Create An Asteroid Field In 5 Minutes - Blender 2.9 Tutorial

hey it's popnerd here and today we'll be going over how to create an asteroid field using a particle system so to first create the asteroids let's delete the default cube and add in a uv sphere and go to the modifiers tab to add a displacement modifier let's create a new texture for this modifier change the mid level to zero and under the textures tab let's change the type to voronoi however there are other types that also work depending on the style that you want so i'd recommend checking out the other textures as well i'll change the intensity to 0.6 and the size to 0.23 but once again i do recommend trying different settings to get the results that you're looking for we can see the displacement on the sphere but it looks super jagged so to smooth this out let's go back to our modifiers tab and add in a subdivision surface modifier i'll crank the values up to 3 and as you can see the asteroid looks much smoother we'll be adding the rest of the details for this asteroid through the shader editor so make sure that your render engine is set to cycles then let's go to the shader tab and press shift a to search for and add in a displacement node let's add some detail by adding in a noise texture and connecting the factor of the noise texture to the height of the displacement node i'll then fine tune and set the values in both the displacement node and the noise texture once again i recommend messing around with the values to see what you like the best to actually view the displacement make sure you're in the rendered view and under the settings tab in your material properties change the displacement type to displacement and bump you should now be able to see more roughness on the rocks giving it more detail to add impact craters to our asteroid let's use a voronoi texture before we add the voronoi texture to the displacement node let's plug the distance into the color of the asteroid so we can see where the craters will be every dot you see on the asteroid will be a crater and you can adjust the size of these dots by changing the scale of the voronoi texture i'll set my scale to 12 and add in a color ramp between to give us more control over the individual craters which can be adjusted through changing the factory of the color ramp i'll also add in a math node after the color ramp and change the type to multiply i'll then change the bottom factor of the multiply node to 6 to adjust the falloff of the crater impacts we can also duplicate the multiply node to place next to and change it to a subtract node to give us even greater control of the falloff once you're ready to add the craters to the displacement node let's add in another math node change the function to multiply and place it between the noise texture and the displacement node then let's disconnect the voronoi texture and all the other nodes connected to it from the principled bsdf and connect it to the value of the multiply node we just added we can then adjust the scale value on the displacement node to change the intensity i won't be doing any complex texturing in this tutorial so i'll just add in a noise texture and connect that to the base of the principled bsdf then i'll add in a color ramp and adjust the values to add some darker spots on the asteroid before we create the asteroid field using a particle system let's create some variations of this asteroid by duplicating the asteroid going to the texture tab of the object and making a single user copy of this texture by clicking the number next to the name of the texture we can now adjust the displacement by changing the type size and intensity of the texture without affecting the other asteroids repeat these steps until you have a good number of asteroids to randomize i'll create five unique asteroids and i'll duplicate and scale them down so we have smaller asteroids as well once your asteroids are ready select all your asteroids and right click to add to a collection let's create a new collection and name it asteroids to create our particle system let's add in a plane and scale it up make sure that it's not in your asteroids collection let's go through the particle settings tab for the plane and add in a new particle system slot once you've added the slot let's change the type to hair and make sure to enable the regrow and advanced settings to add the asteroids let's go to the render tab and make sure your rendering as a collection and choose the asteroids collection as the instance collection we can also turn up the scale randomness for more scale variation within the asteroid field then disable show emitter in both the render and viewport display settings to hide the plane under the emission settings we can adjust the number seed and length of the asteroids to adjust the scale and randomness if you still can't see your asteroids make sure you're emitting from faces under source we can randomize the rotation of the asteroids by enabling the rotation setting under the particle settings tab changing the orientation to object z and turning up the rotation to one to animate the asteroids rotating let's open up our timeline make sure you're on the first frame and right click on the face value under the rotation settings to add a keyframe then go to your last keyframe in the timeline turn up your face value and add in a new keyframe if you play the animation you should now see the asteroids rotating i should also note that your emitter object doesn't have to be a plane for example if you want to create a ring you can create a mesh with the ring shape and use that as an emitter you can also render the asteroids within the volume of an object through the particle settings tab if you're using a 3d mesh we can also make a quick simulation of two asteroids colliding using the cell fracture add-on first go to edit preferences add-ons and enable the cell fracture add-on create two new asteroids in a new project or outside your asteroids collection and make sure to apply all the modifiers select one of the asteroids go to the object menu quick effects and select cell fracture you can edit the properties here or add more subdivisions to the shape to get more fractures but i'll just go with the default values go to the object menu select rigid body and active to make sure you've applied this to all the pieces let's select all the pieces in transparent mode and go to object rigid body and copy from active now if you play the animation you can see that the asteroid just falls but since the scene is in space there shouldn't be any gravity so to disable that let's go to the scene properties tab and under gravity change the z value to zero i'll go to the other asteroid which will collide with this one and add a rigid body constraint in the physics tab i'll set this one to passive and enable the animation setting now we can animate this asteroid crashing into the other asteroid by placing a location keyframe at your first frame in the timeline and placing another location keyframe at the last frame you could also keyframe the object visibility for the original asteroid so the cracks don't show until the other asteroid actually hits it once you're finished add your asteroid field into the scene and there you go i hope this tutorial was useful if you have any questions let me know in the comments or on discord and please like and subscribe if you enjoyed the video i'll see you all next [Music] time [Music] you

Channel: PopNerd

Views: 10,766

Keywords: blender, scifi, crate, unreal, unreal engine 4, cinematic, tutorial, modifiers, blender modifiers, array modifier, bevel modifier, boolean modifier, game assets, space, asteroids, comet, meteor, rock, planet, crater, impact, 3d, vfx, 3D, Alien, Sci-Fi, Free, Asset Pack, Free Assets, Blender Tutorial, Blender 2.8, Blender 2.9

Id: v-fwTFvd3eU

Length: 6min 47sec (407 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 16 2021

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