Blender Beginner Tutorial - Part 3: Stone

in part three of the blender fast track series we'll be building out the environment we will go step by step as we apply a cinematic look to our render we will build out the environment utilizing the included rock kit be sure to grab all the free downloads the link is in the description then we will add a god ray effect and finish up our scene with some basic camera animation and integrate a miximo character it took me years of struggling before i was comfortable enough building out my first environment which is why we at cgfastrock.com are really passionate about simplifying the process and building the courses that we wish we had when we first started if you would like to get to know me there'll be a link in the description to my demo reel with that said let's get going [Music] so we're gonna start putting this cinematic look on our render on our sword here this is essentially a two-step process one there's going to be a color grade and two there's going to be this hdri setup that's going to allow us to have this blurred out background so step one is to set up our camera and what we need to do here is get to know our camera right here so this little triangle thing that we've been ignoring this whole time is our camera so to start using this what we need to do is look through it and if we do up the view viewport and camera you can also hit number pads here on your keyboard and there we go so now we're essentially in like photography mode and if i move around the viewport you notice it doesn't the camera doesn't come with it right so the fix that is we're going to do v port camera and then if we hit n on a keyboard to get our side properties right here so we haven't used this i think at all yet and what this is essentially just quick properties for things that are interviewed primarily the camera if we go up the view here and go to camera to view lock view or view lock right here camera to view it's now going to be locked to our viewport movement so now we can frame up our camera i'm going to select our sort here hit cue frame selected there we go and then what we're going to do here is set up our resolution so i'm going to go to image outputs or output properties here and we're going to do 1080 by which would be just be a nice instagram resolution and now what we're going to do is set up our interface in a way that makes it easy for us to work because we want to be able to set up our camera composition and still be to work around the viewport say we want to come over here and adjust a light we have to move our camera currently to do that which we don't want to do we want to frame our shot and then don't touch the framing anymore so i'm going to go ahead and frame up my shot just like this and what i'm going to do here is set up my interface so i'm going to go ahead and give myself some more room over here and then i'm going to do here is right click on this little uh sidebar right here right click and then do vertical split and then i'm going to split my interface like this i'm gonna go ahead and click and there we go so now we have two different viewports one we're going to use for our camera one we're going to use for working and we're going to use this one over here for working so i'm going to hit n and then turn off camera to view and that's going to allow me to move around like this so now we can move around our camera like this we can move around our light and all that good stuff let's go ahead and clean up this area over here all this ui stuff up here we can just turn off so if we just go to view turn off two bar we can turn off tool settings we can turn off adjust the last operation and then if we go all the way over here these two options right here um if we like select the sword right here if i turn this off it'll turn off all of our gizmos if i turn this off it'll turn off all of our you know ornaments and then what we can do is just simply go to view and then we'll go to and then what we need to do is go to cameras and then frame camera balance we can also just hit home on the keyboard as well and that's going to lock up the view like this and then what we can do is shut off all the stuff up here and down there as well so we're going to select our camera going to camera right here and these are going to be our camera properties the most important one that we're going to want to get to now is going to be our focal length right here so if we want to do like a wide angle lens we can do that uh uh you know 50 millimeter 90 millimeter i'm not going to get into focal lengths too much right now we're going to stick with 50 millimeter which is just a good standard portrait lens and then we'll go down to viewport display and we'll come all the way down here and just turn opacity up on this guy right here and this is going to turn off this right here and that'll just allow us to properly frame our camera great and then next up we're going to set up our hdri for me the toughest part about learning 3d modeling when i first started was following along with the video it was very easy to miss this button very easy to miss that button and before you know you have to stop rewind and struggle to find just the next step to the process this is a brutally exhausting process which is why we at cgfastrack.com built the step-by-step screenshot application and we put it into every single one of our courses this would have saved me so much time and frustration and makes it so much easier and enjoyable to learn 3d animation after you're done watching the video here on youtube click the link in the description and follow along there so the problem right now if we go ahead and do render render image this is not going to look at all like our current render so this doesn't look anything like this and that's because we are currently on material preview we need to work on uh render preview which is going to be this guy right here and with our minecraft scene what we did was we came in here went to scene world and then used hdrs right here this again is getting into material preview we can't actually use this again if we go to render right here it doesn't actually show up right here and this is a you know this isn't this is a bummer that blender doesn't allow this um they might be implemented in the future i'm not sure i go through a hacky way to get that to work in the future course for now we're going to set up our own custom hdri so we're going to leave both of these on and we're going to stay in rendered mode and what we're going to do is we're going to switch over to our shading tab and set up our hdri specifically we're going to go into rendered mode over here as well and then we're going to do is go switch over to our object so instead of working with our uh object shader networks right here what we'll do is we're going to go over to world and we're going to do view and then just a frame all and what we're looking at right now is basically our background and what we can do here is change our background color and this is essentially how we light our environment this is how we you know if we want things to be brighter we can brighten them up just like this and what we want to do here is bring in a custom hdri that we're going to use with this setup so we're going to use an hdri from this website right here this is called sibl and it's a free resource just like hdr haven if i if you go to sibl right here archive the one i found that worked really really well for this scene right here was just this one right here this is all located in the download so we already have this so you can feel free to experiment with a bunch of different hdris and i'm going to go ahead and jump to my scene over here so in our downloads under hdri we have that hr download and we're just gonna i'm gonna go ahead and copy that path right here and what i do is i'm gonna add and i'm gonna do texture and then we're not gonna use image texture here we're going to use environment texture because we're going to be using an environment we're going to open that and then i'm going to go ahead and go to that path and then the hdri that we're going to bring in is just this one right here dot hdr hit open drag and drop that in there and there we go now we can you know rotate around and we have our own custom hdri in here which is pretty cool and this one you know i picked this one out specifically because it worked really well with just the sword and stone we got the like a rocky environment with the sky coming down which turned out really really nice um the problem now is we want to frame this up right so we want to be able to rotate this hdri around and to do that we need two more nodes we're going to need our mapping node and our texture coordinates so i'm going to go to add we're going to go to vector and then mapping right here so it's the same mapping node we've been working with to scale up and down and move our textures then we're going to add we're going to go to input and then we're going to do texture coordinate and the reason why we're using texture coordinate here is because we need to generate uvs we're going to choose generated we're going to put that in a vector so why what is all this stuff so the world doesn't actually have uvs and we've been using the uv node to do that so we use texture coordinate to generate the uvs for this and now what we can essentially do is you know rotate this around like this if we go to z and just click and drag we can now rotate around our hdri and if i just do view we'll go to cameras or viewport and then camera we can look at this from our camera and now what we can do is just rotate this around you can see here that we can now light our scene like this pretty awesome i'm just going to rotate this around like there leave it somewhere right there and i'm going to have this at 448 yours might be a little bit different depending on how you have yours framed up in the next chapter what we want to do is blur out this background to mimic a cinematic you know depth of field look and we'll do that next so this is the hdri that we just brought into our scene and what we want to do is blur this out for the background so what we want to do is use this hdri for the reflections to keep those nice and sharp and then use this one for the background which is going to be a blurred out version of that so this is going to be a little bit tricky um the technique that we're going to use here is a little bit intermediate i'll try to explain it the best i can but what we want to do here is copy these two nodes and we're just going to copy them so do control c and then control v and i'll just go ahead and move those down like that we'll go ahead and plug this in plug that in right there and we'll go ahead and plug this one in right there so now we have two setups this one will be our reflection this one will be our blurred background i'm gonna go to the dialog box and then i'm going to choose blur.hdr so all sibl hdis come with these blurred hdris which is really handy but you could always like take them into photoshop or something like that and blur any hdri out and now you can see okay now this is looking pretty good the problem is our reflections become pretty blurred out and you know it doesn't really have that big of effect right now but if i come over to my layout tab here and if i just zoom in here so we can see this little bit better so you can see these reflections are getting really really blurred and if i you know put in the reflections here sharper one you can see okay now they look a little bit sharper so this isn't going to change things too much but a technique that we can use to control what the reflection sees versus what the background sees is going to be this light path node and again this is a little bit intermediate so i'll explain this the best i can but basically what this does is it generates black and white values that we can use as a mask to control what the camera sees basically so if i do is camera array put that in the surface you can see okay the background turns white that's because the camera sees the background right so if i do something like this glossy ray or we'll do is reflection right rather you can see now our reflection turns white but our background turns black now this is very you know kind of complicated ray tracing stuff that's happening here this is just a utility node that we can use with what we're going to use next which is going to be a mix shader so i'm going to add shader and then we'll do mix shader we're going to plug this in plug this in and then what we can do here is do is reflection we'll just do is camera right actually plug that in and then plug that in the outputs and then we'll go ahead and move this up a little bit so we can see this uh we'll just do right here to make this a little bit easier and expand this so we can get a full view of this there we go so you can see here now we have the reflection going into one the blurred background going in the other and then we have the is camera array holding that as a mask so now we're gonna get nice sharp reflections and we get that nice you know blurry background which looks really cinematic great so next we're going to apply the color grade which is going to give us this blue hue so color grade is the one of the best ways to get our cg renders out of like this fake cg world and into a cinematic world 100 of our cinematics at cg fast track the trailers that we do we put color grades on them and they're really good way to really amp up the render so so far we've you know played with the layout tab we've played with the you know uv editing tab the shading tab now we're going to do one more which is going to be the compositing tab so i'm going to go ahead and just close this menu right here just by hitting the n and so we're going to take a look at the compositing notes so i'm going to hit this button called use nodes and what we get is these two nodes right here we have one render layers and then one composite so what are we looking at here this looks very very similar to the shading editor that we've been playing with but essentially what we have here is our render and then we can apply 2d operations on top of this so you can think of this as like a post process i'm going to go ahead and just do another render so i'll do render render image and then we'll have the blurry background there and then now you'll see okay that's going to show up here but we have no really way no good way of displaying the composite right now so let's go ahead and set up the interface to be able to do that i'm going to drag this down drag this over and then right click on this part right here and then do vertical split so right click vertical split so it's being a little buggy on me i think it's my screen recorder if i'll do yep there we go so right click vertical split there we go now we have two node networks but what we can do with one of these is set this up to display our render and the other one for our node so i'll go up here to our um editor type menu and we can switch out what we're going to display here and you know we have things like the 3d view image editor all these different things what we want is the image editor that is the same window that pops up whenever you hit render and then we can do is choose what image that we're going to look at and the image that we're going to look at is the rendered result and there we go now we can you know scroll up and down we can middle mouse all of that good stuff and same thing over here middle mouse scroll up and down and then we only need one note in here what we're going to do is we're going to add color and then we'll do color balance so color balance is a really really awesome tool to do color grading what we're going to do is just stick with complementary colors and what that means is basically we want to if we use an orange for our highlights we want to do blue for the background so orange is over here on the color wheel and then blue's over here so we want to slam some blue in the dark values so this is going to be dark values this is going to be mid-tones and these are going to be highlights we want to go really saturated in the dark tones over here with blue and a little bit more you know we can shift these around a little bit the mid tones may be a little bit more turquoise get some variation happening there you know i like to split these up a little bit so we're you know averaging out these out to be blue by you know pushing one more towards blue and the other towards green which gives it a really cinematic feel great so that's looking awesome the only thing that we want to do now is really just do our final tweaks so final tweaks just being if we go to shading if we select our blade here and then go to object and then currently we're not in the blade glow so we want to go and select our material slot here so we'll select that go to blade glow and then we can do our final you know if we want to do something like 2000 on the brightness so this you know we want to do our final tweaks here and then we'll just go back over to compositing and then we'll just do go back over here to render render image you can also just use f12 hotkey and there we go so that's going to be a lot brighter so at this point you know just some tips for camera composition what we can do is go back over to layout tab and if we just select our camera just some general tips if we go to our object properties right here what i would do is keep the location of our x just at zero that's going to keep things nice and symmetrical um we can keep y as zero as well and then you know uh something like this z and y you know then we can play around with like y or um our x rotation there um that's just going to keep things nice and symmetrical and then what we can do is you know after we do our render you know all we have to do is image save as here and then save anywhere we want i'm just going to do our you know render version one i'm just going to do save image and then i'm just going to do a couple more different compositions so go to layout and then i'll go ahead and move this in just like so and then we'll frame that up i'm going to go ahead and move this down a little bit maybe rotate this up a little bit so we're looking up at the sword a little bit something right in there maybe a little bit more rotation something right in there and then we'll just go ahead and go to render render image and that's going to be thrown through our compositor so go back to my compositing tab here and i'll just do image save as then i'll just do render version two and you can see how quickly we can just iterate with doing a ton of different versions and i'll just do one more here um by zooming in here and then moving this up somewhere right in there so just a general composition you know the rule thirds that's something i talk about a lot in the art of lighting um what i'm looking at here is this guard is going to be like that hero piece so i try to keep that either in the the top third or the bottom third either right here or right here in the composition and again if you're not familiar with composition that's totally fine you don't need to for this one it's definitely something you want to get good at longer term which we do go over in the art of lighting i'm going to do another render so render render image and then we'll go ahead and save that out just go into com compositor and then image save as and then we'll do version three and that's going to wrap that up so be sure to hashtag your stuff on social media we check instagram every day we love uh looking at all your guys's renders so be sure to do that and we'll go ahead and start laying out the cave environment in the next chapter so this is where writer we're going to take our cinematic render and we're going to integrate our environment and put the sword into the stone before we do that we're going to get to know some online resources and this becomes super crucial and you want to integrate these as soon as possible for me when i first started um i always talk about this david versus glyph analogy and i i talk about this a lot because you know as a beginner your goals really most commonly to make games to make movies whatever it may be you want to do really high quality work and you want to share it with the world that's usually the goal that we're trying to achieve here now it is in our nature as 3d artists who want to take ownership of every single thing within our scene and for me i was very very guilty of this when i first started and it was a really big problem because it took me a really really long time to get away from this and essentially you know if we take a look at my demo right here you can see you know in my demo reel i credit you know what i did to the job and basically you know just looking at a shot like this there's a dozen different people working on this there is a character animation team there's a lighting team there's an effects animation team there's going to be supervisors directors all these different people contributing to this so when you're first starting out it really is a david versus goliath situation because in order for you to get a job or do high quality work um you're just yourself and you know you're competing against feature film teams or aaa teams or whatever maybe so it becomes hyper crucial to start utilizing online resources which is what we're going to talk about now so i have a ton of different uh resources that i use on a regular basis the first one's going to be textures.com there's uh some free resources on each one of these sites so you don't have to pay for them or anything i'm not affiliated with any of these sites this is just sites i use regularly there's some free stuff on this website the 3d dot textures.me this is a completely free resources for textures there's a ton of really good pbr materials it's a little bit hard to find things sometimes but it's a really good free resource we have hdr labs we've talked a bit about this before in minecraft and basically hdri is lighting your environment right so we've talked about those sibl is another really great resource for hdris kibash 3d so this isn't a free website but they often do have these free kits they do you know environments worlds all that stuff and it's really really great because just like the sword and the stone scene we're going to build our hero asset which is going to be the sword and then you can put it into environments that you utilize those online resources so you want to focus on those primary elements those story elements and then integrate online resources whenever you can around that another great resource is going to be mixedmode.com so this is going to be what we're going to be using for our character integration it's really awesome you just pick you know very generic characters you have your basic you know mocap animation it's really really good for like secondary elements background characters so if you notice in the cinematics she's always lift from the back and she's always in shadow those kind of things you don't want to necessarily use your hero assets for this although you might be able to get away with that another really good one is going to be mega scans so mega scans is mostly known for doing rocks uh photo basically photogrammetry around the world they have a ton of free stuff as well that you can get started with and we're gonna go ahead and get started next with our rocket that we're going to integrate here and this is going to be included in the kit so it's going to be on the downloads so you know the downloads from an online resource we're going to use this in the next chapter so to summarize what we want to do you usually want to what you want to do is focus on your hero elements really customize those really you know make those unique to your story that you're going to tell and then utilize your 3d elements your 3d online resources for all the secondary elements which specifically here is going to be our rock kit so we're going to start integrating our rock kit so to bring any data from any other package being geometry what we're going to want to do is use this either import or a pen menu a pen is going to be for blender files imports going to be for other things like fbx obj are going to be the most common ones that you would download from like online resources but this is already going to be all prepped for us and it's already going to be a blender file so in our downloads there's going to be this rocks so we'll go in there there's going to be two different versions there's going to be hi-res there's going to be a low-res so the hi-res has 4k textures low-res has 1k textures so if you're on a slower computer grab the low one because it's substantially faster if you don't have a high-end graphics card i'm gonna stick with a high version and even the low the low isn't bad quality or anything it's still pretty hot still pretty detailed um so i'm going to grab the high hit append and then what i'm going to do is go to if you've never seen this before which probably haven't this is going to be the inside of a blender file so we just reached inside the blender file and we can grab stuff so we're not importing the whole blender flower we're only importing pieces of it i'm going to go to collections which are going to talk about in a bit and then choose rocks so the last two steps things we have to talk about the outliner which was what we're going to talk about next chapter for now i'm just going to choose rocks and then i hit a pen and there we go so we'll import it i'm already in rendered mode so it's going to take a little bit it's because it's going to load up my textures if you see this take a really long time to load your textures it's probably a good sign you want to go with us mark or the low-res objects and there we go so now what i can do is just lower this down so that we you know it's going to be below my sort scene i'm going to go ahead and just scale this so i'm going to hit s and then scale this down and there we go we can start laying stuff out i'm going to just grab a couple of them just to give you a tour of these so we have you know big chunk and then a big chunk over here and this one's really good for just like angular pieces specifically the sword and the stone i'm gonna also move the camera back just a bit so we can see the full sword right there and then i'm gonna go ahead and move this over like this and we'll want to bring this down like this i'm going to go ahead and rotate this down just get the flat surface up top like this and then bring this in and scale this in like that somewhere right in there and again this part is going to be really creative it's going to be really up to you feel free to try to follow me exactly i'll have this final project in the downloads as well so if you actually want to go in and see these exact transform values you can always do that as well um but for the most part it doesn't really matter you can uh utilize or uh kind of just use your own artistic judgment and to use what i'm doing for inspiration and go off that so we have our first rock so it's looking pretty good and then i'm just gonna go ahead and lay these out just two of them in the back something like this and i'm just going to get two going for now and then we're going to talk about the outliner next so i'll just move this back here and again when you're moving around these big scenes really take advantage of the cue frame selected for that i'm going to really help you get around so i'm going to leave it right there and then the next chapter we're going to start talking about the outliner which is what this is up here so our outliner let's talk about this right here and we haven't talked about this and this is a big part of blender but it doesn't really come necessary until you start doing bigger scenes and get away with not using it for quite some time and basically what it is it's a list view of our 3d scene so we have all of our 3d objects right here every single one of these the camera the lights over here we are going to see over here and what you see here is if i select my camera you see okay we had a camera right there if i select my light we have our light right there and if i select a rock you know we can scroll down and there's going to be our rock so it's a list view of our 3d scene why is this important well mostly for organizational purposes and there's some renderable properties as well as well as rigging the two that we're going to focus on right now is mostly rendering and organization so let's talk about just what we're seeing in here at the very top we have our scene collection this is going to be the group of the world and then underneath here we have another collection and then we have another collection so what are these collections you can really just think of them as groups we talked a little bit about that in the last chapter where we imported we went into the collections so we can think about those as just groups for things that live inside of our 3d scene and next up we're going to have our object so the white icons over here are going to be collections and then the orange ones are going to be our objects so every single one of these orange ones are going to be inside of our 3d scene and then we got some stuff over here you know these are just going to say modifiers so we have that wrench which is you know if we select this right here we have that wrench right here you notice how there's not a wrench right there but if we go up here there is a wrench that means there is modifiers so if we select one of these it'll just jump straight to the modifiers we also have this little green icon here um so if we click on this little green icon here if we expand this we'll see okay these are just going to hold like material properties and all that um you can see this little green icon right here so things like normals things like that those are all going to be here for the most part we can ignore that one for the most part and then we have our eye icon right here so this blue one this green one i don't really use those very much the ones that i use the most over here are going to be this eye icon and this is how we hide things so if i want to you know select my blade right here i can select that what i can do is hide it over here just like that or i can use you know h on my keyboard to hide i can select that h to hide undo out of that and then the big thing that we want to get to know as well is going to be the renderable icon so if i do something like this where i hide my blade right here and then i do render image we'll see here that that blade still shows up in the render why is that well viewport visibility and render visibility are two different things and we can find this up here in our render restrictions so we click this little dialog box up here um this is going to be our filter menu a lot of stuff in here you know if we don't want to display certain things or whatever it may be you know we can display you know just objects or whatever just lights all that we don't want to necessarily be overwhelmed by all this stuff what we want is this little button right up here which is going to be render render filters so we have our eye visibility we have our checkbox visibility and we have our render visibility all three of these highlighted icons right here are going to show up right here so we have our checkbox we have our i and we have our camera icon so the checkbox is going to be turned off completely it's not hiding it it's turning off it completely which means it's not going to interact with anything in our scene including viewport visibility and render visibility we have our icon which is just you know viewport visibility and then we have our camera right here so if i reselect my cube which in my blade right here and hide those what i'm going to get here is you know now it's not going to be visible at all which is what we want so before we move forward what we can do is just clean up the scene which is what we're going to do in the next chapter so this outline right now is really messy and if we you know middle mouse up and down we can go down uh to see all of the although we have here and basically you know we can't really tell what these things are we have cube we have cylinder we have cylinder and this is you know not a too terrible thing but as the scene gets bigger we're going to want to use this outliner more and more which means we want to clean this up so we should be able to know and find things in here very easily so i'm going to drag this down and what i'm going to do here is just select each one of these so we have my blade right here um we have my we have our guard we have to handle all this stuff we want to group all these into a collection so we can create a collection by using this button at the top right corner new collection if we just click it it's going to kind of create it wherever we want which we don't want to do what we're going to do is select scene selection right here or scene collection and then hit new collection which will essentially parent that new collection which is going to be this right here to our scene collection which is going to be the world so i'll double click this and i'll just call this sword and what i want to do now is drag everything into this so i click my cylinder drag and drop so i can either you know i can just guesstimate that you know if i click here i can see this currently in my viewport so i'm going to click and drag all of these in here uh one by one by one and now i have the ability to shut off my sword or turn it on right shut off my rocks turn it on and then as well as my camera and light which is right up here and then what we want to do here is just double click on each one of these i'm going to double click on this one call it blade and then just go down this one's going to be our guard this one's going to be our handle this one's going to be our palm mount and i'm just going to call this palm out one and then palm out two there we go so now everything is going to be cleaned up which means we're going to be ready to start duplicating this around and make the making the scene a bit bigger in the next chapter so we're going to continue working on our environment and what we're going to do now is take our rocket start laying out the rocks and something i just want to mention earlier right here really quick is that basically if we're not seeing it in the camera we don't have to worry about it and that's something for me i made a huge mistake on first you know not even just the first time i started doing 3d but years and years to come and what i learned was it's best to always set up your camera first so just like we did in this series we set up our camera first we lined up the composition and then we started building the environment around that that's super super super crucial um going down the road so before we start duplicating these rocks from we're going to talk about duplicate linked so if i click on this and then right click and go duplicate linked right here this is going to be an instance and what an instance is is not necessarily a full duplicate of an object but it's a reference to an object so if i you know minecraft we were doing shift d that is a straight copy you know copy and paste duplicate linked is a an instance and that's a 3d terminology that we use to define things that are referenced to each other the benefit of this is that the benefit of this is that it's going to keep our scene nice and light so the rock kit alone is about 11 megabytes if we were to duplicate this around our scene a bunch of times this would quickly get into like 200 300 megabyte file which would be really really big and it's going to be really really heavy on the render as well so duplicate linked is going to be an instance which means it's not going to actually create any new geometry it's just going to create a new transform value and a new transform value is just going to be all this data right here so just this data right here is very very lightweight whereas the actual mesh of the object is actually really heavy you can notice here whenever i select this and go into edit mode we're now editing both of them at the same time right so duplicate links so i'm going to go ahead and keep doing that that's going to be alt d for the shortcut so now we're going to want to continue to use alt d and then of course our move rotate scale g r and s um those are going to be super crucial as we start moving forward a tip when we start stacking these things around is that we want to kind of staircase these in the sense that um you know we have one right there we have one right there and one right there and we don't want to just stack it up like legos on top of each other with our minecraft we want it to be a little bit more organic and whenever you're doing this you know it's always good to just think about how this world was built and a cave essentially is the way you know most caves in the world work is that they're either some sort of erosion um that collapsed or they might have been some sort of like water uh you know some sort of like erosion came in through water and then um a bunch of you know empty areas a bunch of space ended up getting cleared out so i'm going to continue with this rotating around um we do have two rocks and you can see just by you know scaling move moving these around how unique they can look just by you know scaling it around and rotating all that kind of stuff it quickly makes it feel unique i'm gonna you know start broad with my bigger ones and then slowly move into my smaller ones as i go so just like we're painting a picture we want to start broad and go from there again we're not necessarily worried about anything that isn't directly on the camera um eevee as well it doesn't handle reflections off camera very well anyway so if this were if we were entering cycle which is a retracer which is a fancy word to say it's going to calculate things off the camera um it'd be a little bit more important but for what we're doing right now it's going to look great just by focusing on that you know camera so i'm going to continue this in continuing that out and you can see here i'm kind of using my viewport as a way to move this stuff around as well this is a good tip too so if i want to you know start to arc this like this as soon as i do alt d i can use my viewport as a way to um you know because the way we move this around like this with this middle handle right here or when you just simply alt d i'm just going to attach it to the cursor and then it's basically moving planar um to the camera perpendicular to the camera our viewport camera the navigation camera that we're moving around with great so i'll do a couple more alt d move that over rotate around um you can see that i'm using the white handle a lot which is again just a planar rotation which is rotating perpendicular to the viewport i'll just continue to move this up and down all around and we're going to leave it right there um we could certainly you know go all day with this stuff you know we got the camera done you know in cinematic i had to duplicate all the way down like this to create that corridor to create that tunnel um that's something you guys can experiment with all the techniques are going to be exactly the same the only thing added is just going to be the ground plane so i'll alt d and what i want to do here is just do escape to drop it because we want the ground plane to be a little bit more uh predictable in the sense that we don't want to actually move it up and down we just want to move it side to side so something like that looking good so the last thing we want to do here is that the viewport is looking really really flat you know it looks like a video game from the 90s right so what we're going to do is go up in our eevee settings and turn on our ambient occlusion we talked about a bit about that a couple times with minecraft um specifically so we turn that on so we start getting those contact areas but for this one we want to go up really high on the distance something like two and then same with the factor something like two um these can you can experiment with if you want to go up distance five for example it really starts to feel contacted back there i can now start to you know move these around since i can see okay now i have a hole there move that up move that around all that good stuff and then in the next chapter we're gonna start working on some atmosphere for me the toughest part about learning 3d modeling when i first started was following along with the video it was very easy to miss this button very easy to miss that button and before you know you have to stop rewind and struggle to find just the next step to the process this is a brutally exhausting process which is why we at cgfastrack.com built the step-by-step screenshot application and we put it into every single one of our courses this would have saved me so much time and frustration and makes it so much easier and enjoyable to learn 3d animation after you're done watching the video here on youtube click the link in the description and follow along there so here's where we're going to take our flat scene and apply some atmosphere on it so the biggest thing that atmosphere does is it helps create negative space i'm going to explain what that is but i'll kind of break down visually just what's happening here but basically you see here in the foreground it's nice and contrasty and then in the background it's all washed out right there right that's going to be the atmosphere it's also going to be the thing that allows us to have these god rays in here once we start lighting that's going to be atmosphere but the importance of negative space whenever you're working on any kind of artistic medium is super important so what we have here is two different types of negative space we have complementary colors which is basically the orange right there and the blue right there so the what that means is they're the opposites of each other on the color wheel they're complementary to each other and the negative space within these complementary colors is basically this is the positive space all of this is the negative negative space and i talk a lot a lot about this in the art of lighting as well that's another course on the website um basically this is the 80 20 rule where we want 20 of it to pop and then 80 of it of the canvas to be different you know color contrast all those things so complementary colors is one way to do negative space dollars with contrast right so here just by implementing the atmosphere we automatically get a great sense of depth within our scene all because of the negative space because the foreground is going to be nice and contrasty and then the background is going to be all washed out which just helps make the scene look bigger we can see depth um it just feels more engaging so tomorrow start implementing the atmosphere i want to do is go over my shading tab and then i'm going to just make sure i'm in my rendered mode right here so we can see what we're doing then we're going to go into object or go into a world mode so we know world because we set up our hdri here and that's going to be our environment lighting and now we're also going to apply atmosphere to the world so the entire world is going to have some atmospheric and then we do that with our volume metrics right here so there's a surface slot right here and a volume atmospheric effects and volumetric effects you they're pretty interchangeable in terms of terminology so that's what we're going to do is putting that right there so we need to do here is go to add we'll go to shader then we'll go to emission and what mission is going to do here is if i plug that in we'll immediately see okay everything gets flushed out but if we go down on the strength something like you know 0.00.05 you can see here okay now we can start to see you know clearly as we go back right here we start to see atmospheric perspective you know we see that atmosphere going backwards and then the foreground as well we start to see this as well so what we want to do now is start you know taking a look at this with our render so if i just you know go to render render image we can say okay not too bad but it just doesn't feel right it feels way way too washed out overall so we want to do here is do a gamma operation on this so we'll go to compositing and then what i do here is just go to add we'll go to color and then go to gamma so what is gamma uh gamma is basically just a way to adjust the gray value so we have our bright values right here we have our dark values right here and we can kind of crunch those in between so i want to do is just drag and drop this gamma on here and then i'll just go up to something like 3 just so we can see what it's doing i'll go ahead and click and drag right here i'm going to do alt shift and drag and you can see here okay you can see what it's doing a little bit better as we get interactive here and it basically it's crunching our image it's a gamma operation it's taking those mid tones and crunching them down right and what that's going to do is help help the entire scene not feel so washed out so i'm going to leave a gamma of 1.6 on here and now that we have this working now we can actually start to see our final composition is coming to life what we can do is just come in here and start doing things like go into our layout tab and we can start creating some more depth so i'm going to come in here right click duplicate linked move this in and what we want to do is create more depth within our scene so as i push this stuff towards the camera um we're going to get more sense of that atmospheric perspective something right in there and then up here you know we have that little hole right there so we want to fix that i'll go and frame this go and scale this up move that over there we go and we'll kind of perfect this stuff as we go always focusing on the camera i'm going to go to compositing go to render image and there we go now we're really starting to get a sense of depth in our scene and then in the next chapter we'll start working on our lighting so we want to go from here with this really flat scene and start adding in our lighting which is going to create all of these light shafts that we see here you see we have a pool of light right there pool of light right there pool of light right there and then of course our god rays that are coming in right here that's what we're going to focus on so i'm going to go back to my layout tab over here and we're going to focus on just the initial light shaft so i'm going to select my light right here and just get this into position so this part you know it's going to be really uh tricky i think a lot of people said they they struggled with this the first time um the lighting part specifically so i'm going to try to give you guys a couple extra tips that will make it a little bit easier so what we want to do here is we basically want to point the light at somewhere around a you know 45 degree angle from this right here so we have you know 45 degrees right here that'll be a starting point and then what we're going to do here is just open up a little bit of light like this so we're just going to open this up and basically what i want to do here is make sure that we can see the sword and the back rock both within the light shaft right so the first thing we have to do is set that up so i'm going to go to lighting i'm going to go ahead and adjust this up so we'll do something like 5000 and then boom you can start to see already we're flooding our light in the scene so that's really step one step one is flood your light scene if you're like this and you can't see your lighting at all in the scene that's a problem so get this part first really focus on that so where we can see the light shaft at somewhere around a 45 degree angle and then flood the scene with an opening now step two is going to be to start adding in the shafts of light and we do this by you know moving around these rocks after we get this light in a good spot we just want the rocks and the very first step when we do this is just to make sure that we can both get our sword and the rocks within the lights together so we'll go ahead and start moving this around so you can see boom so right now if i move this around you can see okay i got my light right in front of me right so i'm not i'm not over here like this moving this thing around that would be incredibly confusing what you want to do is come over here behind your light so we're essentially looking through the light that's what we want to do that's going to make it a lot easier and when we do that we look through the light basically what i'm trying to do here is line up the sword and my light together right so my light's right on top of that sword and then what i can do is just move this stuff around and you can see good lighting right here this is all about painting your scene with shadows we have shadows over top of everything and then you know we can expose the scene up a little bit more like that so we want to get a little bit of splashes in the back like this a big tip that we want to do is we want to make sure that the sword itself is going to be silhouetted by shadows so right now i'm getting a really big light shaft that's happening right here and just aesthetically that's going to look good down the road because we're not going to be able to see the guard and the handle very well so what i'm going to do here is now move this light even more further back like this because i want to get light shafts over here and also what i can do here is you know come in here and i can start to do stuff like this where i you know bring this forward and now you can see boom we have a shaft of light right there so this is going to be a lot of tweaking to do this um you know i the first time when i do this right now it might look really really easy and you're going to be like how did you do that so easily it's really just experience and practice so don't feel like you're um you know alone within the struggle there's going to be a lot of that with this chapter there we go so i got that shaft of light and then what i'm going to do is go back to my light over here i'm going to look through it just like this and i'm going to block out that top part right there now you can see that now that's looking better so i can paint right here i can paint that shadow in just by moving this around so now that guard is going to be silhouetted by atmosphere not a really bright rock which is what i'm after and now you know this area is looking good but we want to do is still go with the negative space so negative space being you know we don't want the whole scene to be bright this is just going to be splashes of light here here and here the bulk of the scene is going to be still in shadow that's going to be super important so i'm going to continue to duplicate this around i'm going to alt d move this up and there we go you can see we can start painting the scene with more shadows and i'm going to just continue to paint the scene with our shadows um again i'm getting a little pool of light right there so you can see that focusing on this area right here as i move this around just getting a little bit of a splash something like that and then we want to now start to get this background a little bit more uh in shadows also i'll do this up and then you can see here okay now we can see now that background is gonna start to uh be in shadow as well um but we don't wanna you know go too far and sense that we're you know darkening our sword we want that sword to be nice and bright but we want you know something like this and you can see here i can't actually knock that out right now because our light looks like that rock is going to be you know right there so what i can do is just focus on this middle area so we can get that shadow in there so i'm going to move this over move that back and i'm just going to scale this down something like that i'm just going to put this you know somewhere in the back and this is where we want to get very very specific so we start really broad and then we open it up and there you can see okay now i'm letting a little bit of light in here still i'm getting that light going right there and it's all looking pretty good something like that scale that light up a little bit and there we go and because our scene you know it's really really contrast or really really washed out what we want to do is go over to our compositing tab and then do a render so overall that's not too bad um obviously there's it's a little bit blown out so we'll tweak this as we go but next up we want to do is add in the volume metrics so i'm going to start working on our god rays which is what we see right here with these light shafts and we're going to do that with our volume node volume scatter node so i'm going to go back to my shading tab right here and what we need to do is add in volume scatter so we would add go to shader and we'll do volume scatter so we have our mission we have our volume scatter and if we just plug this in to see what we got you can see right out of the box we're gonna get something that looks a little bit more like it's coming from the light itself right so if i go over my layout tab over here and if i just jump into rendered mode over here in the viewport you can see okay we can see that we're actually getting light shafts happening here it's going to be a little bit too much off the bat so i'm going to tone this down something like zero two for the density um maybe a little bit higher i'm like point two there we go go back to lighting and then you see up here there we go now we have this right here if i move this around you can see we have that volumetric lighting in play so we get all this nice volumetric stuff happening which is really cool stuff check this out a little bit more like that cool stuff right i'm going to control z out of that and now what we want to do here is add this in with our emission so back to shading and now we want to do is an add shader we're going to add we'll go to shader then we'll go to add shader go ahead and drag and drop that over our top of our noodle right there go ahead and plug that in so it doesn't matter which order we plug these in here we just want to add shader that's going to add them both together and now we have essentially a light shaft and our emission if we want to temporarily turn off emissions so our scene isn't going getting so washed out and we can focus on just a volume scatter node that'd be a little bit helpful right now so what we want to do here is now focus on that so if i come in here i'm going to go back to my material preview mode so i can see a little bit better it doesn't actually show that volume metrics what i can do here is you know focus on um shaping out those god rays so i'm gonna go ahead alt d move that over scale this down and you can see here now we can paint in our volume metrics as well so i'm putting that in and then i'm creating that light shaft right there so now it's going to be going like that a little hard to see so what we can do is boost up our lighting so go to light and then we'll boost this up something like maybe something like uh 10 000. there we go so now we can really start to see that light shaft and we can see you know as i move these rocks around we can paint in uh you know god raise just like that and again i'm on a pretty fast computer for you you might have to like move it a little bit then you know get an update move a little bit get an update all that good stuff so if you feel like i'm working really fast um don't be too discouraged by that um you know i i've been there where i've been on a super cell computer and it can be a struggle so whatever you have to do to have patience and all that um you know you can work in solid mode so right now i'm actually rendering two viewports right now so i got you know render right there and a runner right there if you just switch one over to solid mode it's gonna speed things up also making your viewport smaller so this is actually if you're on like a 4k monitor this is going to be trying to render almost 4k so if you just do something like this where you click and drag all the way up it immediately makes your resolution smaller for your render which means you're going to get faster updates so now even like as i move now you can see way faster updates all just from you know making that a little bit smaller and now what i want to do is just add in a little bit of detail so all d i'll scale this in scale this out something like this where we have like a really long one and then i'll just go ahead and rotate that around so that kind of sits in the middle of my so i'm going to go to my light and then again look through there and again while i'm looking through here i can see okay let's line that up with our sword right there and now i can literally move this in front of there and i know this light shaft is going to be hitting that sword which is really cool so we just want a little bit of detail um within there so now you can see okay that volumetric starts to look a lot more organic rather than really artificial something like that i can hide it unhide it i like this shaft that's happening down there when i hide it and unhide it so i'm hitting h control z h control z so what i can do here is actually just move this out of the out of the back a little bit more so it's not so much on the foreground but it's going to be in the back of the sword a little bit again this part is going to be super tedious it's going to take a lot of practice but it's all those like little details that are going to make the scene really pop out and now i'm going to go back to my shading tab and go ahead and plug in my mission again and then i'll go ahead and go to my compositing tab and then just do a render great so that's looking good so far and then in the next chapter we're going to start working on some final tweaks so most of the tweaks i'm going to be doing from here right now are going to be very specific to my scene i'm going to do the ones that you should you also can do um but there's going to be a lot that's going to be kind of tweaky tweaking very specific to my scene so first off we want to be able to iterate very very fast and be able to see our render very fast anytime we make a final update we want to be able to see our final scene so in our image output settings right here output properties what we can do is set our percentage to something like 50. so we have to render that really high resolution also we can use the hotkey f12 which will then pull up that hotkey really fast or pull up that runner really fast or you know render render image right there it's pretty quick as well so the other thing that we want to do really quick is just apply a little bit of depth of field onto our scene depth of field is where we get that like blurry background effect right so i'm going to select my camera up here go to my camera properties i'll just check on depth of field you can see already it kind of gets really blurry what i can do is just select focus on and then click my guard right here object guard right there and now it's always always going to focus on that and then if i go lower on my f-stop right here so if i do something like point one you can see okay the entire background becomes blurry this is going to be rendered with ev which is a real-time render which isn't going to have perfect depth of field so we don't want to go too heavy on this somewhere around uh one will do for my shop um so we get a little bit of blurriness in the foreground a little bit of blurry this in the background i'll go ahead and f12 and check that out and you see okay now let's look at very cinematic blurriness blurriness all looking really good and then the next thing what we want to do is just make sure that that background feels very atmospheric and right now the contrast here contrast right here we can't see it very clean where we go from here to here you know we should be able to see a very clear shape but we can't right so what we do is go back to our shading tab um go to our mission and we can play around with that we can do something like 0.1 and then f12 to see this final result you see okay not too bad um i think you know we might be able to go a little bit lower on our uh gamma over here so compositing gamma um if we go up on this it's going to crunch it a little bit more so it's something like a value of two and now you can see okay now this is becomes very clear this shape right here that's what we want and again that's just getting back to negative space we want a very clear positive foreground all the way around here and then a very clear negative back here and that's turning prop pretty good so i'm gonna leave it right there so the other thing with my scene right now the glow is a little bit too much so i'm gonna go back to my layout tab right here i'm gonna go to my render settings up here go to bloom and then you know there's a couple different things that we can do we can tone down the radius so i'm just gonna go undo out of that and what i like to do here is i like to just come in here and i can just do like divide by two so forward slash two and then what i'll do is just hit f12 that way i can see my final result see okay is that enough or is it not um we can go down an intensity same thing divided by two hit enter and then f12 now i know if i want to go back to the original all i have to do is multiply it by two great so in terms of negative space um this is starting to look pretty good that highlight is looking a little bit better but the biggest thing right now is like you know the blade is looking really good this part is looking really good but we can't see the handle up here it's getting really really lost it's getting lost within this background so we have a couple of options we can add some more lights in which can help but we don't want to really do that either because it's going to be affecting a lot of our scene so a good technique to do here is we go into our shading tab i'm going to select my guard and go over to object mode right here and what we can do is simply brighten this up right so it's already metallic you know the specular slider is going to be not useful right here because you know we have the metallic slider all the way up but what we can do is go up on the base color we can select this and you know we have this value slider right here if we just go up on this it's going to make that shader brighter so if i hit f12 again see what that's looking like so now you can see okay right away we can start to see that a little bit better which is exactly what we want and now if we go over to our handle for example we can start playing with this as well this one because it's not metallic we can go up on the specularity which is the reflection which is going to make it brighter overall now if i hit f12 and see what that looks like okay now we can start to see that pop a little bit more and you know we're just plugging the the grunge map straight into here a good technique that we can do is plug in a ramp so we can control this a little bit better so if we go to add so go to converter and then color ramp and i'll go ahead and just drag and drop this on this now it's a little bit hard to see here but if i just you know get out of my camera mode right here i'll just hit n make sure my view lock camera is off and now i'll go ahead and cue frame selected and come in here now what we can do is make this brighter or you know more diffused and basically what this is doing is it's going to crunch our block if i just plug this ramp directly into the material output we can see a little bit better but the white values here are going to be diffused which means we're not going to be able to see much of it the black of parts of it are going to be shiny so as i crunch the blocks it's going to become shinier so i'm going to go ahead and plug in the principle shader again and now you can see okay now we're getting more shine right there which is what we want so it's going to help a little bit it's not going to be a cure-all if i go to view viewport camera we can get back to our camera and i'll just do f12 so that's looking better so at this point you know we can do a couple different versions of this we can do you know if i just render image and i could you know f12 for you what i would do is go into the percentage here turn this back up to 100 percent i'm going to leave this down for now and then i'm going to do f12 and then i'm just going to do image save as and we'll do our final cave version 1 and then we can just do a ton of different iterations we can go back to our layout tab here we can select our camera here we can move this in like this move this up and we can do a shot right here move that in then we'll hit f12 there we go now we can do a ton of different versions that look just like this they're going to all look very cinematic i'm very clean um all every all the work that we've done this far it's going to look really good that depth of field is going to look really good on these close-up shots so you can see as we move in here uh just like that i'm going to hit f12 and then boom that blurry background back there is going to look really really good image save as we'll do a final k version 3. and yeah you can play around with you know coming into our camera settings right here playing with the focal length so if you want to do like something like 15 which is a wide angle lens um it's gonna be a lot more work because you're going to see a lot more of the scene you can see how like this can make it feel very grand whereas like 50 and maybe 90 millimeter is going to make it feel a bit more sleek so 90 millimeters closer to what i used inside of the cinematic so we'll do something like that f12 and this point you know it's getting really washed out because i need to fill in the rest of the scene so i'm going to undo out of that i'm just going to make this 50 and i'm going to leave off just with a wider composition um yep and we'll leave it off right there turned out pretty good and then we're gonna have a couple of bonus chapters specifically on integrating the camera and then doing some very basic keyframe animation just to get things moving and as always show us your work we want to see it we check instagram every day hashtag with cg fasttrack and we'll check it out here's where we're headed we're going to work on two different camera animations that are going to equal to two different shots and we're also going to integrate the little floaty bits so we can see a little bit of particles that we have here and we're also going to integrate the character using mixamo so i want to stress really quick that this is not necessarily animation isn't a beginner's thing you want to start with by just building basic props and then later on down the road now we have three different or two different areas that we're going to cover keyframes which is the very basics and just a very basic particle setup so after you're done doing this you know don't expect to be able to do much else outside of what we're seeing you know we have a full course on our website just to do animation alone so we're going to go through things as quickly as possible cover what we need to explain things as much as we can with the time we have but ultimately if you feel like you're going to be button pushing and not really understanding the full thing that's totally fine and so what we're going to do now is work on this shot right here which is just a vertical camera animation so to start setting up our first shot with our camera animation you can see here you know if we just take our camera and move this up and down it's pretty easy to get something going right so we need to actually do two things we need to set up our time slider down here so we talked a bit about this with minecraft we have our play button right here and as soon as we do that we're basically in animation mode nothing's moving yet because we haven't set up our keyframes so i'll hit pause and then i'll hit rewind so the first thing we want to do is just set up our start and point our endpoint is going to be 120 that's going to be five seconds long so it's 24 frames a second five seconds long which equals 120 frames and then from here what we can do is go all the way we can click and drag our time slider right here and go all the frame all the way to frame to 120 and then we'll do is go ahead and move this in and start framing this up so we want to get the last frame looking pretty good we'll come in here and do something like this somewhere right in there and then what we want to do is just make sure that this is going to be animation friendly so if we go up to somewhere out here and then go all the way down right here how's it going to look and this is going to look really cool because we got that depth of field going which is going to look really nice foreground is going to look really out of focus so we'll go all the way down you know somewhere right in here and then just go up all the way like that just to see how it's going to look like it's in in motion now um what i'm going to know is while i'm on frame 120 you know frame up my camera like this and then go over to my object properties right here and then on location what i want to do is right click insert keyframes and what a keyframe is going to do is basically you can think of this as a way to stamp these values onto this frame right here and then if i go back all the way to the frame one i can now move this again just like that and then what we can do now is go all the way to the bottom right there and i'll come over here and you'll see that we now have this little orange you know icon right here green means it's hasn't been adjusted and but there is a keyframe on it and orange means it's been adjusted what we want to do here is just right click insert keyframes and now you can see okay as we move this slider it's going to be moving again if you're on a slower computer what you want to do is mostly work with solid mode solid mode is going to be really really quick um to animate on um since we're just doing a very very basic animation it doesn't matter too much but then what we can do is while we're in solid mode just hit play and we can see you know closer to what you know the final result is going to do now with cinematic camera moves one of the you know common mistakes i remember making and i see a lot as well as having this camera move that starts moving slow then it speeds up and then it slows down again that's not very cinematic and if you watch the cinematic for the sword in the stone series you'll see that we don't really ever do that so if we want to adjust that what we do is just pause this and then what we can do is select our keyframes down here we'll right click we'll go into our tribulation mode and we'll set this to linear now if we click lap what we can do is now hit play and now we'll see that okay now it's not doing any speeding up or slowing down it's going to look nice and smooth now what is what is all this keyframe interpolation um basically bezier is going to be smooth linear is going to be sharp so again we're going to be skipping over a lot of stuff but basically you think of this is no ease and no ease out now if we want to make any adjustments to this we could always you know select the keyframe right click and then just go to uh delete keyframes just like that and now it's not going to be moving anymore i'm going to go ahead and hit control z to undo out of that so so we have our keyframe there so it's looking pretty good i'm going to go back over to rendered mode so we can see this what's going to look like and what i like to do here is just you know hit f12 to render see what it looks like there and then go all the way down you know do a couple renders see how it's looking that's looking pretty good don't go up right here do another render see how that's looking so that's looking pretty good now before we render this up we want to go to our render properties up here and we want to adjust a couple more things so we have you know screen space reflections if we turn that on you notice right here we'll be able to see a little bit more um of an interaction with the sword right there so i'm going to toggle this on and off so you see that so you can see the sword is not going to be reflecting the ground which is going to look really nice in animation mode now we also want to turn on motion blur which is going to be nice to just capture a little bit of camera motion blur now we want to actually render this out so go to our output properties right here and what we'll do is we have our you know resolution set up right here um we're currently at 50 and we're going to get a little error i believe um with that so we'll talk about that in a second what we want to do is set the output so make sure you have your file saved somewhere i mean wherever how you have this saved is where it's also going to save the renders so we're going to do forward slash forward slash right there and basically what that does is it says okay blender render this out wherever the blender file is and that's going to be a relative path and i'm just going to do underscore renders and then we'll do camera a version one so camera a just being the first camera that we're going to do and then just version one we'll do file format we'll do mpeg video and then after this what we want to do is go down to encoding and click this little option right here which is going to be a preset for encoding and what i'm going to do is go to h264 and mp4 which is going to be a little bit more instagram compatible and then we'll do medium quality and then we'll go to high quality and then before we render this out i'm just going to go ahead and save so first off you know typically i don't render with mpeg video typically i would render with like an exr image sequence uh just for the sake of keeping this super basic we're just gonna stick with mpeg video for now and that's just gonna be an easy way to get it out in the world post it on social media and all that so now what we can do is just simply go up to render up here and then we'll do render animation um you'll see we got our error down here that we're getting and it's saying it's height not divisible by two which basically is saying that the video format that we're trying to render it's not compatible with with this because uh this is just a weird format and that's because we have this 50 on them so long story short we can you know boost us up to 100 if we're ready to do final quality i would stick with 50 until you're absolutely sure you're you're okay with this and what i'm going to do is just change this to 1340. um that's gonna be a nice workaround for us to be able to render this out in animation without getting that error then as soon as we get that we'll see we'll pop up um we'll see the frames starting to flash like this and it's this is gonna take a while for sure um you know for me it's gonna maybe take like a minute or two if you're on a slower computer it could take a few hours right so um we're gonna go ahead and skip over this rendering part in the video and here we are with our final animation so from here what we need to do is we need to start adding in our particles which what we're going to start working on next so now we're gonna start working on the particle setup that we see here so all these little floaty dust particles that we have right here that help really helps make the scene uh feel really natural and not more atmospheric so before we get started what we want to do is just create a brand new setup and at this point it's really good to start utilizing the outliner a lot so if we do just turn off all of these collections we can now basically just have a fresh scene and if we do collection up here and we can just do you know new collection while i have my scene collection selected i'll create that collection and just do particles now we can create everything now with inside that while this is selected so while this is selected we'll go up to our add object appear mesh and then we'll do cube there we go and then we'll now what we'll do is add object mesh and then we'll do iso sphere so iso sphere is just another primitive that we're going to be working with and it's going to come out really big what we're going to do is go to object mode over here and we'll just scale this down to something like 0.1 we'll go ahead and move this off the frame and now what we can do is we go to this box but we're going to use this as a way to emit particles using this isosphere so if we go down here we can see we have our little particle set up right here so if we come in here we get particle properties and then we'll do is a plus and that's just going to create a new particle system and now we have officially our first particle system and if i just hit play we'll start to see some stuff now this particle system gets really complicated there's so many settings in here a lot of really good stuff in here but we're only going to scratch the surface just what we need to create this project so i'm going to go ahead and rewind go back to the beginning and then we what we're going to do now is just set the number to 300 that's just going to limit the amount that we see that's going to be emitted at any given time we're going to do start frame is going to be negative 100 that's just going to set it to where on frame one there's already going to be stuff in the air right so we don't want to just magically poof out of nowhere we want it to start on frame one with things already living in our scene life lifetime we're going to set this to 200 and basically what that means is the particles are not going to die for 200 frames so they're going to be visible for at least 200 frames which negative 100 and then 200 you know that's going to equal you know 100 frames and if we want to go up to something like 300 on that too that's totally fine the very first thing that we want to do is to get this a little bit closer what we'll do is we'll go down to field weights and then we have things like gravity we'll just go ahead and turn gravity down to zero and that'll be like okay the now they're just going to be floating off into space and now we want to do is go over to our velocity up here and velocity basically just controls how fast these things are going to be moving by default and velocity normal basically means okay wherever the polygon direction is happening it's going to be basically shooting off into space and what we want to do is set that down to zero so it's not actually shooting off into space at all so they're basically just going to be static right now right and if we do something like randomize and we set that randomize to something like point two all of a sudden okay now they're going in you know completely random directions but now they're just like floating around which is more what we what we're after now we'll go down to render and we'll do render as and then we'll choose object right here and then we'll do iso instance and do isosphere now you can see okay now we're grabbing that object that we had before and if i just go into my wireframe mode here i can see this a little bit better i'm gonna do wireframe mode over here as well and we can start to see okay now we're really starting to get some floaty bits and we can move this down so the cube itself i'm going to have pause and then move this down so this is actually going to be more in our shot and what i can do now is just maybe turn on sword for example just so we can see this in context with the shot and then just rewind and hit play now we can get a feel for like okay is this looking about where we're headed in this particular case it is and then in the next chapter we're going to start working on the rendering setup for these if we render this thing right now we'll just do render image we'll see okay we just get this weird box looking thing so we'll start talking about that next so as we scrub through here and if we just hit render image we'll see okay the biggest problem right now is that we can't actually see our particles we just see this thing and if we come down here to the bottom of this box we'll actually see that we're still seeing the box so we have to do is make this box transparent so we'll go ahead and select our box right here we'll go over to our shading tab um we'll go ahead and click new for new shader and then what we're going to do here is you know get rid of this principle bsdf and select that x to delete and then we're going to do is add shader and then do transparent bsdf so what is transparent bsdf this is basically just how we like transparency is just a fancy way to say okay now we're going to be seeing through the object now uh the problem here is that we we can't actually if we go back to layout here you know if we start to scrub through here we go back over to rendering we can still see the box we don't see the sword right so what we have to do here is go to our material tab we can do that over here or in our shading network we just have to have our cube selected down here in our material tab and then what we have to do is set the blending mode to alpha blend that is just a way for us to make sure that this thing is going to be transparent and we'll do shadow mode and just choose none and i'm just going to click render right here so we can see that coming through and we'll see okay if we go back to our layout tab now we're going to be seeing through that and we can start to see those as well now it's really difficult to see because of our environments so bright so something else that we can do is just go for shading go to the world tab and just turn off a couple things this is going to be temporary temporarily so if i just turn off something like you know volume that's going to you know we're going to be able to see it a lot better and if we also turn off the background blur which is going to be this one right here now we can see this on just black while it's rendering and now if we go over to layout we can just you know rewind hit play and there we go we know we can now see okay this is looking pretty close to what we're after great so at this point we can go ahead and go back to our shading we'll go ahead and plug these things back in and then we'll plug in our plug in our volume again and then from here as well we'll go back to our layout and turn on rocks and turn on collection which is where our lights and everything are going to be great and i'll just scrub through here i'll go to render image and then check this out so now we can see okay now we have all of that stuff looking pretty good so now we can actually start integrating our character into the scene we're gonna do that in the next chapter so to start integrating our character we're going to use this website called mixamo and this is a really good website for just doing background characters generic characters um this isn't something i would necessarily use for like a hero asset but for what we're doing we just need like a secondary element to complement our hero sword this is a great website to do that now you'll need to log in and then what we'll do is go ahead and go to characters and then you know you can feel free to pick out whatever you want i'm just going to type in female spoiler alert um the hero character of our scene is going to be a female a lot of people didn't realize that when watching their cinematic so you can always just search for erisa up here in the search as well and then what we can do is go over to animations and then what we can do is search for this as well i'm just going to search for stop walking um you can click on any one of these animations feel free to tell your own stories um the one i'm going to choose is going to be somewhere around uh right here just the standard stop walking there you go so we're gonna have her coming up to the store the sword and just come into a stop very very simple now um to get this into blender what we need to do is just download it there's gonna be a couple different settings here we want to choose 24 frames per second that's what we're going to be using inside of blender fbx is going to be totally great some people had issues with fbx the first time around and they ended up using dae um so i'm going to stick with fbx but feel free to use the other one as well they'll both work fine i'm just going to hit download so now to get that into our scene all we're going to have to do is file import and then we'll just do fbx and then you know just navigate to wherever you need to go to download i got mine right here you can also just work with the character that's in the downloads in the link below we'll just do fbx stopwalking fbx import um and before we do this we actually want to set up a collection for this so i'm just going to cancel out that what i'm going to do here is just go to scene collection up here hit plus and then type in char for character now whenever we import this into our scene it's going to go into its own collection which is going to make a little bit easier to work with so file import fbx and then stop walking.fbx hit import and there we go there's going to be our character now to lay this out i'm going to go ahead and turn off our particles for a little bit so we can see it's a little better and now what we want to do is we only want to move around the armature we don't want to move around the mesh if we do that we can you know end up with some distortions in the animation um and if we scrub our timeline right here we'll see okay now you should see a little bit of animation so this is where um the dae file versus fbx might work better for you depending on you know whether whether or not blender is going to be cooperating so you should see some animation scrubbing around i'm going to go ahead and select my armature here and then we'll use this to move the character around just like this move this into her scene get her on the flat ground um and there we go so we'll just rotate this around as well get her in the scene there we go so that's all good to go and then in the next chapter we'll start setting up the next shot so before we start working on the next shot what we want to do is make a backup of this camera so this camera you know we like it it's looking great but we want a secondary camera that we're going to use to render out as well and what we're going to do here is just go to our camera up here our collection right now we'll select our camera and then we'll do is right click and we'll just do duplicate objects i'm going to go ahead and hit escape to drop it and now we have to have our camera which can really navigate the camera too now we need to set this as our active camera the way we do that is inside of our scene properties right here and we'll choose camera and we'll do camera two so by setting this active camera camera too it does one of two it does two different things it sets the renderable camera so whenever we do render image is now going to be communicating with this camera it's also going to be working with our viewport here so if we just do view and then viewport then we'll just do camera what we're going to do is get access to that camera two so now what we can do is just delete these keyframes that are going to be on camera two up here i'll select these hit x and then just do delete and there we go now you can see okay we're not we're moving the timeline but it's not moving our camera appears not moving we're currently looking through the camera so everything's looking great so now we want to set up this next shot now we're going to pull this back a little bit just like this get this framed up so what we want to do here is get the last frame looking good so something like this and then we'll get the first frame looking good so we'll set to something like 120. that's going to look good and what i'm looking at here is we want this to be in the right third right there we're going to want our character so i'm going to select my armature we're going to want a character in here as well something like this and i'm also going to move the camera back quite a bit so we can get a full frame we want to be able to see the actual environment a little bit the stone that the sword's in currently there we go and then we'll go ahead and go to the armature here and then we'll go ahead and move this around like that so we'll have her in the left side of the frame and then the sword in the right now if we come back here um i'll just go ahead and add frame 120 go ahead and select that camera and then we'll go over the object properties over here and then right click insert keyframe and then we'll do all the way to frame one and then we'll go ahead and set that up as well so do something like this we'll just get her hand in the shot again we're trying to make her a secondary element we don't want the entire focus on that i'm going to insert keyframe on that and there we go we can start to see that happening as well now we want her in the frame at least for the majority of it we'll do something like this move it over right there it's going to take some experimentation when right click insert keyframe i'm also going to set these keys to linear as well so i actually deleted i accidentally inserted the wrong key frame there i'm going to select this i'm going to right click and just do interpolation mode linear and again that's just going to help make it feel a little bit more cinematic and hit play there we go this is looking pretty good um so we want to make sure that we can see her in the left side of the frame for the bulk of the render so maybe we'll start with our right hand over here we'll right click uh replace keyframes on that we'll go ahead and hit play and there we go so now we see her walking in and there we go now we can play around with this a little bit more and again this part is going to be really a lot of tweaking i'm going to move her to the left side a little bit and we have one little problem to start i'm again i'm going to be on rendered mode again i i probably sound like a broken record with this stuff but make sure you're in solid mode if you're on a slower computer i'm going to hit play that's looking pretty good the one problem though right now is that she comes to a stop which we don't want and you know there is ways to fix this with combining different animations what we want to do is you know select somewhere where her feet are planted somewhere right in here select those keyframes like this and then just ctrl c to copy that and then just move this down here and then ctrl v to paste so now what it's doing here is it's just taking that animation and moving it down here as well and then it's going to do a little bit of interpolation between them which will just keep keep her moving um it's not going to be perfect by a long shot it's going to be something quick that we can do to just get a secondary element into the scene not too bad that's looking pretty good and at this point you know we're kind of done we can turn back on our particles i'm going to go ahead and turn back on our render i'm going to save this really quick and then we're going to scrub through here make sure our animation is looking great so i'll hit f12 to render and then we'll just do this all the way back so now we want to animate the sword turning off as she gets closer to the sword so i'm going to go to about frame 100 then i'll go into my sword collection over here select blade and then i'm going to go over to my shading tab over here go over to object and then i'm going to make sure that i'm on this the blade glow we have to actually select that over here so blade and blade glow we'll choose glow and then what we'll do here is keyframe this value right here so we can right click there and then insert keyframes so keyframes are not just limited to objects but we can do them to shaders as well then we'll go back to layout and then we'll go over say you know eight different frames and then we'll keyframe that off so go over here hit zero right click and then insert keyframe and then you can always right click uh clear or delete keyframes clearly uh keyframes if you want to get rid of them so now we can see here okay now it's going on and then it's shutting off perfect and at this point what i'm going to do is go to my output properties over here and then go over here and just we'll just do camera b for our secondary camera hit enter and then we'll go ahead and render that out run our animation and there we go we'll go ahead and then just do render and then view animation to view that and there we go looking pretty good so i'll just play this through a couple of different times check it out so that's all looking really awesome and then in the next chapter we'll go ahead and start combining these two into one movie clip so this is where we're headed we're going to utilize blender's built-in video editing and combine both clips into one render so uh to do this what i'm going to do here is instead of creating all this in this one file i actually prefer to do this in a different file um for you know long complicated reasons long story short there's a couple settings that we're gonna have to set up specifically for the video editor and personally i just like to have that be in a different file i'll show you those as we go so i'm in a new blender file here i'm going to go over to my plus tab over here hit plus and then we'll go to video editing and then hit video editing right there that's just going to drop us into the video editing ui and the first thing that we're going to do is just make sure we have our resolution set up so we'll do 1080 by 1340 which is what we were using before i'm going to do 50 which is exactly what we were doing before again if you want to put that higher for yours totally fine and then what we need to do is bring these renders into our timeline right here so this timeline is very very similar to the timeline that we're working before it's set up in seconds not frame so what i'm going to do here is go to view and then turn off show seconds and now we're going to be basically working with frames which is exactly what we were doing before i'm going to go to add over here and then we'll do add movie file then i got my admit two movie clips here i've got camera a i'm just going to select that add movie clip and there we go so now to give you a bird's eye view of how this works as we click and drag right here we can now see our render and there's one problem and this is where we get into the settings i was talking about it looks really flat so we need a different color space setting for our video than we do for our actual 3d scene and again if we were doing other workflows we could potentially find ways around this for now what i'm going to do is just go into my render settings up here and go all the way down to color management right here and then choose view transform and then we're going to set this to standard and that's just going to basically tell not to apply any kind of post-processing colors to this and it's going to look a little bit more predictable that's looking good i'm going to go ahead and drag this around so we can drag this left and right and what we want to do is we want to start this at frame 1 with this first shot and then we're going to do is add you know add movie and then we're gonna choose that second shot camera b version one add a movie clip and then move that down just like this and there we go i'm gonna line these up so now we can see okay now we have two different shots working together and then we can just go ahead and back this up by hitting rewind and then hit play and there we go now that's going to cut over to that new shot right there and there we go so we got a little bit of of a black spot at the very end that's because you know 120 plus 120 is only 240. so we want to do is set our end frame over here to 240 and now we're ready to render this out um so what i'll do here is just go into my image properties go ahead and make sure play this make sure that ends on a clean frame which it does looking good and then over here what we'll do is we'll go to image output output properties and i'll just do my forward slash forward slash again to save it wherever i have this file saved up then we'll just do cinematic version one dot and then we'll choose file format we'll do epic video and then we'll do encoding and then we'll just choose the preset again h264 and mp4 that's just to make it social media compatible basically then we'll do output quality and then we'll choose high quality and that's basically that at this point i'm going to version this up because i've already got a version one here so i'm gonna do version two and then we'll do render animation like that this part should go much much much faster um we are getting an error down here it says could not open file for writing that's basically because we're telling it right here with the forward slash right there that we have a relative path but we actually need to save this out so i'm going to save this let me save here we'll just do cinematic version one there we go now wherever we have this saved out now it's going to put that file right there so i'm do render animation let that go through should be quick and looks like i just finished and what i'm going to do is here's just view animation and that's going to be our final render again a lot of compression stuff happening we just double compressed our render again there's a lot of other ways to do all this stuff this is basically just a quick way to get from point a to point b so it's all looking really cool in the next chapter we're going to do is we're going to start talking about some next steps after blender fast track so as always hashtag your work with cg fasttrack we check instagram every single day we love seeing your cases work and the best things to do right off the bat whenever you first successfully get through blender fast track is to go back and rebuild the project try to do that maybe two or three times until you can do it by yourself without following along with the step-by-step screenshots without checking the video so that you know how to get around the interface how you know you know how to build a project on your own and then from there you really only you know just based off what you've learned thus far you really just know how to build a sword and it's going to be a little bit hard to interpret everything that we've done to something else and that's really where the blender fundamentals series comes in it's a little bit of a longer series um it's about you know seven hours long three different sections and you can see here that there's a ton of different really awesome elements and that's in the scene we got this you know magic orb we have the candles we have the books we have the windows there's a little ring back there there's a ton of really good assets in here that you'll learn how to build and basically what happens is after you build your first one your second one your third one your fourth one and then so on and so forth after you learn how to build a variety of things you'll start to be able to apply that knowledge to other things as well and then you know we have the beginner to advanced library going right now and then as you go down you know implementing animation getting some lighting um the blender fast track series is really meant to just give you a quick overview without burdening you with too much information and then the blender fundamental series is going to go more in depth into each every area that we've already talked about and then animation as well it goes more into animation and then the art of lighting goes much much more in depth with lighting this ball all those are meant for beginners and yeah we'll wrap it up with it right there um show short

Channel: CG Fast Track

Views: 277,370

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Id: y0DMMwwdBaY

Length: 96min 1sec (5761 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 23 2020