Create realistic procedural skies in Blender! Beginner Friendly

so I'm making the procedural Sky tutorial again but this time beginner friendly so anyone can follow along so the first swing we're going to need is a cube and hit shift a and then under mesh select your the cube and primitive object now this cube is going to be our Cloud object or our Skype the sky is not 2 meters large because the cube at the moment is 2 meters large the sky is way bigger so to make this bigger Hit N this open up this panel right here select the X and the y-axis and let's type in what was it let's make this 50 000 meters large so that's four zeros now if we zoom out to see the entire Cube it just disappears because at the moment blender isn't set to look that far in the distance so go under View and under clip and increase that number so let's add a few zeros here and now we can zero giant Cube now let's make this also thicker to so add a little bit of height to it so under the set axis I'm going to make this 200 meters tight and the sky is also way above the climb the ground so let's add under location add in 700 meters so now we got set up our object that is going to be our sky so um how do we are are we going to make this Cube into clouds we're going to do this with a material so to add in our new material to the cube just click here in the corner and drag open a new tab so let's make this a Shader editor and if you click new it creates a new material for the cube so we're not going to do a surface material we're going to create a volume material so let's delete the principle BSF Shader with X and add in a with shift a add in a then what was this type in Scatter volume scatter node click on it and drag it to your decide position then plug the volume output of the volume scatter node into the material output volume so now we need to to actually actually see what this does we're going to switch into the rendered view I recommend using the Cycles Render engine for this technique and let's go to the viewport shading options so now that our worlds and the lighting everything it just is a giant cube in a gray box so go to the World Properties here and under color we're going to choose a sky texture the sky texture is basically a controllable controllable simulation of a real Sky atmosphere so we have control for the sun elevation and for the ozone and all of all those kind of things and you can use the sky texture to actually light your scene and have control over all of these parameters so let's get back to our Cloud Cube now we are going to need a noise texture so hit shift a again and search for the noise texture and now we are going to put the factor of the noise texture into the color of the volume schedule we can see a little bit of what it does but we need more contrast because it's going to use the the luminance value of the noise texture to control which parts of the cube are basically empty and which are full of volume so to create more contrast in the noise texture add in a color ramp and set the color ramp from linear here to constant and if you drag this white slider here you can see what it does it adds a lot more it brings more of the white into the image so we got something that kind of look like looks like clouds so to get a better result or more cloudy look add in more detail a noise texture note so increase the detail to 15 and that's also increase roughness a little bit and now you we got already something that kind of looks like clouds so let's add in a texture mapping nodes to have control over the position of the clouds if you have the node Wrangler add-on enabled so just go to edit pre-frances and under add-ons activate the node Wrangler add-on and then hit just hit Ctrl and T if you have the noise section selected and if we do that we get a mapping node and a texture coordinate and what you can do with the mapping node now is change location of clouds so next thing I want to do is set this noise texture from 3D to 4D and now you have basically a random seed so now you can generate infinite amount of cloud shapes because this Wii Shader is basically the seed to for the random randomness so what do we want to do now now we want the clouds to be let's say we want the clouds to be denser if we increase the density in the cloud volume scatter that doesn't do much because it also is dependent on the volumetric settings in the render settings so go up here to this icon here that says render properties close all of the tabs and we only want the volumes tab right here opened so let's open this and now we have con we have these is the setting these settings here for the step rate so let's turn turn this one down and you can see what this does if you turn down the step rate blender will basically put more calculation into the clouds which makes them a lot denser so depending on how dense you want the clouds to be to play around with this value and so I'm going to set this to 0.32 and there are two different values one frother one for the render and one for only what we can see in the viewport so let's just say that this is the same what we can see also is that our clouds are basically they are squashed on the set axis and that is because blender still uses the scale of the original Cube you can see this here on the scale the cube is a lot wider than it is in height so to change this we have to apply the scale of the cube so hit Ctrl and a and choose okay just basically resets the scale here all to one while also keeping the shape of the object so now what we got is the clouds are not squashed on x-axis so now we can just play around with the settings of the clouds and choose the look of them we can also increase the dimensions so if we increase this to let's say 500 you can see that the clouds are also getting a lot thicker this increases ten thousand yeah you get more of a stormier look and if you increase the white slider of the color ramp get more denser and denser sky so depending on which look you want can also play around with the scale here also with the density of the volume scatter we'll set it to 0.01 for now and what is great about using this technique to create procedural Skies is that they react to your lighting of your scene because there are a volumetric object unlike a HDI that is a fixed image so you can see if we go back to the world settings and play around with the with the lighting now it's a little bit too bright I'm going to set the strength to 0.1 now you can see if we rotate the Sun the clouds will be a lit from the side and that's basically it for this tutorial so this is a very simple Cloud Shader and based on this technique I created a cloud Shader pack that contains different presets with a bunch of easy controllable sliders and settings for these Cloud setups so check out the cloud Shader product in the descriptions

Channel: Cinematic Cookie

Views: 21,182

Keywords: Blender, 3d

Id: 4jTxOsiCfsU

Length: 8min 47sec (527 seconds)

Published: Tue May 30 2023