Create a Sci-Fi Artwork - Blender Tutorial

in today's tutorial i'm going to show you the step-by-step process and how to create this sci-fi artwork in blender it's created in eevee and we start off by creating this planet the shader for atmosphere and clouds creating some meteorites and modeling this spaceship and finally doing some awesome post processing [Music] okay now let's get started in blender and as usual let's delete the default cube add in a sphere this will be our planet and i'm applying a subdivision service modifier shading everything smooth and scaling the sphere very large because it's a large planet and yeah quick note you can find the project files for these tutorials in the description below just go to my patreon account and you can download them there now i'm adding in the camera and reducing the focal length a bit because i want this wide field of view and 16 by 9 ratio and now i'm adding in the spaceship or at least a placeholder for my spaceship because this stage is all about blocking out the scene roughly getting the right composition now i'm adding in the smaller planet just duplicating the main planet and i like to use this two-sided view to switch between my camera view and the scene view to get the perspectives right i'm trying to orient the ship in a way as if it was flying into the planet's atmosphere now i'd like to have some meteorites to balance the composition on the left side a bit so i'm adding in some spheres as placeholders positioning them along the curvature of the planet and making sure that they are in different heights and different levels though they don't look as uniform and i'm trying to play some very small ones next to some larger ones to give this kind of real realistic feel i'm using the passport 2 option and yeah changing the background to a bit darker color not completely black but make it a bit darker and now let's focus a bit more on lighting the scene this is a part i do a lot of times in this yeah and this blocking process i'm positioning a sun lamp right in the scene pressing double r to freely rotate it and i'm trying to get some light on the planet and on my spaceship that's very important and i try to make it fade away a bit to the right and to the left side to get kind of a natural vignette going to focus the eye into our scene i'm changing the the color properties here to get a bit more contrast for this tutorial i'm using this special blender boot with a real-time ssgi i've linked you a tutorial to that right here in the info card so make sure to check that out it's pretty awesome built so now let's look at our planet how is it constructed it's basically like an onion it's made of this inner part which has this planet shader and then some outer parts which have atmosphere and clouds now let's focus a bit more on this shader right here this is what it looks like and we start off with a simple sphere which is uv unmapped with sphere unmapping and i place this venus texture this is an actual image of venus right in here and i think it gives me a great starting point plug that in into an image shader pretty basic stuff nothing special but now we're gonna take a closer look at how this shader is constructed and how we got this kind of mustafa look going um with a lot of lava and magma and volcanic activity and so on it is basically a principle shader which i plugged the main texture in as a diffuse input and i used a bump mapping node and change the distance on there to kind of give this this look of texture of actual texture and make it look not as flat then i've used this emission shader plugged the texture in as the color input and i used the same texture with a color ramp node which i really increased the contrast as the strength input to limit these glowing parts i want to make some parts that are glowing and i did this with this shade and i mixed that with my principal main shader just by using a simple musgrave texture as you can see here so it isn't applied all over the planet but just in specific parts and these parts are defined by this texture right here simple mass grave texture right out of blender used color ram to limit its effect and make the transition between darker and lighter parts a bit smoother and to further enhance this look of glowing parts on my planet i use this emission shader and combine combine that with again a mix shader with these two elements from before and i used again my original texture fed into a color ramp note to as a filter or as a way to limit where this takes place okay now let's have a look at the clouds clouds is basically the same sphere but scaled up a tiny bit and i applied this shader right here it all starts off with a real texture of the clouds of earth you can find them on the nasa website i put down in the link below and i plugged that in into a principal shader or at least i used it as a mask in this principle shader i used this noise texture you can see right here to add a bit more depth to my clothes because at the moment they are a bit flat and don't have a lot of difference between light and shadow and i used this noise texture as my main diffuse map used my clouds as a bump map to add more detail to these parts right here and again to get some sense of depth and then i used my main clouds image which is which is black and white again fed it through color ramp and mixed that again on a second level with another noise texture to further give more detail to our clouds and then i use that as the final filter to mix between this principled and a transparent shader so wherever it's black it's transparent and so on you i think you get the point and then i used this texture duplicated it scaled it a bit up and rotated it and i did that i think about four times and this gives the sense of real clouds and it creates kind of this this depth a real cool effect is if you've got a ship flying through these clouds it actually looks like it's passing through clouds and then there is this atmosphere again it's the same sphere just duplicated scaled a bit up and i applied this simple shader right here just a mix shader mixing between transparency and this very strong emission shader which has this orange color and using a fresnel input as a way to only see it wherever the the viewing angle is flat enough to be able to see that using a fresnel node for that in combination with a color ramp is a good way to achieve this effect and very important of course is to enable bloom in the settings because this really makes this glowing effect so play around with these settings for the smaller planet or this moon or the satellite right here i basically used the same texture of venus and added this the same basic material as for our atmosphere right inside of our shader to create this glowing edge this faint glowing edge i use the add shader to add this effect on top use the emission shader in combination with with fresnel shader to create this effect so very easy right there now let's look at how i constructed one of these meteorites there's a very easy technique to do that just add in a uv sphere and add a subdivision surface modifier with a level of one to that add a displacement modifier and for the texture choose voronoi texture because this creates kind of rocky surfaces it's used for that a lot of times and it really increases the scale you get a rough base shape going which has a lot of variation and play around with the strength to increase this effect and it's always going back and forth between size and strength to get different different effects now on top of that add an another subdivision surface modifier again level one and again another displacement modifier using this time the clouds setting for a bit smaller details and on a very low setting of course because it shouldn't be too strong to get some variation in between these different meteorites going i add in this m team and go into the first displacement modifier the one which has the large detail on it change the displacement type to object and as you can see if i move my objects and my copies around they all change based on their relative position to the empty and then i add in a lot more of these copies place them around the scene make some clumps of meteorites so they tend to attract each other due to gravity i think and try to stay together some larger ones some smaller ones some really small ones and get kind of a natural organic way to do that okay now let's look at our ship this is a small speed modeling segment where i'll show you how to to basically model this ship it's basic box modeling using a mirror modifier to split my mesh along the y-axis or along the x-axis and yeah i'm using some reference of some ships i found on pinterest i'm trying to get the rough the rough proportions right here i don't go too much into details it's always about limiting yourself to not use that much detail right early on because detail is something you can add later on but in this stage less detail is actually beneficial because it helps you to get the proportions better dialed in without focusing too much on uh on dealing with bad topology or something like that i'm not creating a production ready model it's just for this quick render so i'm not afraid of using um of using uh n-gons in my modeling phase so it's not the best topology this is basically you could call it something like previous quality but um in real productions if i want to really animate this mesh or see it close up i would of course use better topology but i think in these cases why not doing it this way so let's now focus on the shading part right here i've dialed down the speed in this part a bit i'm adding in a sun lamp actually i'm in a different scene i like to work this way if i'm modeling some details from my main scene i create a new scene file and place my ship for example right in there and copy that to the main file after that um this ship is basically made out of two materials the one on the lower sides and the bottom sides is a bit darker this is a typical pattern you see a lot of times in yeah in space flight and and um spacecraft and as you see me doing here i add these parts these lower parts right here to the black material which has a bit more roughness and it's not completely black don't make it too dark but it is black enough and then i'm using the inset tool with individual individual insets to create these windows assign black materials right here into these fins i again add black material and the top part will be the white material okay now let's add these glowing boosters right here so i add in these two again make an inset apply this material an emission shader simple emission shader make it not too bluish but slightly and increase the strength to get this glowing effect now i want to place this nasa logo right on my ship so i add in this image use clipping so it doesn't repeat all over the ship and i use the uv unwrapper right here with project from view enabled just use it in side view it's not the best way to do that but it's a quick way and make sure to apply the scale for your ship and then go in and place it in the uv editor as you like then i use this mix shader plug that in and use the alpha input of the nasa logo as a factory define where transparency and where the logo will be and then change the color to black and then then you can go in and add more and more details refine it but as it is just uh very far away and not very visible in this render i try to um not overdo it with that because nobody will actually be able to see that in the end so make sure to find the right balance with that and yeah now let's make some final corrections and place it right into our scene make sure to rotate it to match it to the sunlight and that you can really see the sun in this image and then play around with the bloom settings they not only will affect the blooming of these thrusters but also of the planet atmosphere okay so now let's give the asterisk or meteorites a darker material make it very rough make the scene a bit darker and then prepare everything for render because we are almost ready enable ambient occlusion bloom maybe screen space ray tracing make sure to check the link out in the description for that and then press f12 and hit render okay now for the post processing we are in photoshop and i'm going to show you each and every step i did to get from this base image to our final image first thing i did i added in some contrast to our planet because at the moment it is a bit flat and i did that simply by creating a new layer drawing on that with a dark brush and using soft light for example as a blend mode use the lighter brush or use the curves adjustment to only increase the intensity of the clouds in certain parts right here because they got a bit too dark for my taste on this layer i added in some atmospheric glows by simply using the existing colors painting over my planet using screen blending modes using blurs for example to get a bit more glow going did that multiple times and limited its effect to only certain parts my overall goal here is to focus the eye more into the center by adding contrast color in this case using the vivid light blend mode to paint on with very strong orange colors right in the center and really focusing the eye into the scene that's the main goal i've got with that again adding some more glows using different blend modes overlay soft light all of these work well on this layer i combined everything that's visible into one layer and increase the contrast by a lot use the gaussian blur to blur this image out and use that in combination with this blend mode right here and a low opacity to even more enhance the contrast in these parts or here i felt like the right side was a bit too bright for my taste so i um again added in some vignetting and this is a pretty nice effect i want to increase the intensity of the clouds very selectively and i did that by increasing the contrast of a new copy of this image and then using these film modes right here and limiting them holding alt pressed and limiting them only to the lower or to the brighter parts of the image very cool technique right here here again i painted in some glows this is the main thing i did here because ev is not as as good at that as cycles for example i added in some specific clouds and again use the same fill feature to limit them only to the background but not the meteorites on the left side pretty helpful um feature and then i wanted to increase the contrast and the brightness on my planet did that by using a curves adjustment and yeah then i felt like there were not enough meteorites on the left side because it was a bit empty in this space so i just used photoshop's intelligent cloning tools to place them in with this content aware filter and created some duplicates there then we've got this exhaust part right here how to get that pretty simple just draw in this rectangle or this triangle and um yeah draw on top of that with a blue brush and then go further in and in and go use lighter and lighter brushes to intensify this glow effect from the center and then you can blur everything um to kind of mix it together um deselect everything and then change the blend mode to something like screen or overlay or something like that and reduce the opacity and again use gaussian blurring to blur on top of that you can even use directional blur and with that you can pretty easily create something like this exhaust added in a bit more contrast with a curves adjustment and made the ship a bit lighter again focusing the viewer into the scene and into your main subject that's the key part right here and with this in mind keeping that in mind all of your decisions become very obvious and are all intentional now i added a bit more of a clear atmosphere right here because at the moment it was a bit too soft and lacking a bit of detail and here i'm showing you a quick way to do that simply draw a circular selection and with a very soft brush just draw along these edges to create kind of this this atmosphere effect you see it is pretty fast and pretty easy and then you can place that on top of that and you're done use the screen blend mode okay so now in these layers um i added in a bit of blurring along the edges a bit of depth blurring but again a bit of radial blurring as well to get a sense of speed and to again focus the eye on the center part i used this radial blur on the zoom setting with a very high intensity to create kind of this speed effect and then i used a layer mask to paint that out from the center parts and make it only visible on the on the edges and really reduce its opacity it should be just a subtle effect and yeah here i added in a bit darker parts and again more and more vignettes because as i went on i felt like it was not as dark as i wanted it to be i added in this star background on a soft light blend mode and yeah some some smaller details right here painted in some darker and lighter parts and here i'm using the color lookup tables um and using different blend modes for color and because they tend to add a lot of contrast to your images so try to use the color blend mode instead and in here i wanted a bit more clear transition towards the right edge on my atmosphere and i did that by using an original copy overlaying that on top blending everything in with a vignette and i think this looks a lot better in my taste at least then i added in a bit more contrast and especially to make the ship stand out from the background i added a small yeah um darker part again with soft light blending mode around the ship so it stands out from the background and the background behind the ship is a bit darker and here with these layers i added in a lot of contrast for example using the camera raw setting increasing the texture and clarity slider will give you a lot of contrast and reducing that its opacity will tone down this effect a bit and finally i went into a camera raw played around with the settings and very important created this color contrast between the bluish blacks and the orangish highlights to further refine the image adding a bit of grain to glue everything together and we're done that's basically it it was fast yeah it was fast but i think you get the right sense of what it took to create this image make sure to check out my patreon in the description below to follow this link and download the project files to play around with them for yourself thanks for watching and see you in the next one bye [Music]

Channel: Rescan

Views: 14,174

Keywords: blender, blender tutorial, blender quick, blender how to, blender create, blender art, blender concept art, blender sci fi, blender space, blender spaceship, sci fi

Id: PX60KWqXXxo

Length: 22min 17sec (1337 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 13 2022