Create a sci-fi resource crystal in Blender

[Music] hello I'm Carl with art of karlby welcome to this tutorial on creating some interesting crystals in blender earlier in the week I posted this image on Instagram since then quite a few of you have been asking for a tutorial so here we are I'll take you through modeling and texturing as well as lighting and rendering this will deal primarily with cycles but the same material works to some extent in evey as well so let's jump into it alright let's open up blender and we'll start a new general scene before we start anything there is an add-on we want to enable which is bool tool so click on edit go to preferences add-ons and in the search type Bowie and there you go make sure there is a checkmark next to that add-on and come down here and save preferences this is going to give us a few abilities with with boolean operations just shortcut keys and and some settings that it sets automatically saving us a few clicks so with that let's continue add a cube and we're going to move that up one and let's let's set our origin to the 3d cursor so now with the 3d cursor as our manipulation point let's scale that up on the Z so this will be the basic shape for our crystal or the space that it's going to take up we're going to use a bunch of boolean operations to carve away at it and make it into the crystal that we are going for so I'll apply rotation and scale by hitting ctrl a and this is where I'll introduce you to bool tool so let's add a cube and let's just move it around a little [Music] if we have that selected and then select our primary object and hit ctrl - and this is only when bul tool is enabled it gives us it adds a boolean modifier to our object and so we can move that around rotate and do whatever [Music] and that's going to give us the ability to chop away at our crystal [Music] you'll see it's kind of moving crazily that's because I have our point of reference as being me the 3d cursor so what I'm going to do is start making copies of this object and rotating it around and adding another boolean operation I'll do this over and over until we have the shape or going for so I'll just fast-forward all of this for you all right I think that looks pretty good what we'll do is apply all of our boolean modifiers and select the inverse with control I and delete there we go we have a pretty good looking crystal we still have some chips and such that should be taken out of it so let's do that with a few more boolean operations I'll add a few more cubes you and will apply to all of these [Music] alright so we're back down to one object let's rename that hit f2 [Music] I'll call it crystal and that is really all the modeling that's involved in making the base mesh for this so we're going to move on to adding some bevels so that no so that the edges are not all completely infinitely sharp because in reality that's not what happens so what we're going to do is setup for a boolean or I'm sorry a bevel modifier and we want this to only affect certain edges so we'll hit wait this will only affect edges that we have we have marked as bevel so right now let's just select everything and hit [Music] mean bevel wait we'll set it to one all the way at the top so zoom in a little and see what's happening see it's beveling every every edge that is marked that way in this case it's every edge we're going to change this to two segments and bring it down to point and zero one that's pretty good now let's go to shade smooth by right-clicking and it all looks pretty good let's let's make sure our rotation scale is applied and we're going to add another modifier which is going to be the triangulate yes this is all triangles not all quads this time around I often I will usually make every model all quads but in this case we're not going to be deforming the mesh and it's not going to be animated in any way so triangles are just fine I have some problems here with some overlapping geometry once the bevel is applied just move to that along its along the edge it's attached to this vertices so the way to do that is double tap G rather than a single G and if you needed to extend past just hit C for constrain so there we are and if we go to wireframe you'll see what the triangulate modifier is doing that is it's pretty much it it turns everything to triangles so that we don't have any guns and guns are bad no matter what the situation I say no matter what but most of the time you don't want any guns so I think we're ready to UV unwrap [Music] to unwrap this we're going to bring up our UV editor and turn on sync you vsync selection that means anything we do on this side will have will will affect our 3d viewport and vice versa and let's go in here select all faces at you for unwrap and either you again or click unwrap and we obviously have some problems that is because we did not mark our seams so let's do that now we're gonna make this really easy tip to for for edge selection and select one of our edges that is beveled and shift G will bring up our select similar menu click bevel so everything that has the same bevel weight will be selected and we will control e for the edge menu and from mark seems so that looks pretty good I see we missed an edge here that should be no it is ok it's beveled so now let's go back to face selection all you unwrapped there we are everything is in proportion because we applied our rotation and scale let's go out of edit mode turn off our wireframe because that's annoying and we're going to apply plyer triangulate modifier [Music] so now when we go into edit mode it actually affected the mesh it's not just a modifier anymore and we're not going to apply our bevel just yet in fact we may not even need to at all that is really the setup for creating a material and applying it we do need to unwrap because this is not all procedural there is a roughness map involved that's why we had to unwrap so with that let's move on to material creation so I just mentioned that we'll be using a roughness map to get that the one I used is from CC 0 textures comm however textures one is a site that will search CC 0 textures comm as well as a number of other Creative Commons licenses or sites that release materials under the Creative Commons license so what we can do is type plastic this is oh this is a plastic material that I used and I used this one which is from CC 0 textures and when you click this it'll take you to the site that's actually hosting that and you can download your 2 or 4k maps I'm using just the 2k you can use 4k if you want it just takes more memory when you're rendering and can have a higher quality result so download that and we're going to only use the roughness map none of the other maps that are in that pack back in blender we're going to close our UV editor we don't need that anymore and we'll split it split our screen again and go to shader editor I like to put it across the bottom because that's just the way things span out before we create the material let's put in some lighting and such so that we can actually see it in rendering mode so I'm going to create a plane for for floor plane scale that up to some large size put in a camera so that we have something to render from and we'll move that up hit zero in the numpad to go to camera view G middle mouse button [Music] will allow us to move the camera back and forth home will zoom extents of your camera view and let's just move that up on the z-axis and just kind of fit everything in there I just have a square resolution set up it's 1080 by 1080 you can set whatever you want but there's a lot of blank space for our render if you have a widescreen resolution set so I'm just kind of saving some time with the square one Plus this works great on Instagram so we need a light I [Music] used a spotlight with a fairly high wattage setting [Music] [Music] and let's go to camera view now let's go to rendered rendered mode render view you'll see we don't really see a whole lot and I'm about to make that even worse by changing our world colour to black and with the lamp selected go to the lamp tab change this to something insane like 100,000 that was more than a hundred thousand that was a million and there we go not that it makes a whole lot of difference once it's that bright and we'll kind of rotate that around [Music] that's fine for now we'll adjust it later if you hit control B and drag a box around your camera view it will constrain the render to just that area that way to not being so unkind to your graphics card now let's select our crystal it new for a new material and that material pack that you just downloaded from CC zero textures should be unzipped and you can drag your roughness map right in and we'll plug that into the roughness node if we change our transmission up to one you get an idea of what that's doing to the surface we're not going to see a whole lot until we give it a color let's rotate it around on the z-axis to work until we're catching the light the way we want in fact let's move the camp they'll light around rather than be then the crystal well we have to change a few other settings first anyway so let's turn off our transmission our roughness can stay there I'm going to turn down that light to say 50,000 and we'd have a little bit of a node setup to create so that we can generate those cracks that should be all over the surface so let's start with that we'll start with the burden Voronoi I'm not sure how you pronounce that texture so shape today to add a node search and vor there you go let's plug that the distance node right into our base color so we can see what we're doing and change f1 to distance to edge so that gives us the base for our cracks let's turn the scale down so we have far fewer cracks now this is going to change so don't don't bother with your scale past this point we'll go add a mapping node and a texture coordinate node [Music] we'll take beat object coordinates as our our base of our coordinate system that way when we move the object around rotate it and that kind of thing the texture is going to move with it rather than moving along the surface so there we go we have that now these lines need to be a little more jagged so let's add in a noise texture to modify that [Music] here we'll take the factor and we want to mix it with this so we need RGB mixer [Music] put factor in the color - ha that looks a little better so let's let's turn our scale up a little more a lot more 12 or 10 10 looks all right and I like to turn the detail up as far as it'll go which is 16 and we can play with our mix so we like the the way these look so you don't want them to be too if you mix too much of the noise it just becomes marble looking it doesn't look like cracks anymore actually let's just take it down to point one or point - that looks alright now we have all this other gray we just went black and white we don't want all this gray in between so what we can do is the trusty color ramp will help us with that so we'll take color ramp [Music] put that in here and we'll drag the white to almost on on top of the black node they're going to have to be really thin because this this will be a bump node that will plug it into and that has a tendency to make these look wider than the way we made them I [Music] just switched to book dev mode so that it wouldn't be so intensive but it it's tough to really see what's going on so what I'm going to do that that setup is complete so let's move this down here [Music] if you don't know control space we'll we'll take the window or the the view area that you have your cursor over and make it fullscreen and then control space again it'll bring you out of it all right so back here let's add a bump [Music] and we want that to go into height and so we can see what's going on we'll come back here plug that into normal and we're not gonna see a whole lot unless we go back to rendered mode oh there's some pretty good cracks what we want to do is turn that down quite a bit that was too much [Music] point five looks alright to me change yours to whatever you want if if the cracking and such is not really where you want it to be you can always you can move material around by moving the location in your mapping node you can scale on a particular axis or all of them [Music] I'm gonna stick with that for the moment a lot of cracks I don't know if I really like that in fact what's that look like that's pretty good all right so let's change our transmission back up to one [Music] now this is not looking exactly like the way I want it and why is that not sure so let's move our light around and let's rotate on our z-axis so what I want to see is that scuffing alright that looks fine for now of course we want these to be in kind of a crystal formation so we need to do that we need to basically instance this a bunch and put them in a and a formation that looks good to do that let's start by putting everything besides our primary model into a different collection this is create a new one called the stuff put it there and we'll turn off stuff there we go we just have this and what we're going to do is instance this not copy but instance an instance takes up less memory and it is essentially the same object over and over rather than copies that look the same initially so when you edit one all will be edited all d is what we press to do that rather than shifty shifty is duplicate and we'll rotate that this way and I'll just start moving that around till it looks like a an organic kind of composition I think that looks alright our crystal formation [Music] now let's let's switch to our render mode heading home first alright zi8 is rendered mood alright so I our light is clearly not showing off all the faceted portions of this okay we're back I paused because I could not figure out why the material was not working correctly and it was a pretty basic mistake if you look at our material on our roughness map this needs to be set to non color when you drag and drop an image in it's automatically going to be srgb roughness needs to be a grayscale even though that image is grayscale the node for the image needs to be set to non color now we have all this nice scuffed surface and it should look perfectly fine now so let's give it another rotation around the z axis on the render tab we want to start by putting our render samples up fairly high so I put them up to 4k we're going to have a lot of noise in this image that's why we need that fairly high but there are a few things we can do to to mitigate that so if we go to santa render layers we will check normal UV and denoising these are information that we want to have in our render so the compositor can use the denoise node on it so speaking at the compositor let's bring that up we are right here click use nodes and what we will do is just there's a lot you can do with this but we'll just do the simplest set up which is d noise plug that in noisy image noisy normal normal but T noisy albedo or albedo is the diffuse and we'll plug that in here now this will only take effect after the render goes through so this will do its best to get rid of noise but you do want to give it a fairly high quality image because we're dealing with all these transparencies it's going to have a tough time of it so we'll go here and we've set that here we can set our render image size I'm gonna take this down by 70% which is basically 720p and [Music] let's give it a render we'll hit f12 to do so okay we can see our render has finished it's not that great equality you can see a lot of the the de noising didn't work that well if we look in our compositor here take image over to image that'll bypass our denoising and you can see that that is that's the image without the denoising going on a few things we can do one we can go over to our render tab go to light paths and turn off all our caustics you're gonna notice a difference in that it's not going to show light in its shadow only reflections so what we can do is take this plane go to shader editor and give it something reflective let's make it a dark gray and change our roughness to point three now we have actual reflections without needing to have the the color come through the caustics of the light shining through so I'm gonna turn that back over to solid here and well let's give it another render all right so we finished our render again this time without caustics it doesn't seem like there's a whole lot less noise than there was let's give that a moment it does look a bit better [Music] but really the solution is more samples more render samples play around with it see what works best for you and that's that there are a few closing pointers so if I turn off that other layer and I select one of these turn on proportional editing and go to random we can we can rotate one of these on their local Z and all of them will rotate at a different rate than each other so that'll give us a little more random look rather than just all rotating around a central point all facing the same way so there's that and also if we go over to a shader editor I'm sure you figured this out already you can choose whatever color you want this will this will dictate the color of your crystal go ahead and play with your settings until you have something you like give it a render and post it on social media be sure to tag art of karlby I'd love to see what you make and that is it for this tutorial I hope you enjoyed watching and the learn something along the way if you liked this video find art of karlby on Instagram Facebook and here on YouTube give it a like subscribe and then turn on your notifications until next time I'm Carl with part of Carl be [Music]

Channel: Blender Forge

Views: 46,886

Keywords: b3d, blender3d, blender, tutorial, 3d art, 3d tutorial, instagram, artofkarlb, scifi, sci-fi, science fiction, artstation, blendernation, blender nation, materials, 3dmodeling, 3d modeling, blender modeling, modeling in blender, learn blender, blender for beginners, modeling blender, chrystals, crystals

Id: fxY4uq8kH0Q

Length: 32min 25sec (1945 seconds)

Published: Wed May 27 2020