Create a Beautiful Sky Full of Stars - Blender Tutorial

hey guys it's Steve here from CG geek with another blender tutorial this one on creating a beautiful night sky full of stars so this is a really fun tutorial and it's a useful tutorial because you can use it pretty much in any scene and change it from a data type scene to a night time scene for example you could use any of the tutorials I have on creating an environment like this snowy mountain tutorial or maybe the ocean tutorial that would be cool or even just something like I did here with some trees and again you can follow the tree tutorial I have for something like that but it's a really fun tutorial I'm creating a starry night sky and the cool thing about it is everything is done within blender you don't need any third party you know tools or textures or anything else it's all done straight inside blenders so let's just do it alright so start off we don't need this cube so delete it we don't need that lamp either delete that as well and what I'm going to do is add a big half a sphere here as our world - to hold our stars I'm gonna go shift a and add in a UV sphere we can add a little bit more detail to this so I'm going to ctrl - and I will put a subdivision surface modifier on it with a view of two on it cool and now let's scale this up real big something like 15 should do the trick alright now go in front view hit 5 on your keyboard you go to orthographic view hit tab and let's just delete the bottom half of these vertices so just like those X delete and one more time because we have this option on you can turn that off and avoid doing it twice which I'll do but there we go we have a half a world we're actually more like five eighths of a world but we're going to use this to hold our stars so let's make a smooth shading and let's create a star so the star will be just an eco sphere because it's a little lower poly and we don't need as many vertices because there are very teeny little stars so just add an eco sphere and scale down a bit and that right there can be your star we'll make a smooth shading and let's give it a material now to get into the materials I'm going to use cycles render and I'm going to enable and add and that add-on is node Wrangler so no triangular is something you want because it is awesome and super powerful and you want to check it on so go to add-ons turn that on and you'll be happy that I told you to do that okay so once you've enabled that add-on in the user preferences there you can close that window off and you're good to go so what I'm going to do now is add the material in for the star so I'm just going to split my window here and open up my node editor then tada and here we can go to materials add new material you can do it here or you can do it down here just click new material and we can give this star our material so the star is going to be in a mission shader because stars emit light so I'm going to change it from a diffuse just delete that with X and add in an emission shade it right there and we can connect these two and because I want to I'm going to start using the node R angular futures and that is one of them just hold ctrl right click I'm sorry right click and it connected for you instead of having to grab the little teeny buttons you can just use ctrl slide and it connects it for you awesome and it speeds up the workflow and that's all about what we're about we're about getting things done quickly so with that done we can go ahead and add in our next node which is going to be a color ramp so converter color ramp and this is going to be the intensity of the stars so hold on I have a subsurface ecosphere turnoff the subsurface um how Edyta subsurf on that you don't want no subsurf on you start go ahead and go color and use this in the strength so this is going to be the strength of the stars and I'm going to change it from linear to consistent and basically now I can tweak the variety of stars in the variety of brightnesses basically if you look up at the stars at night you'll see there's a few of them that really stand out that are bright but then if you look carefully you'll see like just millions of them a lot of them aren't quite as bright as distills few that stand out so this is going to be how I choose which ones are bright in which ones are darker so with consistent on I can use different values here to just tell it how much I wanted this and much of one of that so give this about that much 100% white stars and I'll hit control dropping another a little lever there make this a bit brighter like so drop control in there make this one a little bit darker than that last one I'll get a go darker like so maybe brighten this one up just a little bit there and then hit control drop one in there and give this one a little more than black and then we don't want any full black so make that one just a little bit brighter too all right now these are kind of close maybe bring this one up a little bit so you have kind of a spectrum of different colors here that you can choose from and we're not going to choose from we're going to have it randomly choose from these so I'm gonna go a add input object info grab the little random node there so handy and drop it into the factor value now you'll see if I go to rendered view here we have a blank little star here and I fired duplicate it we have a different color one if i duplicate again we have a different colored one you can see it randomly chooses which one is going to be every time I duplicate it that's how it's going to do it with the particle system so I might want a few more brighter stars because it seems it's just kind of too many dark so to add another bar in there and give yourself some more light stars really easy alright so with that done the last thing I want to do in this material is give it a little color variation I don't know if this is accurate or not but sometimes when you look up at the stars you just look up at different images of stars you'll see the stars sometimes look a little bit different in color and it's just cool to give them a little color variation so I'm dropping another color ramp here this time I'm just going to take the first color I'll leave it white and then I'll give it in the last color a slight blue hint not nothing too major but like a slight blue hint there and then I'll drop one more in the middle give it just a slight red hue so we have this sort of color variation that we might get throughout the different stars and if I drop the color into the color there and then add in another random node here object info right there connect it up and I'm sorry I need to do it the right proper way which is called the control and right-clicking because it's so much cooler all right so now with that done we go rendered we have a blue star we have a light blue star wave dark star dark star darks don't wanna get a red star in here doesn't seem like it wants to be red how come I'm not getting much red in there huh so we're not getting any red maybe maybe we need to increase the amount of red chances so let's go ahead and do that again whoops i undid this can I get the cup let's just give ourselves a little bit more red maybe do something like that and just give us a little more red just to make sure it's working I don't like that I'm not getting no red in there huh don't like getting no red what is oh I'm sorry I have it object index in that random there we go now we're getting too much red so I can go ahead and delete that that is how you do the color though so go ahead and command Z all those duplicates and then yeah make sure the random is the one connected to the factor there and we don't need that little handle awesome so some people like it that I leave little things in there like that and I'll show you how I solve little issues that I have other people might get frustrated by it I'm sorry I'm just trying trying to teach you guys how to fix issues you might find along the way so I hope it's helpful out of leave things in there like that but you can see now it's working we get some red and some blue so really cool all right so let's distribute these across our our big sphere here so I'll go ahead and select that fear and go particle system new particle system am i right now we want it to be hair and we want to be advanced and you can see all these hair strands are pointing outward what I'm going to do is I want them to point inward so let me quick split my window here so I can have the 3d view here non rendered and I'm going to go tab and then go n to my properties tab here click that normal face then you can see the normals well facing outwards I'm going to point them inwards so just select them all go to your options here let me just show you here if you're shading you've ease under normals you want to flip the direction perfect now if you tab into edit mode or out of edit mode you see that they're pointing inward and that's how I want it alright so now I can go ahead and add in that star and it will be called ecosphere because I was too lazy to name it so I'm going to go render an object right here and choose ecosphere cool and now we have those stars up in the sky looking sweet if I hit 5 and then kind of jump inside here like so I can set my camera to be in here and I want my camera to be pretty much in the center so I'm just gonna go shift s cursor to Center grab my camera shift s selection to cursor and then if I hit 0 I'll go to my camera here and I can kind of pivot it upwards to look at the starry skies now it's cool for the scene is if your camera adds a wider depth of field or focal length I should say not dip the field focal length so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to my camera settings here and change it from 35 down to about 16 so you get more stars you see in there and it just looks better all right so everything is working good just need to change those star settings a bit so turn off the emitter we don't want the emitter rendering we just want the stars in the sky so make sure you uncheck emitter and your render settings there and the size is obviously way too big so crank the size down give it some random size and give it a whole lot more stars so I'm going to give it another 0 to that number you can see your stars showing up nicely there and now on top of that what I'm going to do is I'm going to enable children now children is basically just like a sounds a children of that star so for every star out there it's going to give it children so I'm going to do simple there and you see it just drops a ton more stars in there and basically they copy the information of the main particle that's already there so they render a bit faster and that's the benefit of using them so let me just take the render value number down to about 20 and this is the display number you'll see and I'm just going to take the roundness right here and pull that up so it really shoots them out it's kind of hard to see with it being rendered so I'm just going to take that out of view and you can see here we have all these little packets of stars and taking around this value up spreads those out a bit and it just helps in the radius to the radius is another one that shoots them out like that so turn my radius and round this up a bit and you'll get them distributed much more evenly cool whoops there we go and there's my desktop if you're wondering okay and I'm gonna take the size down just a little bit to on these children's stars so we'll go down to about 0.9 there already so now we are ready to be done with the stars I think that's pretty much it for our starry sky looks looks very cool possibly too big but those can be tweaked later if we need to always change the size of them that looks great though so with that done let's set up the environment so the world color and that's going to be in our world settings here we want to choose use nodes and for the color we want to be a sky texture so just to choose a little box there and then go sky texture and you see you have your sky texture there let's go into our node editor here and right here you can see it's already set to material nodes this is compositing nodes and this right here is the world nodes so we want the world nodes I'm going to click that little box there I have my world settings here and what I want to do is I want to add in some some color variation to this so if I go rendered right now you see it's kind of bright and too bright so I'm going to take the strength down to start to about 0.4 I'm going to drop a hue/saturation value in there drop that in there and then we can take the value down a little bit more the sky on top of that and maybe you just want to do some things like give it more saturation or less saturation depending on what you want etc so this is looking pretty good I'm just going to drop one more node in here and that's going to be the RGB curves so shift a RGB curves and let's take the color down even more something like that is going to about do it now I just want to position my camera so I don't see the floor of the world here I'm just going to hit DoubleTap our our I'm selecting it here I gather to jump back to my to my star layer you can see the Stars rendering there I'm just hit double tap R and pivot that upwards so I don't have that the floor in it and it's just the sky basically all right there we go looking pretty good excellent so if you find you a viewport running kind of sluggish because of all these stars and you're seen what you can do is with that children setting that's another reason it's nice to use children it's because you can turn them off so you can take the display on the children down to just one and it won't show any of them but it'll still render them so now you can see a viewport runs a lot smoother and you'll just get work done faster so do that and as long as is that one and this is that 20 you'll still get them rendering awesome alright so now it's time to do a little bit more to the scene and add in some clouds for some nice little variation in the sky so to do this I'm going to use a new layer because I'm going to render it out in separate render layers so we have a whole lot more control later on so go ahead and go to layer two and let's add in a cloud well a cloud that's going to be made of 2d textures and we're just going to kind of layer them in the sky and it will look good for something like this I'm going to add in a plane let me go to top view here hit 5 of my number pad and I'm going to scale that plane up and scale on the X just was kind of a long shaped cloud right there for now alright then maybe too much in the X or something like that and let's just give that a subdivision well no let's first divide it so I'm going to tab into edit mode hit W and subdivide and I'll do that a few times to get myself some vertices there to work with all right now I'll give it a little bit of shape to by grabbing that Center versi hitting O to turn on my portion editing right here and pulling it downward and then scrolling my wheel and the mouse to to kind of curve that up more if you don't have a mouse wheel a little tip for you is if you're grabbing it you can go ctrl + or Alt + + alt - on a keyboard to change the size alright so there we go and now we have that done I'm going to choose smooth shading in my tools here under object mode and then I'm going to add a little bit of displacement to this texture so that's just going to be a modifier first I'll add a subdivision surface modifier and then on top of that I'll add a displacement modifier right there once you've done that you can go new texture and you won't see anything happening yet because you got to go to your texture tab you got to change it from sky texture over to displacement texture and now that you're there you'll see a set to image and movie and that's not what we want we want a cloud texture so we'll choose clouds and they you know you get some cloud shapes coming across there that will work fine just those default settings maybe just make it slightly smaller shaped clouds but that will be fine then go back to modifier settings and we can take the strength way down because that is just too crazy cloudy alright something like that's looking pretty good I'd say it's maybe a little strong but there we go you can tweak it as much as you want I'd be halfway back go 1.5 0.15 and there you go so now let's stick this cloud up in the sky and work on our materials okay so there's our cloud up in the sky if I go rendered you'll see it's just a blank nothing so switching back to our material nodes here our object nodes there choose that little box there choose new material and we don't need to fuse again because these are going to be emitting otherwise they won't show up and they also kind of emit light when the stars hit them they show shine up a little bit so I'm going to go ahead and add in a shader emission shader connect that up and you get that blink old piece of plane so go ahead and add in a texture noise texture and what we want up right away with that is a converter color ramp so go shift a converter color ramp and connect that up to that all right now if we click on that's with control shift and we have an old regular add-on like we did earlier we can see a little preview of what that's going to look like and it's not looking too bad but there might be just a little bit too much curvature in this so maybe just pull that back a little bit just so it's not too crazy curved all right now I'm going to kind of tweak these settings to have the white set portions of it be the clouds and the black portions be where I don't want any clouds so just kind of tweaking this and now I'm going to change the size and scale the scale will be something like 21 maybe 18 something something like that and then I'm going to crank the detail up to something like 8 so we get some more detail maybe more maybe I'll go all the way up to 16 16 is the max and so you get some nice little detail on those clouds and let's can't tell in that black off a little bit all right something like that isn't looking too bad now the distortion is something that you can use a little bit of to kind of give yourself some cool wavy clouds you can't go to much because it starts looking weird but a little bit of that is helpful all right so now one thing left to do well maybe a few things left to do but is we don't want these sharp edges we want the clouds to kind of fade in and fade out so how I'm going to do that is with another texture I'm going to go shift a add in texture and this is going to be a gradient texture so use the gradient texture and change it to spherical and add in a color ramp we'll just duplicate this one to make it easy connect those up holding ctrl and right-click because that's the way I'm doing it now and do it again and I guess it's felt to do because it kind of to the factors I guess it doesn't really matter factor would probably work too but I'm going to go select that and you can see I get that sphere coming on the side of my my plane there and I need to move that to be more centralized so what I have to do is normally I would go add in a texture coordinate and add in a mapping node but to speed things up with that node Wrangler on I'm just going to go ctrl T and it will add both those in a lot of you guys told me to do that in the comments when I was using node Wrangler and I listen to you it's awesome do it it's helpful so now I'm just gonna kind of tweak the location here in the negative values I'll go negative 4 and that kind of centralizes it a little bit better now I might have to tweak some of these locations to Center eyes it even more so turn that up a little bit there and then turn it down a little bit sighs there using that value there so just kind of work with these settings until you have a centralized and it's a nice orb in the sky something like that isn't bad and now let's take this gradient map here and you can catch Ange the scale of it with this too and make it something nice and fatty so I'm going to change it from linear to YZ YZ is sometimes just a little bit more fede and something like that awesome so what I'm going to do to connect the two of these now is just a simple color mix multiply so change it to multiply and multiply this on the bottom socket and then this one in the top socket so you have into the factor two one you have the clouds right there fading in and fading out the size might be a little bit big still I might make those just a little bit bigger there changing up to 16 and awesome so now what we're going to do is going to make this be the color of the emission shader okay now you might think well I still get that black chunk sitting there what am I going to do about that well what I'm gonna do is add in a mixed shader so shift a add in a shader transparent shader where is it right here and then to connect the two of these I'm just going to hold alt right click drag between them and node regular does it for me super awesome did I tell you it's awesome and now for the factor here it's just going to be boom let's multiply now let's all hold ctrl and right click and we connect the factor up to that so now when I look at this you should see where these two values need to be switched there Falah we have let me just move around some organized some clouds appearing in the sky so very cool and very easy to do now you can kind of tweak your cloud settings make it more or less intense etc but that looks pretty good right there you turn the distortion down just a little bit you know animating this distortion could give you some cool moving clouds too so that's something to keep in mind if you wanted to animate the scene you can go ahead and hit I and add keyframes right into here so that's cool method if you want to animate your clouds alright so something like that is looking pretty decent for the cloud layer I might just scale that up a little bit and there you go so what I'm going to do is take these clouds you can change the strength of them with the emission of value here so turn it down maybe a little bit go into camera view here and I'll actually I'm already in camera B here but um so that will work fine I can just kind of look at it from this view and move them around in this view I'm going to duplicate these and just mix them up a little bit give them some layers like I was talking about so go ahead and shift D move them around scale um rotate them along with Zed just kind of keep them looking like similar but often the distance may be a little bit more and then what you can do is go to your materials hit that little checkbox to make its own material and then you can tweak the settings and even change the way they look in the scale of them and everything else so that's cool and let's give them a to give them some variation let me go ahead and do more of that just kind of layering up in the sky here moving these around maybe pulling them back and a scaling them up bigger I'm just giving us some variation in the clouds I think my main texture she might be a little strong still maybe turn that down a little bit that's looking pretty cool maybe just do one more now and we can kind of pull it down as a lower hanging cloud right in here maybe I'll just going to rotate that though give it a little bit of a different rotation there all of these might be good if they're rotated just a little bit towards the camera I'm just grabbing them hang R twice to kind of pivot them all right there we go and that's looking that's looking like some pretty sweet clouds pretty satisfied with those maybe just turn down the amount of this one a tad more but everything else is looking pretty sweet so there is our layers of clouds and that's ready to render so we have our clouds and we have our stars now if you are going to add something like an environment or some trees to these you go ahead and add them on another layer I don't know if I'm going to bother with that in this tutorial though because this is basically just on creating a starry sky and a half tutorials on adding trees and mountains and everything else so you could do that on your own so let's go ahead and get into the compositing and finishing up at the scene so to do that I'm going to go to my render layers now render layers are super powerful and super fun and as soon as you understand them you can't stop using them so render layers I'm going to use two of them so just hit that plus there and the first layer will be called stars and the second layer we can call clouds now to choose to set it up to use stars in the clouds I'm just going to say stars are going to be this layer here because they are layer one and then choose clouds and you can see right now everything is selected I want to just be that layer there now I don't want either of these to use the environment so choose uncheck use environment in both of them and then add in one more final render layer node and that will be the environment I'll just leave that as E and V for environment and leave environment checked and then check like the third layer there which is the blank scene which will just render out the sky so cool those are the three main nodes you need for the starry sky once you've done that you should be able to render so I'm just gonna quickly create a render here give it about a hundred samples that's about a minimum when you're doing the stars and yeah go ahead and hit f12 and render it out you see over here it renders out pretty fast and hold on I'm sorry I didn't select those layers if you don't select them they're not going to render so you just want to hold shift down and click on the layers that you want rendered and then you can go ahead and go f12 to render you can see here that it's already looking pretty cool though just in our little preview scene there and you see your starts rendering out they look very awesome you see some of those dimmer stars and some of those brighter stars maybe too many stars it could possibly be too many stars but some people might argue there can never be too many stars so we can work with it and we can always turn them down in the compositor or boost them up so there we go render out the stars and then we're rendering out the clouds this might take just a little longer so I'll pause the recording and jump back once it's finished alright and I'm back and you can see the environment render layer is just finishing up right there and we're ready to go so to start I'm just going to switch to my compositing nodes let's just give ourselves a little bit more room to work here close this tab off with N and choose use nodes and backdrop there we go and we have our star layer here so we'll start with the stars and I'll just go ctrl shift so we can see what those stars are looking like crazy looks like a universe of crazy stars there might be a little bit big so you can always turn the size down a little bit on those particles just crank them where re-size just crank those down to about a point one two but I can still work with them for now and I might just do a final render layer later so let's duplicate our render layers and give ourselves the environment render layer there we go and if I ctrl shift and you can see it's just that blank gradient environment so let's start by giving our stars some clothes because stars glow at night it's one of the coolest things about them so to do that I'm just going to go shift a in a filter blur I'm going to choose fast guardian and drop in the first just drop it in there you go let's see what well I guess I can't see what's looking like because it's plugged into the sides there we go give us some blur this is just going to be a slight blur to start though so I'll go oh - and then I'll duplicate this blur and do it one more time and give it a wider blur alright so give us one like a eight or so pretty good look at that you can see it's a wider glow maybe even nine all right now I'll add in a color mix and I'll change it to add and I'll add these two glows together so we have there we go we double the glow which is always cool and then I'm going to duplicate this add node one more time and I'll add these clothes on top of the stars and there you go you see we got those crazy glows on our scene you can tone down the amount of gloves though if it's too much by taking the factory right down but another thing is I think I have too many stars and meeting too bright of light so what you can do is jump back to your default render layer here grab your star it might be easy to find it up here is the ecosphere go to your node editor and then just crank back the amount of bright stars by doing something like that so you might want to do that and I think I actually will and if you want just rerender one of these layers without having to rerender all three of them you can just click that little checkbox on the star layer and you can see it renders out just this star layer which ends up ultimately saving you a whole lot of time so there we go this looks like a better starry sky with a little smaller stars and a little fewer super bright stars so this should look a little bit better and give us a little better results so that's rendering pretty fast and because we don't have to render the clouds out it will vendor very fast so there we go and we're ready to roll with the new stars alright so now I can crank this strength back up to one because now you can see it's not just making the whole scene bright but just a few of them and some of them are still dim and it's looking pretty awesome already so let's go ahead and add these stars to our environment I'm going to go color mix change to add drop it in the bottom and drop the environment in the top all right check that out control shift click it there you go you get your environment behind the stars and it's looking pretty sweet now if you want to change the way the environment looked a little bit we could drop a filter color balance what color balance notice there color color balance and you can give it just a little bit of a deeper blue color something like that is pretty cool and change the brightness and darkness and everything else if you wanted so that's looking pretty good and now one thing I want to do is I do it and pretty much every one of my scenes go to the color management change it to film you can see that darkens everything up a little bit but then I crank the exposure back up to one and add some of that brightness back into the scene and now I can kind of change the scene here by tweaking the colors and making that a little bit brighter back there it just adds a little bit more filmic look to it and exposure and I like the looks of it so there's our stars looking pretty nice now what I want to do is I want to add in those clouds let me go shift a add in input render layers we got one more render layer to use and that's our clouds let's check what that looks like you can see it looks pretty decent so to start off I'm just going to do duplicate that the mix shader' there drop the clouds in the bottom and you can see we have the clouds coming in the scene not too bad but something doesn't look right and you guessed it what doesn't look right is the fact that the the clouds let me see what that's like it doesn't make a difference which direction it's flooded the clouds aren't really covering up any of the stars and clouds normally kind of cover up the stars a bit so what I'm going to do to fix that is pretty simple I'm going to take this texture here add in a color ramp converter color ramp right there drop this into the factor and then go to it now I'm going to flip it right there and you see it looks like it's pure white after I flip the the gradient there but if I dig the blacks and pull it all the way up right up close you can see we have detail in the clouds there so I'm gonna go ahead and do that pull it up really closed point zero zero five something like that and then I can use this as the factor and you see that those areas where it was black hmm I'm not really seeing it actually maybe I need to invert this think I think the white is going to show the Stars and the black isn't I think I need a genius to mix actually there we go and now I need to invert it I believe or we could just flip these inputs which should do the same effect there we go we can see that in those areas we aren't getting the stars now the issue is I have my notes up a little wonky right now I don't want this to be here I want this to be here I'm getting just a step ahead of myself so this one's going to go to the Stars being added to the environment and then this node is just going to be a basic add to add in our clouds so there we go just fix that there and now you're ready to roll and basically you can see here that with this node we're just kind of cutting away the stars where these clouds are supposed to be and that's awesome I might make that even more harsh I changed it to ease I might get a little bit better gradient again and maybe I'll change that position it could be just doing a little tighter there just because we kind of want to cut those stars back there we go it's looking pretty good and then let's give that a little bit more of a gradient by dropping in a blur node so filter blur drop a wren right there change it fast Gaussian we'll just go relative on the Y and do it by 5's and then we'll see that kind of feeds it out that's fading it too much let's drop it down to one oops both of them one there we go and now I can make this even more small just really pop those blacks out awesome and what's this looking like well we get that and it's looking pretty decent maybe just a little bit more blur now but it's looking pretty cool so the clouds are kind of hiding or covering up some of the the stars now and it's looking pretty good maybe just turn down the amount of blur a little bit I think you're just a little harsh and I see what's looking again first blurred yeah that's pretty decent maybe 1.5 just because just because it's better than one all right now the cloud seemed a little dark so I could drop in a color balance note on the clouds color color balance and tweak the clouds a little bit I want to tweak these clouds so drop it in there awesome let's just kind of boost the highlights a little bit make it a little brighter boost the mids kind of pull those clouds out a little dark in there there we go that's looking good and now we can see what it looks like there you go it's looking pretty sweet maybe too bright but that's the power of render layers when you have the render layers you can tweak the settings without having to re render the whole thing because you can tweak just parts of it now if I use this for the factor I think that will cut back more of those stars and that's what I want so go ahead and use this in the color ramp and I'll cut back even more of those stars and then I can create the blur up a little bit more to let some more that starts back in maybe I'll even go up to three there we go so that's looking pretty sweet now I might turn down the amount those clouds are added in but you can see it's looking very cool this might be still a little harsh maybe I'll move a position just back a little bit there there we go and you can see we're back in business things are looking pretty fancy so that is essentially the combination of the three layers now there's just a few tricks that we can do to make this look even cooler one of them is being adding some color variation to the sky so sometimes when you take a picture the sky even if you don't see those colors you'll get some red or some blue or something cool coming in the background and that's what I'm going to add in here so to do that I'm going to drop in a color and filter and I'm going to choose glare there we go and I'm going to change it from streaks over the ghosts so drop that into the image on ghosts and check it so right now it doesn't look like much I want to change the mix to be a hundred percent and then I have to just take the threshold way down point zero zero one you see you get some of that some kind of glare coming off those clouds I'm going to change the color modulation to be up a bit more so you get some color in there I'm going to take the letter A shins up a bit too so it's brighter like that and that's not bad we're kind of ready to work with it so this is something that I can just add in to my environment to add some variation to the scene and it's kind of working off the clouds as well so we get some interesting kind of looks to this glare note so I'm just going to add a color mix drop it in there change it to add and we can add this glare to the environment so you see the environment now it looks like that obviously that's way too strong we're just going to go like a point one two just a subtle little bit of color popping into the scene there and now when you look at the final image you'll see that a little bit of glare doesn't show up too much but it adds quite a bit of variation to it so if you crank it up a little bit more you'll get even more kind of popping color and then we might want to tweak the amount of clouds I turn that down a little bit and it's looking pretty nice the last thing we want to do is a few more glows and Claire's just they kind of add to the scene giving a little star effect that's not a star effect to the stars you get it of course you get it let me go literation is to five leave it up streaks being four and then just turn the threshold down until we start seeing those streaks kind of come in with some of these stars there we go something like that giving a little bit of an angle to it changes to 45 that looks pretty cool some streaks on those stars and they're just kind of popping a little bit more in places maybe even too bright if they're too bright you can kind of turn down the amount of glow over here or maybe just make the glow a little bit bigger so it's less harsh but um it's looking pretty good the brightest stars are kind of popping out even more and maybe just take the threshold up a little bit so they're not all quite popping just some of them are alright that's good just a tad mark and then some color modulation is always nice as well to add some color to the scene and to the glares there we go and with that color changed you don't see it as much so you might want to give it just a little bit more and that's looking pretty decent now last but not least is one more glare node and that's going to be ghosts over the whole scene so we can have some ghosts created from the star effects and what knocks it just looks cool so I'll just show you so to give ourselves more control I like to do the switching the mix to one then adding in a color mix node which is you get to add and adding it back in to the bottom socket there it's basically the same thing as a mix here except it has more control over how intense it is and then I can tweet the colors of a two in a separate note if I wanted to so go into this now let's see what that Claire is looking like our main apps are a Claire but ghosts so really nothing yet and that's just because we need to drop our threshold to a low value I'm going to go to point zero one oops that's not point that's that's that's point there we go let's see what that's looking like ooh it's pretty cool nice you get the star effects creating some cool glare and I like it so crank up the color modulation maybe just a little bit more and if you did something like I did in my scene adding a moon then you'd have some glare coming like the kharsa seen this ways and just looks pretty nice so I'm going to turn this down point to something and you get that effect subtle but it adds to it gives them more of a center point to the scene now if you'd like a tutorial on how i created that moon feel free to shoot me a comment saying hey steve make a tutorial that moon it's just a procedural texture node and it was kind of a node setup it was all done in blender and it was kind of fun so if you really wanted that I would do that for you guys but that is going to do it I might just tweak my background environment here a little bit give it just a little bit more blue hue just to kind of pop it a little bit more there we go that's pretty sweet and then you could drop a color balance on your final starry sky layer and just kind of tweak the highlights and shadows and anything that you might think is too much and the highlights might be a little much so I might just take the highlights down here a little bit and boost the mids a little bit then with this here through that gives us all right that looks luxe pretty decent and you can give just a little color change in here to maybe make the highlights a little red and then the mids slightly blue something like that we'll see what that adds to it just a little bit of variation to the scene might help so there you go it's not really noticeable but it's there so that is it guys that is our starry night sky with some procedural clouds and everything in place it looks pretty sweet I think I like it these stars might be popping just a little bit too much and that's just going to be we need to turn the amount of glow down on it so you can always come back turn the amount of glow down and if you want to turn that glow down and add just a bit of overall glow you can do that too by dropping in one more glare node over here let's add it in here actually and just give it a streaks will give it fought glow just a little foggy glow and see what that does and there we go it doesn't look too bad take threshold down a bit 2.1 see what that looks like nodes start moving just a little bit slower once you have that money but that's kind of a nice subtle glow to the scene and I like it so there we go guys that is our finished starry sky that that environment might be a little bit bright there and then just connect your final node to your composite layer there and you're ready to save it out so shift space to make it fullscreen and I'll just zoom in a little bit with alt V that is it I hope you guys enjoyed this tutorial and had fun creating a night sky in blender it's a fun little tutorial I found well I had fun making I don't know if you had fun but if you had fun let me know in the comments guys and show me your results so thanks for watching and thanks for learning and I'll see you guys all later bye bye

Channel: CG Geek

Views: 177,456

Keywords: Blender, Stars, Tutorial, Sky, Night, Enviorment, Realistic, Halloween, trees, Animated, Clouds, Easy, Beginner, Tips, Blender (Software), Animation

Id: uWSeBoIDJV4

Length: 44min 29sec (2669 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 01 2015