start to change our lighting drastically this is because we're rotating the world around our scene our environment HDR hdri texture and what we're looking for here is to have the sword be lit from the right side so we want the right side to be brighter than the left side that's the direction of our lighting now the exact value I ended up using was just a value of negative 405 and my rotation z-axis that's going to give us our lit from the right lighting going towards the left and then there we go that's going to be a wrap for our hdri and we'll continue working on this in the next chapter the goal now is to add light rays into our scene and we're going to do so with the help of volumetrical lighting for step number one we need to add in our volumetric Shader in our Shader editor in our world properties just like we've been working I'll do another search and I'll search for volume scatter then once I see my volume scatter I'll go ahead and drop that into my scene I'm going to drop it next to my world output then I'll plug my volume out into my volume parameter of my world output and just a general note here we have both the surface and the volume parameter now being active then all of a sudden we see now blender has added fog into our scene but the default values are a bit too much for us so we're going to lower the density on the volume scatter node to 0.1 and now we should be able to see the sword clearly and we have some general fog going on in the scene and then step number two we're going to set up our render views and our animation tab so I'll jump back to my animation tab then on both my camera view in my 3D VL turn on rendered mode and just a general reminder we can scroll over using the middle Mouse scroll bar since we can only see parts of our men you at this point so I'll middle Mouse over all the way to the right and then I'm going to turn on render view then over to my 3D viewport as well do the same thing scroll over and then turn on rendered view great now if I zoom out a bit I should now see that I have an atmospheric fog going over my scene and you can see that it's most dominated by a light the the lights now appear to be emitting this fog into our scene then for step number three we need to set up our light properties I'm going to select my light I'm going to jump down to my light properties then at the very top of my light properties I'm going to enable Spotlight and now we're going to start to see that we have our light Ray effects starting to happen now there's a few more parameters that we're going to once again get to know within our light at the top we have our color I'm going to open this up I'm going to shift this to be a slight blue value the exact values I'm going to use is point 0.6 in the Hue and then 0.2 in the saturation and then the value we're going to set to one and that's going to give it a slight blue hue and we're going to continue to use use those values as we work now we want a light rays to be a bit sharper and not so Broad and we can do so by adjusting our light our Spotlight shape parameter I'm going to click and drag on this to make it bigger or smaller and when I make this fairly sharp I'm going to set this to a value of 5. and as soon as we do that we see our cone is now small but we don't actually see anything the light is not disappeared so we need to emit some more light I'm going to go back up to power this is how we adjust the intensity of the light and then I'm going to set this to a hundred thousand that's one and then five zeros again usually this takes some practice and tweaking to get to right but those are the exact values I'm going to leave off with there now from here we also have our volume slider and we can adjust this up and down to control the volumetrics as well and the unique thing about this is this doesn't affect the overall scene light meaning the way it affects objects it only affects the volumetrics so I'm going to bring this value up to a value of 10. this is more of a stylistic choice this means is the light's going to affect the volumetrics more than the actual objects and we'll talk about and we'll talk more about this later in the last option we want to adjust is our blend value I'll drag that up to a value one and we're going to notice that on our edges of our Spotlight they become more of a gradient they become more of a gradient and less sharp so more blurry and that's it for our light properties and this next step was the biggest challenge with the original release that we saw actually moving and rotating this to be something that's inside of her camera and pointing the exact way that we wanted to and getting this to shine directly onto the scene the right way this was the toughest part so in the next chapter I'm going to share with you an easy technique to be able to line this up and position this just right the goal now is to set up our light rig which will allow us to easily Shine the light rays exactly where we need them to be in our scene for step number one I'm going to reset the light's position in rotation I'll select the light I'm going to jump into the object properties and then I'm going to set the location to 0 and x y and z and then I'm going to set the rotation to 0 and x y and z and then the only value that I'm going to adjust here that will be a non-zero value is the location Z which I'm going to set to a value of 20. and there we go we should now see that the light is pointing straight down at the center of the world with no rotation values then for step number two we need to set up our controller first I'm going to select my rendering collection whatever we have selected in our outliner is where the new object is going to be created so that's going to help us keep us organized then I'm going to go up to the add menu and then down to empty and then I'm going to select Cube now what is an empty object what are we doing here an empty object is an object that is visible in our viewport but it's not going to be visible in our render these are commonly used with animation Rigs and in this case we're going to use it for our lights right then for step number three we're gonna parent the light to the empty object so I'll select my light I'm going to shift select the empty and now we should see that the light is darker outlined and then the cube the empty cube is lighter outlined in our multi-section this is how we know we have the selection correct for parenting then I'm going to go up to our object menu I'm going to go down to parents and then I'm going to select the top option which is parent object and then there we go after we select that we should then see our parent child relationship is now set up I'll test this by selecting my empty and then I'm going to rotate the empty around and what we should now see is the light is moving around our scene with the rotation of our empty object and if I move the empty around as well you'll notice the light is going to be pointing to wherever I put my empty so if I want it to be the middle of the sword I can move the empty to the middle of the sword and it'll automatically point there and a bonus step here over in our outliner what we should see is we have our rendering collection we have an empty underneath it and then if I open expand the empty object what we should see we have is we have our lights under there that'll also confirm that we have the parent child relationships set up then our final step in this chapter is to just the size of the empty so step number four I'll select my empty I'll go down to my empty properties and then I'm going to set the size value to a value of 0.1 that will make our empty object a bit smaller and a little bit easier to manage so we can position it effectively and a general reminder here if you're struggling to move around your viewport your viewport's getting locked up we have our view menu and then we can go down to frame selected on any one of our objects and that'll automatically snap the viewport to the object so that we can rotate and orbit around great and we won't worry about the exact position rotation just yet we have a few more steps to set up and we'll continue in the next chapter the problem we're trying to solve now is that our volumetrics look very flat and our goal with this chapter is to make them feel a bit more organic adding some details into the light rays and we're going to do this with the help of Gobo objects here we have a generic scene with basic volumetrics then in the middle we have a gobo object added and we can see with just a simple poly plane and some rows cut out of it we can very easily make this feel like the light is coming through a window this is what goba objects are for they help us create more organic shadows and good lighting is like painting with shadows Shadows more often than not matter more than the actual light themselves and for this chapter we're going to drop in a few cubes and then add them to our light rig and have our light rage shine through them mimicking rocks inside of a cave for step number one we're going to reset the empty location and rotation settings I'll select my empty I'll go to my object properties panel then I'm going to set my location and rotation values to a value of zero getting it back to a default location and a quick bonus to appear if you're wondering how I'm setting these values so quickly all you have to do is select the top parameter hit zero and then hit tab to go the to the next parameter hit zero again then hit tab again and repeat this until you're all the way down then for step number two we need to add our Gobo objects first I'm going to select my rendering collection then I'll jump to the add menu I'll jump to the mesh Sub menu and then I'm going to select Cube as a general note global object is really just a fancy word that we're calling an object any mesh would work in this case we're going to stick with a cube because the cube has nice harsh Shadows that we're going to use to mimic rocks Now by default the cube is going to be a little bit big so I'm going to jump into object properties and set the scale to 0.3 and X Y and Z then I'm going to move it up and immediately start to see that the cube is starting to cast Shadow into our scene great now I'm going to go ahead and set the Z location for my Cube to a value of six this is going to guarantee that it's going to be out of my camera's field of view and we're not going to end up seeing this later on and then I'm going to start to rotate my Cube around and immediately you'll start to notice that the light rays start to feel a lot more organic you can start to feel all the different edges and Corners starting to cast different shadows then for step number four we're going to duplicate these cubes and make four different cubes I'll first move this first one off to the side I'm going to have it about 30 percent in so half of it's in Shadow and half of it's going to be in the light then I'm going to right click and duplicate object hit escape to drop it then I'll move to the other side I'll rotate that one around again to make it feel a bit more organic and once I have that in a good spot I'll shift select both of those I'm going to duplicate both of these objects and then rotate them around so now I have four total cubes and I'm going to go through each one rotating each individually adding some randomization and then going through and adding some randomization to this scale as well in position and location until we get a very organic look in the light rays this can take a bit of a tweaking as you'll notice that the light it takes a lot more trial and error to get right this is perfectly normal and then for step number four we need to parent our Gobo objects to our empty objects so we can start to rotate around our light I'm going to shift select all of my cubes I'm going to shift select the empty and then I'm going to go up to the object menu parenting and then parent object the same exact parenting method that we've been using then after we have that we'll confirm that it worked by going jump into our outliner and then we'll see that our cubes are now nested under the empty object then for step number five we need to set our final position and rotation for our values for our empty I'll select my empty I'll go into my rotation values I'm going to set my rotation value to a negative 60 in X then 0 for y and zero for Z and that's going to give us that perfect angle coming into our camera then for my position I'm going to move this up so it's just below the guard and then I'm going to move it back a little bit so it's not directly on the sword this is going to help the sword pop a little bit instead of being washed out by the volumetrics you'll see that now we're going to see the silhouette of the guard and the overall shape of the blade a lot clearer all right and then we have a few bonus tips here the position I'm trying to aim for here with my light rays is I want the volumetrics to be above the guard this is going to help us read the overall shape a little bit more and another bonus tip at this point the majority of the work is going to be within our Gobo cube is try tweaking these scaling these putting one directly in the middle moving it away try again getting some large variations to happen within your race a general note though you don't want to go more than four objects adding more than this will start to make it feel like it's under water and not inside of a cave so move rotate and scale but you would don't want to overdo this by adding too many of them four of them is going to be more than enough and another bonus tip here you'll see that the volumeters currently look a bit chunky they look a bit low resolution if I jump to my render by going up to my render menu and then render image button you'll notice that this comes out a little bit more clear this is because if I check out my render properties you'll notice that my sampling is set higher in my render versus the viewport the more samples we give the renderer the more light is going to be calculated and thus the Shadows are going to be a lot more clear giving us a better image and that's going to wrap it up for our volumetrics and we'll continue in the next chapter our goal now is to take our very gray and flat scene and make it feel a bit more cinematic and we're going to do so with the help of our compositing tab compositing is a post process where we take our 3D render and we run it through some basic 2D operations and that helps us push it towards our final result now I cannot stress this enough compositing is where the real magic happens when it comes to making our scene feel 3D and cinematic here we have our final result but without the compositing applied to this and then here we have all of our post-processing compositing on top of this and all of a sudden it feels way better feels way more cinematic so what is going on here and how do we get there the three techniques that I always apply to nearly 100 of my 3D projects is a color grade a vignette and has some atmospherics color grade takes a flat footage and then we push it towards a specific direction using color wheels for a specific feel subtle color variations add a lot of emotion into a shot and it's that emotion that's going to make our scenes a lot more interesting it not only can add a lot more our emotion but it helps her scene not look so flat and helps it make it feel a lot more believable and it meshes all of our assets together next we have our vignette this is also a post process we take our flat footage and essentially we darken the edge this helps add shape to our lighting as well directs the eye towards a specific direction of our composition you can see here without the vignette applied the render feels flat there's not a lot of shape to it then as soon as we apply the vignette the scene feels much more Dynamic there's a lot more shape to our render then the third one is going to be atmospherics the atmosphere helps us add depth and visual Clarity to our renders something to always keep in your back of your mind is that even though we're working in 3D the output is always two-dimensional and the subtle Act of creating depth has an exponential effect of how interesting our scenes are going to look now our renders always start flat and not very interesting and then one thing we have already done is added a volumetric scatter which adds the layers of depth to our scene it helps separates our objects another method is to add a depth pass to our composite which helps create a foreground background on atmospheric effect here we have no depth applied and we can see it kind of looks flat and then as soon as we apply that all of a sudden we can see a lot more visual Clarity going from foreground to background we can see our sword is going to pop more the three hero rocks in the foreground they pop a lot more and we can see a lot more details in the background and we'll begin setting up our color grade vinya and Atmospheric in the next chapter so how do we apply compositing to our scene for step number one we're going to set up our compositing tab we'll jump up to our tab menu we'll go over to compositing Tab and then as soon as we select that we are now in the comp and we're going to have a blank set up by default this tab does nothing and is not even enabled by default to enable this we'll select the use nodes option at the top left of our compositing panel by default what this does is it creates our render layer in a composite output the render layer is our 3D render and the composite output is our final result and then we apply our post processing effects in between these two nodes by default our render layer is blank and we need to perform a render to actually be able to do anything so I'll go back up to my render menu and then hit render image and now we can start working with something but the problem now becomes is that the rent of you who likes to disappear here and it likes to go behind the blender session and overall this setup by default is a little difficult to work with so step number two will dock this and set up our compositing tab I can disable the sidebar that we have here by going up to the view menu and I'm going to select the same able the sidebar or you can hit the N hockey and that'll close that and it'll give us a bit more space to work this next step you do not have to do but for me I'm going to right click at the bottom of our dope sheet again and then click on join to collapse that and that'll help save us some space in the screen recording now I'm going to expand my outliner here to make room for the render view we're going to turn the outliner into the render view so it's going to be docked at the top left here we have our editor type options you'll notice that this option here is in any one of our panels inside a blender this allows us to change any one of our panels in blender to any other type of panel on the left side here I'm going to select the image editor in the future however we can change this to Shader editor we can change this to our 3D view we can change this to any view that's available we can change this to any panel that's available any in any tab inside a blender so after I select my image editor panel by default this does actually nothing it's not doing anything by default now the name of this panel is a bit weird it's called image editor but I know I I don't actually edit images here I just view images here and we can view any image that we brought into blender by going up to our image browser at the top in the center and step number three we're going to set up our view render result image if I bring back my render view you'll notice that the top it says a render result this panel is our image editor panel and the image type is set to render results so we can replicate that if we go back to our docked image editor browser then I'm going to search for that same result that render result so I'll select search I'll type in render result now if you don't see this if another reminder you have to actually render your image so go back up to render menu and then hit the render image button again now we should be able to go back to our image browser and then search for rendered result and then search for render results and select that and then we should be able to see your name we now have our render upgrade and now we're ready to start compositing we'll start that in the next chapter and now we're going to set up the entire base composite and a bonus tip before we get going at the very end of this chapter I will have a full node cheat sheet for you to follow so no stress trying to keep up during the video I'll have all the values at the end for step number one we'll begin adding the color grade I'm going to go up to my ADD menu I'm going to select search again and then I'm going to type in color balance the color balance node is the most common node that I use to do any kind of color grading within the compositor once I find that I'll hit enter and then while it's still attached to my cursor I will hover over the render layer in the composite connection and then once I see the Highlight happening I'll then click over that to drop it in my scene and auto connect the two and now we should see that we have our render layer out image into the color balance image input and the color balance output into the composite image input on the left of the color balance now we have our lift parameter where you can think of this as just adjusting the dark values of our render then the center is going to be gamma which is adjusting the mid tones of the image and then gain will adjust everything together including the highlights mid-tone and the dark values I usually start by adding some values into the lift so I'll go ahead and add some deep blue values here and immediately you'll start to see we have a lot of control over the the end result then I'm going to do the same thing with the center color we I'm going to click and drag on that and add some blue into my scene and that's going to add some more into the mid-tones and then I'll share with you my exact values I'm going to leave off with on the left I'm going to select the color swatch and then we're going to use the same values that we're using for our light that's 0.6 in the Hue and then 0.2 for the saturation and then I'll leave the value set to 1. then I'll do the same thing for the gamma I'm going to use a value of 0.6 and the Hue 0.2 in the saturation and then a little different here instead of the value of 1 in the value of our gamma I'm going to use a value of 1.2 and I'll just brighten it up a little bit generally speaking whenever we Dart whenever we add values to the left or a gamma we are technically darkening the image so I tend to brighten it up just a little bit to compensate for that then for step number two we're just going to set up the node setup for the vignette I'll start by adding the nodes in our scenes and then making the connections I'm going to start by going up to the add menu I'm going to hit search and then I'll search for mix Mi X and that's going to be very similar note is the color mix RGB that we use in our Shader editor I'll hit enter and then I'm going to hover over in between the color balance node and our render layer so we're going to put this before the color balance node and that's very important because we want the color balance node the color grade to affect the vignette as well then I'll repeat this process for the ellipse mask go up to the add menu search and then search for ellipse mask click on that and I'm going to drop it below my notes setup I'll do one for a blur node I'll search search for blur and then once I have that I'll go ahead and drop that next to my ellipse mask underneath my current nose setup now we have all of our nodes created but we need to finish our connections I'm going to start by connecting the ellipse mask out to the blur input and then I'm going to click the blur output to the second connection of the end of the mix node and a note here the render layer is connected to the first inputs of the mix node and then our blur node is going to be connected to the second input okay so what is all this stuff at this point we are should just see an ellipse result in our render result if you do not see this in your render result you currently do not have the connections set up correctly now the ellipse mask node is what has given us this result in our rendered result the Blurred node by default is doing nothing it has the values of Zero by default it's not on yet then our mix node is currently mixing the results of that over top of our render layer and then running it through the color balance node since our mix value is set to a value of 1 all we're seeing is the the ellipse setup so if I adjust our Factor on the mix node up and down we'll start to see that we're starting to reveal the render layer for now I'm going to bring that up to a value of 1 again so a value of 1 in our Factor so we're only seeing the ellipse again and then I'm going to set my mix blending mode to a value of multiply and what multiply is doing is it's taking the dark values and it's taking the dark values from our eclipse and then it's going to darken the render layer leaving the bright values on the render layer bright leaving the bright values on the ellipse bright on the render layer so you can think of the the ellipse now as a darkening the render layer on our ellipse node we can start by adjusting the width and the height values as I click and drag on these I can now start to expand my ellipse and make it bigger the exact values I'm going to leave off with this is a value of 1.1 and for the width and then 1.6 for the height that's going to give us enough shape to work with then I can start to move the X and the Y parameters and that's going to help us position this where we need to go and what I'm looking for here is to get the left side of the image covered in the lower part of the image covered leaving the top right exposed in the bottom left darkened the exact values I'm going to leave off here is 0 0.8 in the x value and then 0.8 in the Y value and then there we go now we should see the left and the bottom are now covered next we're going to soften this out with the blur node and again currently it's not on so we need to enable this by setting our x value and our y value to a value of one that's just going to make it to where both the X and the Y blur values are being affected and then at the very bottom in our size parameter we're going to bring that up and then for this value we need to go really high I'll go to 100 then 200 and then the volume I'm going to leave off with is 300 and that's going to give it a really wide blur and then there we can see we can see now it feels that the light is decaying a little faster the overall the overall image now has a gradient effect happening which helps the scene feel way more Dynamic and cinematic and then there we go here's going to be my final node graph with all of my values and that'll be a wrap for our compositing setup and we'll continue in the next chapter our goal now is to integrate The Rock kit into our scene and we're going to do so by starting with the base Sword in the Stone setup and as we work I'll share a few tips again to help begin managing their scene as we scale up and begin to work the Rocket will be located in the downloads downloads are linked below the video and inside of our rocket blender file what we see is we have a few different collections we have our Rock kit layout this is for a manual layout for our hero stones that are in the center of the world rocket ground is a is going to be our ground plane then rock hit instances we'll be using in a later chapter when we get into geometry nodes you're welcome to use these on your future projects as well and some other resources such as Mega scans has a few free ones to use and polyhaven has a few rock hits as well and polyhaven is all free and of course we have our sculpting and blender course on the website as well that goes into making rocks and environmental assets as well all from scratch using the sculpting tools and blender for step number one we need to append The Rock kit into our blender file I'm going to jump back into my animation Tab and before I import anything I want to disable rendering in my viewports and I'm going to jump back in a solid mouth on both my camera and 3D view this is going to help up ease up some resources on our computer and prevent any crashing that may occur when we import and then before I import them append them into the scene I want to select My Scene collection whatever scene Cloud whatever collection I have currently selected is where the Rockets are going to be put and selecting the scene collection will help us stay a bit more organized from here I'll go up to the file menu and then I'll select append this is how we bring in other blender files that we can create into our current one then I'll navigate to my downloads directory and I'm going to locate the rock kit dot blend file and once we locate that I'm going to double click on that and now we're going to be inside of the blender file so we can grab specific objects that are located within this file I'm going to jump into collections and then there we will see that we have our Rock kit I'm going to shift select all of these inside of collection and there we go now we're ready to append these into our scene and then we should see these are all now imported then for step number two we need to organize our outliner I'm going to collapse all of the collections so that I can get a bird's eye view of what we currently have and then we should see we have three rocket collections for now I'm going to disable the rock kit instances we're going to be using this in a later chapter and we'll be using Rock kit layout and rock kit ground in this chapter specifically and a quick bonus tip here if your rock collections are nested inside of one another you can locate easily by selecting an object in the 3D View and then over in that liner I'm going to right click on the outliner go to the view menu and then select show active with the show active button does is it'll automatically navigate to the object in the outlier so we can easily find it and then from here if we never need to do any real organization we can then just select that collection and drag it back up to the scene collection for me I don't need to do any of this because I selected scene collection before I imported it so we're all good to go great and then for step number three we need to set up our 3D views again in my camera view I'm going to select the rendered mode again turning on the render now as soon as you select this it may take a few seconds to load up this is because the rock textures have to be loaded up into memory for us to be able to see them and then in my 3D view moving forward I'm going to keep this in solid mode to keep things nice and lightweight and have a few extra parameters I can help us with overall visibility in our 3D view back in our 3D view all the way to the top right we're going to have our shading view drop down menu and just note that we're going to be on solid mode for to be able to see this menu from here I can set my color of my objects to random and then I'm going to turn on the cavity parameter and then I'm going to disable specular so what is all this stuff what random objects does is it just turns the display of our objects into random colors which makes things a bit easier to see in our viewport while we don't have any lighting or any interaction happening with our flat shaded mode here then the cavity parameter adds some Edge and cavity at wear to our object so that we can see the details a little bit easier this is great in this specific case because it's an environmental scene and The Rock textures themselves have a lot of these details built into them so it's a quick way to be able to see what the what they're actually going to look like within the render and then for specularity specularity is just a white color and this just disables it so that our random color objects can shine through a little bit better and for a bonus display tip by default blender puts a default ground plane into our scene which is great for as we're building our models but now that we're building our own ground plane I'm going to go ahead and remove that if I jump over to my viewport overlays this is going to be the icon with a little two circles in them I'll choose the pull down option at the very top we're going to have our grid settings from here I'm going to disable the entire top row and then leave everything else the default values disabling all this will just disable the grid ground plane and any grid visibility within our scene so that the viewport itself doesn't feel so cluttered great and now we have our rocks imported and our scene set up and we'll continue in the next chapter the goal now is to lay out the rocks and put the sword into the stone I'm going to select the very tiny rock that is in the back Center and this is the hero one that's going to go into the sword I'll jump back into my move tool and then I'll move this to the center of the world and just a note here I'm only going to use the red and green handle I don't need to move it up or down the height is already perfect for us and I'll just move this into place I'll take a look at how this looks in the camera view and see how things are going as well and we're going to start focus on setting up our composition next I'll select the back bigger Boulder Rock and this is going to be the one on the right I'm choosing this one because it has a lot more shape into it I'm going to go and then I'm going to begin moving that into place and from here we're going to need to tweak and move this in all three axes and this is going to be the first step I'm going to push it down so it's about halfway between the top and the very tip of our first stone in the ground plane and then I'm going to grab the final Rock and then begin moving that into place I want to move it over move it down a bit and then this is going to be the first step into our Sword in the Stone setup and then for this one to help make it feel more like a step I'm going to scale it down in the blue axis this is going to make the overall Rock a bit flatter which is going to help it make it feel more like a step rather than a boulder and if I take a look at this in our profile view we want the first stone to feel like a Podium and then the two rocks underneath it to feel like Steps so we don't have three steps here we have two steps in a Podium and so that the podium from the tip to the base is going to be about 50 percent of the way up and then the top two steps are going to be in the bottom 50 and overall we're making this shape right here then in a three view we want a triangle feel for this base Stone setup this will help push the composition to the sword and help the sword feel a bit more heroic and so I'm going to select the middle Rock here I'm going to start scaling it with our green axis to help begin making that triangle shape and then I'll do the same with the bottom rock as well scaling it in the green green axis to be able to make that triangle shape happen great and then those are going to be our three hero stones and we'll make one more for the ground plane I'll select the Bottom Stone I'm going to right click duplicate objects hit escape to drop it and then I'm moving and then I'm going to move it down and move it back into place directly in front of it and you'll notice here I'm going to be scaling this way up and then I'm going to scale it in the blue axis down a bit to make it really flat and then there we go where you can finally do a quick render to see how this is looking with the composite setup I'll go up to the render menu hit the render image button and there we go we can see that everything is looking great and then we're going to continue building this out in the next chapter the problem we're trying to solve now is that the stones in the foreground feel very flat and so our goal now is to add a foreground Spotlight that's going to help the hero Stones pop a little bit more in the composition for step number one I'm going to duplicate my lighting and Gobo setup to do so I'm going to jump into my outliner I'm going to find my empty under my rendering collection I'm going to expand that and then I'm going to select my empty and then shift select the Gobo cubes and the lights and if I look at my viewport now we should see that our final selection is the entire lighting rig then I'm going to right click in my viewport and then I'm going to duplicate objects I'm going to hit escape to drop that and then immediately I'm going to jump into my move tool to move them over so that we can begin working with them and they're not over top of the old light rig that we set up then for step number two we need to aim the light at the hero rocks I'm going to select my empty for our newly created and newly duplicated light rig and I'm going to begin moving it into place I'm going to move the empty right at the bottom right of the hero Stone overall we want the light hitting this area of the rock which is going to help it make it up a little bit more now this is the easy part because we've already set it up our we already set up our light rig and this makes it drastically easier to be able to aim the lights and move things around with our lighting now step number three we need to tone down our the volumetrics for this new light Ray because you as you can see here the foreground is now completely washed out and that's not good and so I'm going to select the newly created light and then I'm going to jump into my light properties and just to note here we want to be selecting the new light not the background light now I'm going to turn down the volume metrics all the way to a value of zero completely removing the volume metrics from our foreground and what this does is it allows us to clearly see the foreground pushing the background further in atmospheric depth overall making the hero assets of our scene pop a little bit more and this really pushes the scale of the scene we're starting to get a sense that this scene is starting to feel big which is exactly what we want then under my diffuse and specular right above the volumetric setting I'm going to turn these to both to a value of two and basically what this means is for everything except for volumetrics it's going to double up on the light making everything brighter and now we should start to see the rocks are really starting to pop and starting to have that highlight in our camera and if you're not seeing the highlights here at this point on the Rocks you may need to adjust your light rig empty a bit more moving it sideways moving up and down or you may need to manually go up and adjust your Gobo cubes a bit more make sure that they're not casting too many Shadows into the scene and a very special note here I'm going to be making this look easy but it is not attempting to do this 100 exactly like mine is not a realistic expectation lighting is a very very organic process and you're going to need to put a bit of elbow grease into this then step number four we'll do any final tweaks that we want to do for our background volumetric light I'm going to grab the light rig in the background by selecting my empty and now I'm going to focus on the guard and the handle for this these are the two most important parts as they don't tend to pick up a lot of light like the blade does and I just want to move this back just a little bit just just enough to where the volumetrics are not hitting these elements you'll notice if I move forward the guard in the handle get completely washed out because the volume metrics are reading it so I'm going to move this back just far enough to where the handle on the guard feel very contrasty they feel very dark we don't want to go too far back but just where we start to see that's not visible anymore in the foreground and for me see you can see here that it's going to be just below that ground plane element that we have in our 3DC and overall what we're doing here is we're adding contrast the background is going to be bright and Atmospheric and the foreground is going to be dark creating a really dramatic visual Clarity that is overall going to help the scene feel a lot more cinematic now we can finally do our render image and we can go up to render render image and then we can see if our rocks now are really starting to pop from the background with the color grade with the vignette and everything starting to melt together and everything's looking great we'll continue in the next chapter the goal now is to add in our background rocks and we're going to start with the cube we're going to subdivide that Cube we're going to delete the half of the mesh and then we're going to scatter the Rocks onto it and a general note here we're only creating half of the environment because that is only what we see in front of our camera and that is generally how movie Magic works really if we don't see it we don't need to spend any time working on it and we're going to start in this chapter by creating the base mesh for step number one we're going to set up the outliner in our render views first I'm going to disable the rendering in my camera view turn it back turning it back to solid mode this will help us keep some stability while we go into modeling then I'm going to disable our rendering collection this is going to help us give us some space to work and help us not accidentally move the lights we already got into position next we're going to create our background collection I'll select the scene collection so that my new collection drops into that collection and then I'll hit the new collection button and we should see that drop in there next I'll just double click on that new collection and rename it to background great now we're ready to start modeling it out so step number two we'll create the cube and get into position so I'll select the background collect section so that my Cube drops into there I'll go into my ADD menu go to the mesh submute menu and select Cube and then after we have that enter scene we just need to scale subdivide it and cut this in half and once we create it we'll see that it's going to be very small so I'm going to go into my my object properties I'm going to scale this up to a value of 7.5 and that is the value I just found that looked overall big enough to feel like a the scale that we're after but not so big that it doesn't feel like a small cave then for step number three we're going to subdivide it and turn it into a sphere first we'll need to zoom out all the way in our 3D View getting into position so that we can easily select everything as we jump back into modeling mode I'll go to my modifier panel I'll go to the add modifier and then I'm going to select the subdivision modifier this is the same subdivision modifier that we worked with with our sword and this is going to turn it into a spherical shape then once I've created that all we need to do here is set the levels to two and then collapse it then towards the top of our modifier I'll go up to the select pull down menu and then I'll select apply mesh this is gonna this is going to take the subdivision modifier and bake it down into the mesh so that we can begin modeling on top of it I'll hit apply and then for step number four I'm going to jump into edit mode and start deleting our faces I'll hit tab to go into edit mode and then I'm going to hit 3 immediately to go into face selection mode as well I'll jump into wireframe mode to make this a little bit easier so that I can select our faces and then I'm going to box drag select the right side of the sphere and just a general note here I'm selecting the right side and I'm going to leave the entire left side still on until this next step so I'll hit X to delete and then choose delete faces and then after that we should see we have a half a sphere and now we're going to delete the lower half the other side so I'll select the other half and this time I'm just going to shifts and then this time I'm just going to shift click on these because I'm not going to do the entire lower half I have one row of polygons and I'm not going to select under the second half of the sphere this will give us a bit of overlap so the rocks will go into the ground a little bit so we don't end up with any seams and then one last time x to delete and then choose delete faces great so I'll jump back into object mode once I'm done with that I'm going to jump back into solid mode so that we can see our scene a little bit better and then I just need a road into rotate it into place I'm going to turn back on my rendering collection so I can see the lights in my viewport I'm going to rotate the backdrop around to meet that and I'm going to leave off with a negative 40 Value in the z-axis and then all my other location rotation values are still going to be set to the default of zero and a general note here if your rotation values are not the same that's totally fine it doesn't have to be a negative 40 that's just where I'm going to leave off with and one final note here we should see that the lights have more than enough space to work there's a little bit of a gap in between when we scatter the Rocks the rocks are technically going to go over a little bit so we need a little bit of a gap there great and then we'll continue in the next chapter the goal now is to scatter the Rocks onto the background and we're going to do so with the help of geometry nodes geometry nodes are going to be an entirely new area for us in blender this is how we're going to scatter the Rocks onto the background of our base mesh and it's also going to be the way we create our dust particles as well as the fire and the Embers coming off the sword now if this all looks super intimidating uh don't worry we got it all very very simplified in your not expected to be a geometry nodes expert after this course and at the end of the next three chapters I will have a full node cheat sheet for you to easily check all of your values with as well and a special note here before we get into geometry nodes the blender developers are updating geometry nodes constantly so I will link the exact version of blender that I'm using in the description so if you have any issues you can easily download that and follow along and also keep an updated pin comment in the comment sections with common questions so be sure to check that out as well now blender does have a dedicated geometry nodes tab but for what we're doing we're going to integrated directly into the animation tab so that we can work with it with our camera and animation as we move forward so step number one we're going to set up our geometry nodes panel now you should already see your geometry nodes panel from when we switched our dope sheet out into the geometry nodes in our camera animation tab setup chapter that we did earlier you should see you have a time slider and you should see you have geometry nodes go ahead and make your geometry notes panel nice and big so you have some space to work if you do not have this geometry nodes panel you can follow these next few steps at the bottom of my 3D view I'm going to expand out the time slider giving us a bit more space to work I'm going to click in between 3D View and the time slider right where they connect and I'm going to right click on that and we should see that we have our view area options and then I'm going to select horizontal split and what this is going to do is create two panels going on top of each other within one panel I'll select horizontal split and then after I do I'll move my mouse down to tell blender that we want to split the bottom panel or time slider panel then we should say we have two time sliders and a bonus tip before we move on we can always join these panels back if we ever want to get rid of this panel by right clicking and then going to join panels we'll skip over that for now at the top left of my new panel I'm going to select the editor type and I'm going to go down and select geometry nodes this is where we're going to be primarily working with our geometry nodes and then once I have that I'm going to make a little bit of space for myself to work okay and this is all new information at this point so be sure to apply these next settings to your geometry nodes panel and then I'm going to go up to my view menu inside of my geometry nodes and then disable the sidebar this is going to give me a little bit more space to work and then you don't have to do this step and I'm going to move my properties panel to the right next while we are in object mode we're going to select the background object and then we're going to click on the new button at the top of the geometry nodes just like when we created our new Shader Network inside of our Shader editor we need to create a new geometry node to network to begin working by default this does nothing and then after we click new we should see something happening and if your nodes are too small if you don't see anything in this site is tab we can fix that by going back up to our view menu and and then select a frame all and that'll just go ahead and expand everything so we can see everything and be comfortable a bit more comfortable while we work so what's going on here on the left we see our geometry input and on the right we see our geometry output and just like the compositor we are going to do all of our adjustments in between these two nodes currently the geometry nodes is doing nothing because we are telling blender to just bring in the geometry and then output that same geometry which in this case is going to be the same result and that is how we set up our geometry nodes panel and one final tip for this chapter if you ever see your geometry nodes disappear this is most likely because you're not on the correct selection in your 3D view the geometry nose panel is going to display whatever we currently have selected in our 3D view so keep that in mind moving forward and we'll begin sending up the network in the next chapter continuing with our geometry nodes our goal now is to set up the network I'm going to go up to my ADD menu I'm going to select search and then I'm going to search for distribute points onto faces now if you do not see this node distribute points on the faces or if anything that we do moving forward is different in any way whether the nodes are different or the connections are different be sure to click the form below and check out for any updates the blender developers have been very aggressive about updating names and nodes I am currently on blender 3.2 so try to be on that version to be safe then I'll hit enter to confirm and then I'll take that and hover over in between my connection until that connection is highlighted then once I have that I'll click and drop it in and then the auto connect notes and we should see that we have our geometry output going into our mesh input then our points output going into our geometry input and so what this node is going to do is it's going to scatter points onto our mesh which we can then use to instance our geometry next I'm going to go back up to my ADD menu and then click search and then click and then search for my instance on points no mode I'm going to select add select search search for instance on points and just a very special note here this is instance on points not the instance two points these are two different nodes so it's instance on points I'll hit enter to confirm and then I'll drag it right between my distribute and my output and then I'll hover over and auto connect those now we're still not seeing anything because that is because we have not told blender which objects to instance onto these points and a general note here an instance is just a fancy word for duplicating objects but what's special about instancing instead of duplicating is that instancing is referencing the original mesh which means we can work with thousands and even millions of polygons which much less computer power so now we need to tell blender what nodes we want to instance I'll go back up to the add menu I'll go to search and then I'm going to search for a collection info collection info node is how we tell blender to instance are rocks using these points I'll enter to confirm I'll drop that next to my instance to points node not Auto connecting anything here then I'm going to connect my geometry output to the instance input of the instance node and then we have one node left to create then I'm going to go up to add I'm going to search and I'm going to search for random value this is how we're going to randomize and rotate our rocks once we have them distributed now you'll notice that we're in a rotation input on the instance node is purple that is a vector input this means it has three values instead of one so we need to change the random value node from a float which is a single value to a vector which is a three-way value and again this is all very complicated it'll make a lot more sense a little bit then we're going to plug our out value of that node into the rotation of our instance node and so purple connections need to go into purple connections green needs to go into green and pink needs to go into pink and so on and so forth okay so at this point we still don't see much happening and so in the next chapter we're going to finish this off by setting up our parameters okay so at this point we still don't see much happening so step number three is we need to assign the rocks to the collection so that we can see them on our scatter setup on our collection info node we're going to select the collection parameter and then we're going to select the rock kit instances this is the collection we imported earlier that has two Boulders inside of it that we haven't actually used yet and once I select that you'll notice that we now have a problem they are massive and if we remember earlier with our Cube that we started with the creative background we scaled it up to a value of 7.5 and what this means is that we're technically now scaling our rocks up that same amount of value so just like when we applied our scale value in our image projections in our image Shader to fix our textures we need to apply scale for our geometry nodes as well so first I'll just make sure my make sure my object is selected in my viewport I'll go up to the object object menu and then down to apply and then I'm going to select apply scale and that'll make sure that the scale values are all now uniform scale down to a value of one and that will make sure our rocks are scattered at a value of one to one scale with the rocks that we have already laid out in our scene and a bonus tip here if we want to we can deselect in our 3D viewport just so we can see things a little bit easier and everything's not highlighted and outlined but if you end up actually selecting anything randomly within the viewport you may end up missing out on your geometry nodes you may see your geometry nodes disappear that is because the geometry nodes is going to show us whatever our last selected object is so I'll make sure I select my object and then I can deselect and then the geometry nodes panel will still be there now the problem is we only see one object being scattered so step number four we need to randomize the object on my collection info node I'm going to select separate children then I'll select reset children and then I'm going to turn on on my instance node to pick instance so what is all this stuff separate children is telling blender that there is multiple objects within this collection and we want to use both of them or all of them reset children make sure that the objects that are in the collection are going to have a default location rotation scale value so that things are going to be evenly distributed to General generally good to always have that on unless you have a very special case then pick instance on our instance node tells the instancer to use multiple objects with the incoming input and now all of a sudden we should start to see that we have multiple colors in our 3D View and that is how we know both of our objects both of our Boulder rocks are being scattered on there now currently we have way too many rocks being scattered so step number four we need to adjust the density parameter on our distribute node if I click and drag on this and then go to the left I can start to lower it in just a general note here it's really important that you do not go to the right and add too many if you add too many here your blender machine may end up crashing very easily the value that I'm going to leave off with here is 0.5 on the density attribute and then there we go we're getting far less rocks being scattered and currently they're going to be too small so we're going to go back to our instance node and I'm going to set the value to 2 on XYZ scale values and that'll make them a bit bigger to fill in those gaps and then after we have all this set up now would be a good time to save your file before we end up doing a test render to see how this is going and then once I have that I'll go up to my render render image and see how that's looking and everything is looking good and as promised this is my final no network and this has all the connections all the parameters highlighted that you need to be setting in and once you have all that done we'll continue in the next chapter the problem now becomes while we have a foreground and background together that everything in the scene all of a sudden feels flat and our goal now is to add an atmospheric depth layer into our scene which will add a lot of scale and Clarity to overall scene and help it make it feel a bit more cinematic all we're doing here is keeping the darkest values in the foreground very dark and then the darkest values in the background very light with the c from Gladiator we see this happening again the atmospheric depth helps the scene feel cinematic we see this primarily in our contrast meaning the foreground the darkest values are very dark and then in the background all the values are very bright making it very contrasty and what this does is it creates a positive and negative space that helps us to keep our focus on the foreground and let the rest of the scene fall into the background we see this again with a shot from Game of Thrones overall the scale of the scene feels massive why is that and here again we see the darkest values in the foreground are very dark and then in the background all the values are very bright it doesn't get very dark work it's helping to push that positive and negative space to help keep our eyes on the foreground as well as achieve a much much greater scale to our scene now we're going to achieve this is by creating another volumetric setup in our scene but this time instead of it being a volume scatter that works with our lights it's going to be a volume that only works with purely depth information allowing us to get that foreground to background atmospheric look for step number one we need to create our Cube mesh I'm going to jump in my back in my shading tab then before we create the cube we're going to go ahead and set up the outliner once again to help us stay a bit more organized I'm going to go through and just collapse all the collections so that I can work a little bit easier and then I'm going to select the background collection so that our new cube is dropped into this collection once we create it and then I'm going to go up to my ADD menu and go to the go to the mesh Sub menu and then then I'm going to choose Cube and then this will serve as our base mesh and we'll generate our volume Shader from this once I have that dropped in my scene I'm going to orbit around and zoom out so that I can see my entire scene so that I can lay this out it's really small out for first so we need to set up the scale I'm going to jump into my object properties and then I'm going to set the scale X to 5 scale y to 5 in the scale Z to 5. so we have a uniform scale of 5 which is enough for it to cover the entire scene and now I'm going to focus on moving the cube back in my scene I'm going to use my red axis and my move tool and I'm going to line This Cube up so that's just behind the sword object so the depth information is going to start right behind the sword now we don't want the cube to be too close here we want it to go behind the cube we're going to have a tiny bit of space in between the cube and the sword once we have that cube in the correct depth space then I'm going to move it up with my blue axis so that it's going to be covering the entire scene including the top of my rocks great now that we have our cube in place we're ready to jump into the next step for step number two we need to create the volume Shader while my cube is still selected in my 3D view I'm going to jump back into my Shader editor and I'm going to go back up to my top left of the Shader editor and I'm going to switch back into the object tab I'm going to jump back into object mode which is assigning the object materials once we're there we'll notice that we don't have a material to work with that's because all new meshes in blender don't come with the material to start with so at the top of my Shader editor I'm going to go ahead and create the new material using the new material button then once I have that I'm going to rename it to depth volume great and once we have that we're ready to start setting up our Shader Network by default blender gives us the principled bsdf Shader and we're not going to use this for this so I'm going to select that and hit X on my keyboard to delete that we're not going to use that at all I'll go up to the add menu then I'll select search and then we're going to search for the principled volume and a super special note here we're creating a principled volume not the principled bsdf and once I find my principled volume I'm going to drop it next to my material output and then I'll make my connection I'll connect my ALT volume into my input of my material and a super special note here we're going to plug it into the input volume of the material output and we're going to be leaving the surface and the displacement completely blank gray now we have our Shader connected and we're ready for start step number three and then for step number three we're going to set up our Shader parameters first we'll we'll take a look at what our shaders currently look like in our rendered mode we can now see our volume in the material preview at all as it doesn't have our lighting information in our scene and now we should be able to see that inside of our Cube there's a really dense fog we can see this because our rocks are very visible outside of the volume and then as it goes deeper into the volume it becomes more less and less visible this is our volume Shader in action and that is how we set up a depth of volume and we're going to continue with this in the next chapter in the next problem we're trying to solve is that our depth volume currently feels very muddy it's darkening the background instead of brightening it and we want our scene to be dark in the foreground and bright in the background so how do we fix this now as we notice here the volume Shader has a lot of stuff just like the principled bstf Shader the principled volume acts as a universal volume Shader it's a one size fits all volume Shader that has a lot of stuff the two most important parameters to get to know first are going to be the density parameter and the emission strength parameter the density parameter is how much can we see through the volume right now it's very very dense so we're going to set this down to a value of 0.1 in the density and now we should start to see that we can start to see our rocks better through this fog it's not so dense it's not so thick but there's still something missing overall and then we need that atmospheric fog that goes back in depth as well this is where emission strength comes into play I'm going to raise my emission strength by default set to zero which means it's currently not on and I'm going to raise that up to a value of 0.05 and have a very big super important note this is 0.05 not 0.5 05 would be way too much so it's a very very small value of 0.05 then all of a sudden we start to see the background starts to get brighter this is what we want and we can see this on the edges of the volume on the edges it's going to be very very clear then as the volume gets thicker as we look through the center of the mesh of our volume Cube it's going to get thicker and thicker and thicker great and we're almost through this one so step number four we're going to set up a better selection control for our viewport to be able to select our volume Cube and the rest of our scene a little bit easier the problem here is that as I orbit around my 3D scene you'll notice that selecting the background becomes very difficult our selection stops because our selection thinks we're trying to select the volume Cube and not the background so how do we fix this we need to change the visibility of our Cube to wire mode to set up wire mode step number one I'm going to select my volume Cube first then I'm going to go back into my object properties and then I'll need to go down and dig through a few menus to find this next parameter I'll go down and extend my viewport display parameters then I'll locate the display parameter and then I'm going to change that display parameter to wire so what does the wire value do now you'll notice that as I try to select all of a sudden I can select through the cube and if I want to be able to select the volume Cube I can simply just select the wireframe of that so I'm selecting the edges of it now instead of selecting the surface of it and so this is wired displayed mode note that this is not the same as our wire frame mode as we're setting it on an object level and not the 3D viewport level great and then before we leave off we'll do one last test render I'll go up I'll select the render menu I'll hit render image and there we see it now we see our foreground is starting to pop a lot more the background is starting to be a lot less contrasty meaning it's a lot brighter and we'll continue in the next chapter the goal now is to add our final tweaks to our lighting rendering and compositing so what exactly changed here overall we're trying to make it feel a lot more vibrant and I'll share some simple sweet spots to adjust in your windows you can see here we have a before and after with the runes to help them make him feel like they pop a little bit more then we have the shadow areas we were losing details in the before and after we can see we're gaining a lot of those details back and then we'll tweak our light rays and then in the background we'll see that we have a few cracks showing through the rocks for step number one we're going to set up our render slots I'm going to hit the render render image button to load up our first render slot then in my render view we'll notice that we have a parameter called slot one if we click that we can go down to Slot 2 and what does this do this saves our previous render in slot one so as we work we can continue incrementally moving upwards so that we can actually see the tweaks that we're making a little bit easier this is great for these final tweaks I'll move it to Slot 2 and then for step number two I'm going to just Bloom on our runes I'm gonna go to my burner proper I'm going to go back to my Bloom settings and the most important one to tweak is going to be in our intensity raise that up and down as you need stay somewhere between zero and one for me if I raise it to 0.5 it becomes much brighter I'm also going to bring the radius down to a value of 3 which is going to help those the glow stick to the blade a little bit more so now with my slot 2 active I'm going to render and then render image and there we can start to see that we're starting to make some improvements and if I go back to one slot one and Slot two we can toggle back and forth to see those changes now ultimately all these settings I'm going to be doing at this point you're going to need to make a judgment call for your scene lighting rendering positive it's a very organic process so don't feel afraid to deviate from what I'm doing then for step number three we're going to adjust the details in our shadows I'm going to jump back to my compositing tab I'm going to switch over to render slot 3 and then hit render image again so that we can continue to tweak and then I'm on the multiply note I'm going to go down to a value of 0.9 that's going to reveal some Shadows so we're not going completely black there but now we have a new problem that overall the image now feels washed out those dark values that we had felt really nice but they're also hurting the scene a little bit so here's a trick that we can do to fix this I'm going to go up to the add menu search for gamma then after I find gamma I'm going to hand turn and drag it into my scene I'm going to put it right in between the mixed note and the color balance node this is so that this is going to affect the vignette and this result is going to be affected by the color grade as well and we should see the mix image out going into the gamma input gamma output going into the color balance now what gamma does is it gives us the ability to adjust the mid tones up or down so higher values with the gamma are going to go darker lower value is going to go brighter I'm going to set mine to a value of 1.2 and then we see the scene now gets a little bit darker again just like we had with our vignette which is overall bringing back those dark tones but it's allowing us to see through the vignette as well this gamut technique I tend to apply to all my scenes at the very end I'll tweak this up and down as I need it then for step number four we're going to add a more vibrant blue to the composite and we do that with saturation The Sweet Spot for this is going to be the gamma of our color balance node which is going to be adjusting the mid tones I'm going to select the color swatch we left off with a value of 0.2 and the saturation but we can go up to 0.3 and then we'll see that this is starting to become a lot more vibrant in terms of the blue quality becomes much richer I'm going to leave off with a value 0.3 there tweak that as needed by these values tend to be very drastic so try to say somewhere between 0.2.3.4 ish mine's going to be 0.3 then for step number five we're going to do our final tweaks to our light race I'll jump back into my animation Tab and then I'm going to enable render both my camera view and my 3D viewport then the most important thing with our light rays is we want the hottest point in the background light to be directly behind the guard if we can't see the guard in the handle clearly then the overall visual Clarity of the image goes drastically down and it just ends up feeling like a metal pipe sticking out of a rock so grab that move that up and down as needed you're going to tweak the gobos a lot try to have the hottest point of the gobos as well going through the top that will take a very very long time to tweak then for step number four we may need to tweak our volume light intensity so I'll select my background light go to my live properties and then our go to parameter for controlling this is going to be the volume parameter mine is currently set to 10 but you may need to go higher or lower depending on what how's yours is looking the gobos drastically affect whether or not this is going to show up bright or dark so you can compensate for that by tweaking this value I'm going to lower mine to a value 0.7 a 7.5 this is supposed to be moon rays it's not supposed to be sunlight so 2 white can feel a little off I'll do another render render image that's looking great and then I'll switch to the next slot and then our final step number five is going to be adjusting our geometry nodes to be able to get the cracks in the background the best place for this is going to be the seed parameter in our distributive points on the Face's node clicking the next in the seed will randomize the rocks and as we go up we'll start to see that there starts to become some holes that end up showing through so continue playing with that go up and down find a sweet spot for mine I went all the way up to 52 that's where I'm going to leave off and that ended up working for me and again these values may not be exactly the same for you so tweak that as needed and I'll do one last final render render image that if you want to save this out to post it we can do that with the image menu and then just go down to save as and save that out as a JPEG and that'll be easily shareable creating will continue in the next chapter okay the goal now is to take our scene and add several animated layers onto it we're going to add all the effects elements along with a camera animation we're going to start with the dust particles a floating light layer of dust over the scene then we're going to add in the fire Embers that float up from The Sword and last we have our fire layers which is a combination of several different techniques that's going to be a layer on top of all this and then we'll do cinematic camera animation and render out the animation sequence first we're going to start integrating another kit the lazy nodes toolkit the lazy nodes are a sequence of custom built nodes that we're working on to simplify and automate a lot of tedious tasks inside of geometry nodes once we import these they'll give us access to new geometry nodes and Shader nodes within our menus currently we have three different lazy nodes lazy noise lazy anime and lazy instance those are geometry nodes so let's take a look at some examples of how this works here we have a lazy noise a simple way to add noise procedurally onto a mesh using geometry nodes then we have our animated version of this you creating a ripple effect then we have our lazy anime mate which is a simple way to tell the mesh to move around in any specific Direction then we have our lazy instance which is an easy way to instance and randomize objects onto a mesh then as we start to combine them we can start to create some really creative effects here we have lazy noise in combination with lazy instance creating a mograph style effect here we have lazy noise and lazy instance creating a floating dust particle effect and then here we have lazy anime along with lazy noise along with lazy instance creating a steam particle effect then we have a fire kit that we're going to use and this is using lazy noise for the base mesh and then we have a lazy fire which is going to be the real-time material so note that this is a Shader node not a geometry node for the fire so this is a real-time Shader effect in combination with layering the lazy noise and geometry nose to wrap up a very easy control fire effect so for step number one we're going to append the entire lazy node set up into our Sword in the Stone scene and work up from there back inside of our working file back into object mode I'm going to select the top collection this is where the template files are to be appended to then I'm going to go to the file menu I'm going to choose append and then from here I'll go my downloads directory I'll choose lazy nodes then inside of there I'll find my lazy node.blend file dive inside go inside to collections then select all the collections from there and then we're going to hit append now we should see that we have some new stuff in our outliner and then as a quick bonus here if I go back to my geometry nodes panel and just search lazy we'll see that the lazy nodes are now coming up in Step number two we're going to clean up the outliner we're going to see we have three new collections imported we're going to go ahead and disable each of those three collections disable the fire kit min max height disable fire kit mesh and then disable lazy note examples so everything will be imported will disable for now and we're going to be working on them in a bit now we're going to go ahead and create a new collection for objects that we're going to start creating in the next few chapters I'll select my new scene collection I'll click new collection then we can rename this to to effects that stands for effects animation which is the genre of Animation we're going to begin doing then for now we're going to disable the background we're going to savor the rendering collection and that's going to help us get a little bit more work to work have the scene be a little bit lighter great and we'll continue in the next chapter the goal now is to set up our emitter objects an emitter object is a base mesh that we use to create particle effects or simulated effects here we have a cube mesh that will eventually become our dust particles then we have a funnel shape which is then used for the Embers coming off of the fire then we have a tiny slitter sliver Cube emitting our fire off of the blade to start I'm going to go back to my layout tab this is just going to give us a little bit more space to work then I'm going to collapse any items my eyeliner that's going to give us a little bit more space to work as well then for step number one we're going to create our dust particle emitter I'm going to select my effects collection in my outliner I'm going to go up to the add menu and then while I'm still in object mode I'm going to go to mesh and then select Cube mesh and then once we have that I'm going to go back to my outliner and double click on that rename it to dust particles and then when after we have our base mesh we're going to Now set up the default values for this so we'll go back in the object properties set my location setting to a value of one in location Z just going to make sure that the dust particles are all above the ground then everything else in this one will be the default values and now before I move forward to make a bit more space to work it again I'm going to go ahead and hide this cube in our outliner by clicking the I visibility icon that's going to hide it from the viewport then for step number two we're going to create the base mesh for the Ember particle effects coming off of the fire I'm going to go up to the add menu go to mesh and then select Cube again I'm going to go back to my eyeliner double click on it rename it to Embers back to my object properties we'll do location 0.5 and location Z and then we're going to do scale of 0.1.1 and 0.5 now we should see that we have the cube going halfway down below the zone and then halfway above the stone why are we making that go halfway inside the stone we'll go over that in a bit so for step number three we need to extrude the top of this Embers mesh I'll go back into edit mode by hitting Tab and hit 3 to go into face selection mode then I'll select my very top polygon face and then once I have that selected it'll jump into my extrude tool special reminder I have my XYZ handle instead of the yellow handle this is because of my Extrusion options in the my top left viewport then I'll extrude once up I'm going to immediately hit G on the keyboard to start moving this up and down I'm going to move it just past the guard so it's going right above the guard and then from here I'm going to hit s to jump into my scale tool I'm going to use my white handle to uniform scaled out to create a funnel shape so this is what's going to make the Embers feel like they are getting thicker at the top as they go upwards making it feel a bit more natural then once I'm done with that I'll jump back onto object mode when I go to my outliner and then hide the emperor's object with my eye visibility icon then for step number four we have our flame emitter mesh I'm going to go back up to my ad menu while I'm in object mode go to mesh and then select Cube again once I have that created I'll double click on the outliner rename it to fire go back to my object properties set scale to 0.01 0.01 and then a value of one and what we should then have is a very very very skinny emitter that's going to run through the blade which is where the Flames are going to be emitted from now we need to set the Flaming emitter to be slightly in front of the blade so that we can actually see the full fire effects so it's on the surface so we'll set the location X to 0.02 and then we should have our parameter and then that is our three tomato meshes and then we're going to continue in the next chapter the goal now is to take our dusk particle emitter object and turn it into floaty dust particles floaty bits like this is something I put on nearly all of my scenes they had a ton of realism and they help it feel very magical to start I'll jump back into my animation Tab and we'll continue to work here in my Outlander I'm going to disable the visibility of the fire object emitter and then I'm going to re-enable the dust particles emitter object and then I'll make sure I have my dust particle objects selected and then inside of my geometry nodes panel I'm going to at the very top click new to create a new geometry nodes subnetwork now we're now actually going to use this sub Network we just created the sub Network to create the initial settings and modifiers and that kind of stuff now we have two options to be able to use the lazy nodes setup for now keep your eyes on the video and I'll let you know when it's your turn to start working in our ad menu if I click search if I search for lazy we'll see that we get three new lazy node setups lazy noise lazy instance lazy animation for now I'm going to click out on that we're not going to start from there instead we can use template networks already created for us so all of those templates setups that we looked at earlier are available to us when we appended them into our scene say if I just select a random one here you'll see that okay now I have my rocks scattered onto my object this is the rock setup that we created earlier so we can start to see that we can start to repurpose these setups very very easily then we have our fire our noises all of that kind of stuff okay now it's your turn in the geometry nodes browser search for dust and we should be able to find dust particles click on that and there we go we should start to see we now stop some dust particles going now for step number two we're going to set up our time slider and now it's your turn the bottom panel we have our time slider this is where we enter animation mode just like we did with our Minecrafts project I'm going to set the end frame to a value of 72 is going to make our anime animation three seconds long we don't want the default which is over 10 seconds then if we hit play or we get a spacebar on the hotkey to enter play mode and we can hit use spacebar to toggle in and out of play mode while the animation is playing we should start to see that okay now the dust particles we see them actually floating around they're actually moving a bit and we can see now we can start get going on this then for step number three I'm going to break down how this network works and how you can use it in your future projects as well for this next step keep your eyes on the video and I'll let you know when it's again your turn again I'm going to select all of my nodes except for the input and output and I'm going to use the hockey m m stands for mute which is disables nodes and allows to see the functionality before and after in this case I disabled everything except for my input and output so now the cube mesh is now just doing nothing and I'm going to work for my left and then we're going to work all the way to the right and break this down slowly starting to see how this is built to start I have my subdivide mesh this is just adding some resolution so we have something to apply noise onto then we have our lazy noise which is just randomizing the emitter object so that we can have a more randomized starting place for our particle effects then we have distribute points on faces to start our dust particle effects then we have our lazy noise which is going to add animation onto this so why do we have two lazy noises here the first one is to randomize the emitter object so they have organic starting place and then the second one is to then add animation and and if I hit play which is we have the floaty bits twinkling around then we have lazy incense now this one is not so obvious on what it's doing by default the distribute points on the faces node it doesn't actually render they're just points and they show us a preset object to be able to know something's there lazy instance actually instances on a sphere object or whatever objects that we want and it has some easy to control randomization properties onto it okay now it's your turn for step number four we're going to set up our parameters first I'll click play to jump into my time slider and a general note here we're going to tweak this while it's in animation mode but for heavier effects you don't want to tweak things in animation mode as I could cause your system to crash in our lazy instance I'm going to set my scale randomize all the way up to a value of one from zero and now we start to see that the dust starts to feel a lot more organic with everything much much more randomized making it feel a lot more natural than we ever distribute points node I'm going to turn the density up to a value of two this is going to add more particles emitted into the scene and there we go once we see that looking good we can do our final scale adjustments back to our lazy instance I'm going to set the scale to a value of 0.075 making them a lot smaller alright so that's going to be a wrap for our dust particle parameters and now we just want to do a test render we're going to run into an issue here I'm going to go up to my renderer menu find that I'm going to go then hit render image wait for that to load up now we see a very very very strange issue and this is a very very common blender gotcha we see our Embers emitter mesh hanging out in the middle of our scene but not in our viewport but it's there in the render the viewport and the render are different this is the problem we're trying to solve here back in the outliner we notice the eye icon and the camera icon the eye icon is viewport visibility the camera icon is render visibility so I'm going to disable visibility for both the viewport and the render for everything else for the Embers for the fire emitter objects and then just make sure my dust particles have both of them on again super problematic area blender this is a very very big blender gotcha go back to my render render image wait for that to load up and there we should see now we have our floaty bits ready to go and that is all that's going to be wrap for that and we'll continue in the next chapter the goal now is to create her Embers particle effects we're going to start with the steam lazy node preset then for step one number one we're going to set up the initial Network before we get going it's always good to disable your animation if you still have that going doing any kind of scene adjustments while animation going can be fairly unstable for blender back in my outliner I'm going to enable visibility for the Embers both the eye icon and the camera icon and we'll go ahead and leave dust particles on now as well then in my 3D viewport I'll select the Embers object in object mode and then back in our geometry nodes panel I'll click new to create new geometry nodes subnetwork then I'm going to go into my geometry knows browser search for steam there we should find our steam particle preset I'm going to select steam particle preset and then after that go ahead and move around Zoom around get into position so we can see in the entire network and we'll begin setting this up and then before we actually tweak anything a good practice to get into whenever using these presets is to go ahead and duplicate this so I'm going to click the double stack paper icon and then we're going to rename that to Embers and then after we have that duplicated and renaming we can now make all the adjustments inside of here without tweaking the original preset Network that just makes it a little bit easier if we need to redo anything we can easily do so and before we continue we'll notice that we have a problem if I zoom in here on my 3D view we'll notice that the particles are now very stretched why is that well this is because we have a non-uniform scale and we scaled the cube to be very very thin so step number two we need to apply the scale in object mode while that is selected I'll go to the object menu then apply then choose apply scale and after that the object mode scale properties will then be reset to a value of one one one and we should see our particles are now spherical shaped and then we should be ready and good to go then for step number four I'll do my parameters my geometry no no first I'm going to hit spacebar to enter play the animation mode just so we can see what we're doing a little bit better and what we should see is that the steam particles are now feet upwards an helpful tip here if you ever need to see these full name parameters you can always click and drag on the nodes themselves to make them a little bit bigger this makes a little bit easier to see the actual parameter names then in our lazy instance node I'm going to move up the scale randomization to a value of one that's going to just add more variation to make it feel a lot more organic and then in my lazy anime node I'm going to set the speed random to a value of 1. that's just going to make some Embers move very very slow and then others move the default speed and then I'm also going to change the speed to a value of 2. so some are going to move really fast and then others are going to move really slow so back in our lazy instance node we're going to choose a 0.1 in our uniform scale to then make them a lot smaller and great so that's all of our geometry node parameters for now this is Step number four we need to set up our Embers material now usually we do this in the shading tab but a quick way to do this for now is just to enter our material properties panel you already used the material properties to create this as just a very simple way to create this you can use the shading tab or material properties at the top I'll hit the new button and again this is while my Embers object is still selected I'll immedially rename it to Embers that's going to be our material name I'll highlight the default material name and then enter Embers then our second parameter that we need to adjust at the very top there's our surface parameter this is the default material that we're using the default Shader currently says principle bsdf but we're going to change that and we're going to change that to emission and emission is going to be all the way at the top it's going to be the fifth about the fifth one to the top so why are we using a mission instead of principle bstf this is just a simplify it principle bstf has a lot of other parameters that we don't need a mission is a part of that but we're just going to simplify it and use the emission Shader then I'm going to select my color swatch and then I'm going to go to the Hue saturation I'm going to set my Hue to a value 0.015 and then one in one in saturation of value and that's just going to make it a very deep vibrant orange very very orange red color make it feel very fiery then we're going to need this to be super bright so we're gonna set this to a value of 50 and the strength now this material doesn't actually do anything yet because it's signed to our Embers object on the object level and we're not actually seeing that object anymore because we're creating new ones within our geometry node Network and so step number five we need to assign it to the geometry nodes on the geometry nodes level so the set material node in the geometry nodes I'll select the material parameter I'm going to search for Embers and then I'm going to select the new material we just created and burst do a search for that and once you find it click enter and then that'll set that material great now we're all set now we just need to do a test render I'll go up to my render render image I'm going to wait for that to load up and there we go now we should see that we have our Embers are all ready to go and a super very special bonus note here earlier we created the emitter object but it was halfway above the stone and we also have halfway that goes under the stone so why why are we doing that this is a bit of a hack and what this does is allows the animation to continue on meaning at the start we see the particle effects that start on the visible part of the cube the emitter object and as the animation moves forward we actually see some come out of the rock allowing it to go the full sequence now because all this is so randomized we can get away with that we're not actually going to see them actually coming out of this down it's more just a continuation of animation and that's going to be a wrap for our Embers and we'll continue in the next chapter the goal now is to create our fire system for step number one we need to create our initial Network in my outliner I'm going to turn on the eye icon and the camera icon for the emitter object then again in my Outlander I'm going to select that fire emitter object I'm going to go over to my geometry notes panel and then click the new to create that initial sub Network and then immediately I'll rename this to fire we're going to be creating this network from scratch using the lazy nodes then before we get going we need to apply scale this object does not have a uniform scale just like the other ones we're going to go up to the object menu go down to apply and then apply scale and then that'll reset the scale values to be uniform one one one then for step number two we need to create our distribute to point distribute points node I'll go up to the add menu then search and then I'll search for distribute points on faces same node that we used for our rocks and then once I find that I'll click to confirm and then I'll move that over and auto connect it into in between my group into in between my object input and output Now by default this doesn't give us very many points to work with so I'm immediately going to raise this to a value of 100 in the density then for step number three we need to create our lazy animate node I'm going to go up to add and then search and search for lazy animate but so if I now click to confirm I'll drag and drop it to auto connect it in front of the distribute to points node now after I have those connected I'm going to go ahead and click play to start and to see that we have something going on we have something animating and by default the direction of this is set to 0 0 1 so set the one in the Z axis meaning it's going to go up by default but we could always change this if we wanted the default value for this is going to be fine and then we need to make it move faster so I'm going to adjust the speed value up to a value of 3 making them go a lot faster then we'll go ahead and set the speed of random to value of one as well so some are going to move very slow others are going to move faster and here just with this we can already start to see that we have a very organic feel it starts to feel very natural very floaty very good then for step number four we need to instance our Fireballs onto these points I'm going to go up to the add menu go to search search for lazy instance once I find that I'll go ahead and click to confirm drag and drop it in front of the last node that we just created so this will be the last node enter no no in our node Network Now by default the instance here is instancing a sphere object so that it becomes renderable that's not going to be what we're going to do now we're going to want to instance our Fireball template object onto this I'll go through the add menu search for collection info once I find collection info I'm going to create that and then I'm going to drag and drop it down next to to the left of my lazy instance click to drop that in now we need to set this up to be able to communicate it with the fire kit on my collection parameter I'm going to choose to pull down I'm going to search for fire kit mesh this is going to be our Fireball mesh objects once I find that I'll click to confirm and then I'm going to enable separate children because there's more than one in here I'm going to enable reset children that's going to make sure they're zeroed out and location and rotation now we still don't see anything so we need to hook this up so in our lazy instance node I'll go ahead and connect this in to the instance parameter and then we need to enable the used input instance parameter and there we go now we should start to see that we have something happening on there but everything's looking weird something's going on what's going on here on our lazy instance node I'm going to disable randomization rotation setting this to a value of zero so that they're all going to go vertically now then I'm going to set the uniform scale to a value of 3 making them much bigger and then there we go great we should now start to see that we have a really long thick fiery looking mesh going and now we can go ahead and go up to our render I'm going to render and then render image I'll wait for that to load and okay we start to see something happening here but we need to be able to see this in animation mode and that's what we're going to be doing in the next chapter however uh this next step if you're on a slower computer this is consider this a bonus step you don't have to do this next step now is a good time to save if you're on a slower computer and you may even want to wait until the next chapter so we can do it properly but as a first bonus here I'm going to go ahead and enable rendered mode in my camera view so that I can see the fire animate now I'm running dual 3080 TI's and as a beginner I would not have been able to do this so long story short if you're on a slower computer this is not a reason to stop or give it up this is my job so I need this Hardware to be able to get things done faster and if this is slower for you if this is crashing for you I'll show you how to render animation in the next chapter and for our second bonus tip I'm going to show you the way around the fire kit and again you don't have to do any of these next steps but if I go to my outliner if I enable fire kit min max and if I zoom out my viewport here and get in position there I'll see that I have two different empties these are are connected to the lazy fire Shader you'll notice that in the viewport the mesh just continues to go up it's a stream that just goes up forever it doesn't actually turn off and this is a big difference between particles and geometry nodes particles have the ability to be created and die at any point in time geometry nodes generally speaking are going to be consistent throughout so these empty nodes are used as transparency to be able to deactivate them at a certain point by default these values are fine but if we wanted to like make it go higher or lower we could always adjust these two values all right and we'll continue in the next chapter our goal now is to set up our camera animation and we're going to do so with the help of setting up our keyframes and for step number one we're going to set up our an animated camera back in my outliner I'm going to go ahead and enable the rendering collection and expand that I'm going to find my camera select the camera and then moving my mouse back over to the viewport I'm going to duplicate this right click duplicate objects hit escape to drop it then back in my outliner I'm going to go ahead and rename this by double clicking on it and rename it to camera underscore animated so now we have our static hero camera shot and then we have a new shot which is going to be our animated sequence great and then for step number two we're going to set up its default location back in my object properties while my camera animated is selected I'm going to change the location X to a value of 2 getting us much closer to that sword so that we can set up our crane shot and then location Z we're going to set that to 1.3 moving it upwards and that's going to be our first frame and our camera animation but we have a problem here the camera view is not actually looking through this camera so how do we fix that so step number three we're going to set up our scene properties I'll select My Scene properties panel then under my camera parameter we need to update this I'm going to select the pull down menu then choose camera animated then for step number four we need to set up our key frames in my time slider I'm going to set my current frame to a value of one that's going to be our starting frame it's going to be the first frame we set our keyframe on and now we're ready to actually create that keyframe back of my object properties under location I'm going to right click on this right clicking on the location parameter where the values are and then the top option is going to be insert keyframe then after we select that we should see some some things are starting to happen so now our parameter is now yellow so what's happening here why is this yellow a yellow parameter is how blender tells us that this specific object this specific parameter has a keyframe on this specific frame so on frame one we now officially have a keyframe now back in our time slider if I set this to a value of 72 to make our current frame 7200 time slider we now notice that our parameter now changes to Green What's Happening Here what's what's yellow what's green what is this green is how blender tells us that a keyframe has been inserted on this specific parameter but not on this specific frame so yellow there's one on this specific frame green it just means there's an animation track for this parameter so now I'm going to set my location Z value to a value of 0. that should put us directly on the ground you may need to move yours up and down depending on your layout now the parameter turns orange so what's happening here now we have an orange parameter orange is now 10 blender tells us we have a keyframe track on this parameter and now we have a tweaked value but we haven't confirmed a keyframe yet we haven't inserted a new keyframe so it's a warning side so orange means we need to confirm this keyframe for the stick so I'm going to go ahead and right click and then choose insert keyframes once more on my frame 72. once I do that I should then see it then turns yellow and now we have the two keyframes officially done now for step number five we need to set up our keyframe interpolation settings and we're going to run into a problem here so bring your eyes back to the video for this one I'm going to hit play to run in the animation and this is a classic default blender beginner camera movement happening here you'll notice that the camera starts very slow speeds up and then slows down now in a film or any kind of cinematic production this rarely ever happens so how do we fix this we need this camera to start and end at the full speed of the animation this is how traditionally a crane shot or Dolly shot is cut into an edit so in my time slider I'll see that I have two keyframes I'm going to box drag select both of these I'm going to right click on them I'm going to go up to interpolation and then I'm going to choose linear linear is how we change the keyframes from ramping up and ramping down setting it to a linear motion so that it's 100 consistent from point A to point B and then once I hit that I'll go ahead and hit play again and now we should see that we have a nice clean camera animation even in even out very cinematic great and that's going to be a wrap for our camera animation and one bonus tip before we leave off here if you ever need to delete your keyframe and restart over you can do so by selecting the time slider box drag select both keyframes or whatever keyframes you want to delete hit X and then go to delete keyframe I'm not going to do this since I'm ready to go but if you ever mess up and you want to redo this select them delete and then you can redo it and we'll continue in the next chapter okay so now the goal is to render out our camera animation into a video file now big disclaimer here I'm going to be showing you how to Output an MP4 video file usually what I would be doing is render down image sequence converting that over to keep it super basic super beginner level we're going to be doing an mp4 file video sequences all of that good stuff so for step number one we need to set up our output properties so I'm going to select my output properties the printer icon on our properties panel then I'm going to scroll down all the way down until we see a panel until we see a pull down called output and then first we'll need to set our output path first I'm going to do four slash forward slash This Is How We Do relative paths and blender so our project directory that we set up earlier this will now be saved inside of that folder then I'm going to do render then forward slash again and then I'm going to do swore sword underscore V1 dot MP4 and what this is going to do is now save a sword version 1 MP4 inside of a directory called rendering inside of our black inside of our blender directory okay so that's our path so now we need to set up are format options I'm going to select our options then I'm going to go to ffmpeg video now as soon as we select that we should then see some things are going to change and we get some new parameters specifically we get the new encoding panel now with that encoding panel we're going to select the preset icon looks like little three dots with three little lines next to it that's our preset icon then we're just going to choose preset for h.264 and np4 and there we go so as soon as we select that we should now be good to go but we're going to change this to a higher quality format we're going to open up the coding settings and then we'll change this to an output quality from medium to high and there we go now that's going to be all set up and ready to go now how do we actually render so we're not actually ready to do this yet but once we are under the render menu under render image we have a render animation button now all of this setup is communicating with the render animation button and our time slider so it's going to render from frame 1 to 72 but before we do that step number two we need to set up the rest of our scene in my outliner I'm going to make sure that I have my render collection on then I'm also going to turn on my background Crown Collection now before we do render animation the first thing we need to do is just do a quick render image render animation is going to take a while we need to make sure everything's ready to go before we do that I'm going to wait for that pop up and then we'll check it out make sure it's looking good and then we'll make our final adjustments so one thing that we'll notice here is that the frame is too sharp so we need to set our motion blur settings from here I'm going to go to my render properties I'm going to scroll down and so I find motion blur and then I'm going to enable that that's it all you have to do is check it on and then this will add that natural filmic blur that's going to happen while a camera actually moves then for step number four we're going to make a final adjustment to our depth volume anytime we move our camera around we're also going to be wanting to adjust our depth volume as well so I'm going to go back to my shading tab I'm going to zoom out so I can find the volume I'll select that and then I'm going to go into my mission my principal bstf Shader then I'm going to set my emission strength to a value of 0.1 where did I get that magical number from that was just to help the compensate for when we push our camera forward it'll just add more atmosphere in the background pushing the scale of the scene a little bit more so were so close to the scene now great then step number five we need to do our render animation now is a good time to do a file save before we do this and then before we do our render animation we'll do a render image to check things out see how things are going make sure everything's good to go and then once we're ready we'll do the render render animation now for you this may take a while this could take overnight if you if you need it I remember you know 10 to 15 years ago I would have animations rendering on my tiny very slow laptop that is 15 year old technology and it would take several days we'll do a little time travel we'll do jump cut in the edit and then there we go my render is now done and I can either view this by finding on my hard drive or I can go up to the render menu and then select view animation button and that'll just bring up the animation so that we can see it we can start and stop this with play Space Bar just like we've been doing all right and we'll continue in the next chapter our goal now for these next few chapters are to integrate the character and set up a cinematic Dolly camera setup and a good place to get characters in different mocap animations to build from is miximo.com first you'll need a mixmo account be sure to log in so you can get creative and download any character that you would like and the way mixmo works is very simple we have two options here one for characters and then one for animations both of these Tabs are libraries of assets of which we can mix and match from really great for for conceptualizing through your ideas and bringing things to life quickly so for step number one I'm going to select my character Tab and then I'm going to select any character I would like I'm going to go ahead and search for the one that I use which is erisa a-r-i-s-s-a this is the same character that we used in The Cinematic sequence I'll click on her which will load her up into the sequence then for step number two we need to set up our animation I'm going to jump over the animation tab then we need to select any one of these animations and load them up or we can search them again I'm going to search for stop walking then I'll kind of scroll down I'll find the stop animation and then this is the exact animation that I use used in The Cinematic sequence as well for when she walks up to the sword then we can test the animation by clicking on the button that'll load it up and there we go a few bonus tips here that's all we really need to do but a few bonus tips to the bottom left of the viewport we have our navigation controls if you'd like to orbit around use these instead you just click on them then left click and drag around to orbit and then switch over to pan and just a note here the navigation tools are not like blender so that's always a big gotcha whenever you're switching 3D apps then for step number three we need to export this out so that we can import into Blender at the top right we can find our downloads button this is how we export click on that and then the only default option we should have to change changing the frame rate from 30 to 24. we're doing this now because blender's default frames per second is going to be 24 which is a cinematic film uh frame rate and we're going to use the fbx exporter which is the file format that we're going to use and a bonus tip here I've heard of some having issues with the fbx this should work fine this should be your first option to try but if that doesn't work you can always use the dot Dae which is another file format that we can use so I'm going to stick with that and download with that then once you have that download be sure to stick it in your downloads directory if it comes in as a zip file be sure to extract that as well and we'll continue in the next chapter the goal now is to import the character into our blender file to import our character step number one we're going to prep the outliner I'll select My Scene collection then I'll hit new collection and then once I have that I'm going to double click on that and then rename that to character and that's going to be the one that we import our character into so before we move forward uh make sure you have that selected and then step number two we're going to bring the character into the file uh while my new collection is selected my character collection I'm going to go to the file menu and now we're going to go to import so earlier we used a pen to bring in blender files but import is what we use to use General file formats like fbx obj those are formats that we can use to Interchange blender with other 3D applications then I'm going to find my fbx import and load that up and that's when once we have that we'll look for our downloads directory find out find where I stuck my Pixel character select that fbx file and then after that we can go ahead and then import and we should see that we now have the character into our file and in just a general note here textures and everything with the fbx should be automatically in there so if we look at her in rendered mode we should have that as well then step number three we need to set up our layout in my outliner I'm going to find my Armature object this is the object we want to use to do the layout and a note here that we can run into some issues if we try to move the obstacles around because this character has a character animation rig set up on it currently and the Armature system is how we do that inside a blender so this is a fairly complicated topic to get into I'm going to pass over that but just have that selected don't actually select the geometry when you're trying to do this and of course she's not going to be on the ground plane so I'll need to move her download a little bit I had her on to a little bit of the right of the sword and we're going to put the camera on the left side so feel free to get creative here yours doesn't have to be matching mine perfectly we're going to hit G and R to move around she should already be in the proper world scale as well since we modeled everything to scale this scene is technically a real world scale size that we're using and once you have that we'll continue in the next chapter the goal now is to extend the ground plane across the rest of the scene with the help of geometry nodes and a big tip here I'm going to be moving fairly quick in this chapter this is all fairly review so be sure to follow along after the video using the cheat sheet at the very end of the video this will make it a lot easier for you to follow so step number one I'll need to set up the base geometry nodes Network I'm going to select my ground plane object note that this is the rock ground that came with our Rock kit that we have not used yet I'm going to expand my geometry nodes Network to give myself a bit more space to work then I'm going to click new geometry nodes Network and then I'm going to rename this to be ground scatter and then for step number two we're going to set up our ground plane for this to scatter on in my ADD menu I'm going to click search I'm going to search for grid then I'll drop that into my network and then for now I'm going to plug this directly into the group output then I'm going to set my scale to a value of 10 and 10 on this grid now this workflow that we're doing here is quite a bit different than we what we did before usually what we did is what we started with it was a emitter object this is consistent with the Rocks we made that spherical backdrop which was which was technically an emitter object then we made all the emitter objects for the fiery Assets in the dust particle assets and so what this means is we're using this grid plane as an emitter object within our geometry nodes Network to then use in place to be able to scatter our ground plane object onto and instead of bringing our object through a collection like we did with the rocks and everything else we're doing so directly through the group input nodes so the group input is what is then going to be instanced and this is just another way to work it makes it a little bit easier because now we're only working with one viewport object instead of two then for step number three we're going to set up the rest of the network I'm going to add my distribute points onto faces node I'm going to drop that into my network in between our grid and our output to auto connect that and then I'll do the same thing with our lazy instance so click add click search lazy instance and then once I have that I'll go ahead and click to drop that in my scene drop it and auto connect it between our distribute and our output great and now we're going to integrate the group input which is our Rock asset and when you need to plug this into our lazy instance so I'm going to move that in place connect that up and then it doesn't do anything by default because by default the lazy instance is used in the sphere objects that are built in so we're gonna have to turn on used input instance then I'm going to disable make small which is usually just making them a particle size and then I'm going to turn on rotate along normals and that'll fix the rotation problem that we had and we'll rotation along normal does is basically it only randomizes the rotation along the polygons that the grid plane is facing this is really useful specifically for ground planes things like grass trees vegetation and in this case the ground plane is pointed up so they're only going to be randomly rotated 360 Degrees around then our last setting here we have a currently too many be an instance onto this crumb plant so we're going to set the density value of 2 in our distribute node overall we'll significantly lowering that and now we should see that we now have the entire ground plane covered then for step number four we just need to lower it into place so make sure I have my ground plane selected and my viewport I hit G to move then I'm going to move it down and I want to be able to move this into the so that is just below that front slab we want this to be pretty much even but a little bit lower so that we can see it and there we go now we have our ground plane set up and as promised here is the node cheat sheet with all the settings highlighted for you to be able to easily follow along and we'll go ahead and continue in the next chapter the goal now is to set up our Dolly camera animation in our final render with our character and a dolly animation is just a camera animation with a simple location only keyframe setup that either goes side to side or forward and back and note that this is generally different from the crane shot that we set up earlier which is an up and down movement for step number one we'll go ahead and save out a new file within the same project directory that we've been working on go to file save as and I'm going to go ahead and rename this to sword shot 2.lin file this is a good workbook for creating alternative camera movements so now we have if we ever want to go back to our crane animation and adjust that we can do so very easily in our original sword.button file then for step number two we need to duplicate our camera setup in my outliner in my rendering collection I'm going to select the animated camera and then back in my viewport I'm going to right click duplicate objects hit escape to drop it and then back in my outliner I'm going to rename this to camera.ly double click rename camera Dolly and then we need to reset this camera so I'm going to select both the keyframes in the slide time slider using box track selection and I'm going to hit X to delete and then delete keyframes and so now we're starting with no animation starting fresh now we need to set our active camera I'm going to go to my scene properties then I'll change my camera parameter to our new camera camera Dolly and now we're all done with the technical setup and now we're ready to start animating then for step number three we need to set up the initial camera angle for the shot in my time slide I'm going to set my care frame to frame 72. this is the last frame in sequence and this is important because the last frame in your sequence is the most impactful frame the last frame gets burned into your head a bit more than the rest of the sequence put together that'll select select the camera viewport hit G to move it down and move it back into place and I'm going to lower this all the way down to the ground as low as possible I want the camera nearly touching the ground so move it down until it goes through and then bring it back up a little bit more I'll hit R to jump into rotation and I'm going to rotate this on the blue axes getting the sword in the frame and I'll go ahead and tweak that rotating between G and R to be able to get that into the place I just know here I have my character on the right sword on the left and for the quick composition guides here the guard is going to be in the top left rule of third this is the most important as we can see here we have the guard hitting that top left third inner composition this is going to be essentially where our eye is going to go great and now we have our last frame set up and now step number four we need to set up the initial keyframe so while my camera still selected I'm going to be on frame 72 go back into my object properties I'm going to right click on my location then insert keyframes and then once I have that confirmed I should then see my parameters now yellow confirming that we now have a keyframe then for step number five we need to set up our keyframe on our frame one back in my time so I'm going to set my current frame to frame one now back in my 3D view I'm going to hit G to enter my move tool with my camera and I'm going to move this forward only on the red axis very very very slightly and then once I have that into place I'll go ahead and go back to my object properties I'll right click insert keyframes confirming that keyframe in place now we should see the keyframe is now yellow then back in our time slider we need to set these interpolation mode so I'll box drag select both the keyframes right click go to interpolation mode and then go ahead and set this to linear that again is making sure that the camera has a constant animation from point A to point B helping to get that cinematic feel now if I hit play We Should now see the camera is moving and now this is where we get this dolly Parallax effect you you can see that the sword is actually not moving very much in frame but the foreground which is the ground plane here is moving much faster in frame then the background is it's creating a parallax effects Parallax meaning two parts of the composition is moving independently from each other in terms of relationship to the frame the difference between those two areas the sword stays relatively static in frame making it very easy to see but the overall movement feels very great because the ground is moving so much this is what we call the dolly camera animation and it's a great touch to add to our camera and really helps us out with the overall results and we'll go ahead and continue in the next chapter the goal now is to set up our final render output with our final tweaks in our compositor we'll start by just doing a quick render render or then render image button and they're just going to see where we're at and we'll do our funnel critiques here and the only thing I really see here is that the vignette is currently darkening the left side of the frame a little too much here now that our sword is a little bit to the left we need to compensate for that so step number one we need to make our final tweaks in our composite I'll jump back into my compositing tab and now here if you're still not seen your render image go ahead and go back to your render render image to be able to see that in the compositor and then I'm going to use my M hot key to disable my blur node so they can see where my ellipse node is at and then in my ellipse mask I'm going to go ahead and move this over an X moving that over so that we don't we're not darkening the left side so much I'm going to leave this off at a value of 0.5 in our X location for that and then I'll re-enable the blur with the m hot key and value 300 worked before with our blur but I'm going to lower this down to Value 250 essentially minimizing how much that is actually going inside of the frame and then our foreground is getting being way too bright right here so we need to bring back that dark cinematic foreground I'm going to move my mix value back up to a value of one that's going to make it a bit darker and we need we still need to go a little bit darker here so the other tool that we have is our gamma so I'll bring that up a bit I'll leave that at a value of 1.3 in our camera great and that's overall now looking very good and then for step number two we need to set up our final render output I'll go to my output properties in my properties panel it's going to be the printer icon I'll scroll down to find the output path and then I'm going to rename that to sword underscore Dolly underscore V1 dot MP4 and then this will allow us to not overwrite the original render that we did early on right and then we're all set up and ready to go and then I'll do my final render animation up in my render menu I'll let that cook again this is going to take a while it might take overnight for you we're going to do a bit of time traveling and do a jump cut in the edit and great now I'm speaking to you from the future and we'll do our final viewing of our animation render so I'll go up to the render menu view animation and there we have it as our final animation that we're going to leave off with and everything over looking great and special note here if you need to extend your or rotate your background to be able to get this the shop working you may have to do that a little bit in the top right there overall mine is looking fine for now so I'm going to wrap it up right there and that is a wrap for the blender Fast Track series from here I encourage you to click the link in the description to learn more about our premium membership this is where you will unlock the blender track which is the ultimate beginner to Advanced transformation this is where you'll find the rest of the Fast Track Army leveling up and climbing the mountain of mastering blender seeing everyone's progress every day is a huge motivator I hope to see your progress in the Discord [Applause] [Music] [Music]

Channel: CG Fast Track

Views: 129,166

Keywords: blender tutorial

Id: s-XhO3OOPxQ

Length: 117min 29sec (7049 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 24 2022