Creating a Spaceship in Blender: A Mini-Course

[Music] hey guys just wanted to give this mini tutorial course a quick intro i was browsing around on blender artists the other day and i came across this picture very interesting to me had a lot of detail i clicked on the link and i went to this picture which is a larger picture of it and it turns out that someone had asked what did all you do for the gribbling on the depot and eden t the creator of the image said i have used displacement map on the station and i looked at that and i thought wow that's a lot of detail using displacement maps and because i've recently been playing around with cycles i knew that it could do some displacement maps so i thought i'd learn more about it if you look at these images i've created and this tutorial that follows all of this can be done with the free version of blender and no add-on i'm using some add-ons to help move things forward and get there a little bit quicker but this can all be done very simply with existing geometry and maybe agreeable pack that you might have or generate your own gribble pack the other thing i'll mention is that all of these are explorations they're not concept art and they're not expected to reflect a final design of any kind the spaceship i'm creating is focused on understanding micro displacement in blender the goal was how can i create a spaceship as fast as possible in only an hour or less even so i hope you enjoy this micro tutorial i know it's a little bit long but i've broken it up into chapters for you so you can skip over the parts that you may already know about so let's go ahead and get started hey what's up guys chip here and today i thought i would go over how i created this particular spaceship specifically i used a few add-ons you can create this without using any add-ons if you like it's it's pretty straightforward one of the great things that just happened was that i was able to get a copy of k cycles from my good friend eric klein and with k-cycles now i am able to render blazingly fast in cycles which i haven't been able to do previously and so now i'm really looking at using cycles for a lot of my renderings and of course as you know if you can render in cycles you can now do things like displacement maps so what are displacement maps and we'll get to that in just a second but also when i mention my good friend mark kingsnorth has created a couple different add-ons that i use to create the basic shape of this spacecraft and so without further ado let's take a quick look at what this guy looks like so i'm going to move over to solid mode and as you can see in solid mode this is a very simple straightforward spacecraft in fact i just have a few griebles placed in certain areas as you can tell and i'm going to talk about how we did this these gribbles were all created for kid ops and i used synth to place them correctly on this vehicle as you can see and then of course for those of you that know synth you'll recognize this is one of the corridors that i created with one button that would generate this and then i use a program called js displace to create displacement maps and displacement maps are really very simple and here's an example of a displacement map it's just a black and white or grayscale image and what it does is anything that's white comes closer to you from a geometric standpoint so all the white stuff is going to get closer to you all the dark stuff is going to get farther away so if we go back to this image here and i'm going to go into the shader editor and you're going to see we have this image map which is right here this crap pack scale 95-4 ping so that's the actual image that we're now going to use to displace onto our object and now of course as i mentioned earlier displacement only works in cycles and if you want to learn more about how to use displacement i have a very handy guide which i will share with you right now so this guide is at cw1 dot me forward slash displacement and it kind of goes over all of the settings for displacement what it is the different ways you can use displacement and in particular how to troubleshoot displacement especially if you don't have a super powerful system so i recommend if you want to get more into displacement we'll talk about a little bit later on but if you want to get more into it i recommend you jump into this particular document and check it out especially check out this part that says notes where you may find that you have issues with micro displacement in particular memory issues with optics just want to let you know that this is out there and you should definitely check this out so let me talk a little bit about the add-ons we're going to use for this the first one is by mark kingsworth actually he'll have the first two and he has this great add-on called shape generator and he has another one called plating generator and both of these are pretty fantastic and they really help you especially if you're trying to explore different shapes and everything so i would highly recommend looking at shape generator and plating generator if you get a chance to mark kings north and the other thing about mark is that mark's also the developer behind synth mark's a great guy really really smart and he creates great product so next i want to talk about js displacement this is a free product and it is a standalone application that runs on windows and it will generate those same displacement maps that i showed earlier here's js displacement and it opens up to this uh fancy startup screen you click this button up here and typically you go right in to js displacement 2 and you'll next click on this crap pack and it'll generate a displacement and you just keep doing this if you want and it'll keep generating and you can change these settings and what i like to do is i like to set the sprite scaling up to something a little bit larger like maybe 90 and get something a little bit bigger because at the smaller scales it actually generates too tight of a displacement i think and so i end up having to zoom up on it and this when you save the height it's going to actually create a height map for you it's a png and it'll create that height map and it's going to create it at 8k so i would suggest after you created 8k go in open it up and save it at 4k if you're only using one in a scene and 8k may be fine but when you're using a lot of them 4k might be better so especially if you don't have a lot of memory the other one i would look at is this classic and it generates a different kind of displacement maps so if you're using two different maps inside the same scene i'd recommend doing one classic and one of that crap pack and then of course lastly we looked at this dot grid one and the dot grid one actually creates little bitty lights and these are lights that can be overlaid in your material and i'm gonna show you how you add all these together plus i will give you a material that works with all of these but again with this you might want to generate a little larger scale and see if that doesn't work better for you it just kind of depends you can also adjust the scale obviously inside of blender so those are the three different maps i would look at generating one last thing i'll mention is that if you go into something like this crap pack not only do you get this grayscale but you can also toggle this colorizer and you can actually choose different color variations of this if you want to use these as some kind of image map on top of it i haven't done that but it's certainly something that's worth looking at that is js placement once we've got that downloaded and we've created our displacement maps and of course then we've added them i would suggest finding your own and replacing the ones in my material with yours and once you've added them you can see that it's going to generate all this other extra detail on our model and right now this isn't coming in at the full resolution we'll talk a little bit about that later on but you can see exactly the kind of detail that we're expecting to get when we finally do our render those are the products okay let's get started by creating the basic shape for the spacecraft and i'll start off by going into preferences here and i'll look at my add-ons and when i install i'll just install the zip file i got from mark's kings north and i installed two different add-ons one is the random 3d shape generator and the second is generate plates with grebels and i'm not going to go into great detail mark does that himself on a few videos but i'm going to show you basically how i work with these okay so after they're installed correctly i'll go shift a mesh and i'll go to shape generator and over here is a list of all the things that i've got going i can use this random c to just continue to generate new and unique shapes the extrusions are going to be the number of extrusions so i may want to add more of those as i go and then we can change the length of them and for the most part this is really where i live nothing much more other than the fact that i don't want faces overlapping so i make sure that that doesn't happen and i'll just start you know clicking on random siege how i get something that starts to look like it might have some potential then i may just you know start adding some more extrusions to it to see what happens when i do that certainly i want to make sure i'm mirroring about the x-axis so this is the front and so i can get something like this now the other thing i can do is i can go into operator presets and i actually have one called ship chip and this is the one that we use to create the spaceship so i'm going to go ahead and stick with this one for now and then once we're done i'm going to take this and i'm going to scale it up the scale is going to be with regard to the human so i can move it yeah maybe something like this might be good right there move him to my basic scene and there's our generated shape the next thing we're going to want to do is we're going to want to basically break this up into surfaces and so to do that we use the generate plates and that's an f3 and we just go generate plates right here like this and as you can see this is going to generate parting lines and plates for this whole object and again we will go in here and we have a seat notice all the plates are actually on the edges and that's really not what i want go to my wireframe preview and you'll see that the reason for that is these plates are generated everywhere there's an edge so that doesn't really work that well so i'll tab into our object i'll select everything i'll right click and say subdivide and i'll go all the way to the far right 10. so now i have all these now when i tab back out and i go f3 generate plates i'm starting to get a lot more interesting parting lines and plate lines and again i can go into the chip ship and there is a very nice one that i had saved so i'm going to just leave that the way it is right there turn off a wireframe and that looks pretty good so we'll start we'll start right there with that okay now let's talk a little bit about displacement and the materials that i prepared for you to use so i'm going to select this cube right here and i'll go into this space station k pack and i've got two materials one's a bump and one's displaced let's start with the bump one first and i'll add the material to that and you can see there it comes through let's take a look real quick at this bump material so if we look at it we have at the top we have lights and we have that dot grid that we used with js displace now i suggest again create your own and drop it in here and i'll show you it's easy to do we click this x button we say open i have a folder where i keep these and i can just grab any image i want here the dot images and i've done that and now i've changed the actual dot pattern on that so that's how simple it is to do that and you can see now we have yellow different dots i can go in here and if i want to change this to blue i can do that i can make them brighter so there's all kinds of things we can do there okay let's look at color so the color is using a image called big panels light so you can see that's what that's what this image is right here that's the that's the image that i'm using to create the texture it's an old image i got a long time ago i have this dirty node which comes with my ev materials and it's right here and you can do things like change the dirt scale um or the dirt amount like if i say this cereal there's no dirt on it and that's exactly how that would look but i think i had it at 0.5 and gives us a little more a little more dirt on here anyway if you want to change this right the other thing i'll mention is that if you have an object that's been uv mapped and we're going to do that here in a second then you're going to want to change these and i'll show you how to do that here a little bit later now this is done let's go down to the bottom one and here's our bump setting and again we have our classic if i want to i can change that by just clicking this button here opening and going into any other image i want and it'll load that particular image in as our bump and i can change the strength of the bump here let's make it one and as you know in ev a strength of one is gonna be pretty obvious but it's not so obvious in cycles let me show what i'm talking about let's just go in here and from ev we'll just switch into cycles and we can see that that bump is not near as obvious in cycles as it was in evie so one of the things to keep in mind now one thing i'll also notice is that in the material here in the settings we have this displacement says bump only so this means that inside of cycles it's only going to render as a bump so let's go ahead and change this to a displacement map so let's go in here and we'll grab the displacement material and i'm going to say add material and now you'll see that it's quite a bit different but we're not really getting what we wanted out of it it doesn't look very displaced at all and there's a couple reasons for that first of all we need to go into cycles and we need to go to feature set experimental second we need to scroll down to the subdivision area and we need to set this viewport to one also or maybe we can make it two if we if we're not very fast we don't go very fast make it two and then the max subdivisions i'm going to set to 16 and if my memory runs out i'll bring it back down farther than 16. but okay so now we're looking at this we're saying hey it's still not working right i don't see any subdivisions and that's because in our material itself we want to make sure that our displacement is set to displacement only right here displacement only and i'm going to add a quick subdivision surface this you have to add this for this to work correctly simple and adaptive subdivision and this is going to create a micro displacement and you can see how well that works i'm going to move this up and let's look at our material here so we have pretty much the same thing we've got the lights up here we've got the color here but down here we have the displacement and i can go in here and i'm going to open up a different one i'm going to do this one right here and this is a much smaller one and here i can if i want i can adjust the height at this point 0.02 so let's go 0.2 let's just do that and see what happens and notice how much higher now the displacement is that's a little too high actually so let's bring it back down to maybe 0.1 the other thing to notice is that we're at a 0.5 scale and we may want this to be bigger so if i want to with this set to object texture coordinates i'll just click on this and i'm going to make it 2 and now it's going to get much tighter as you can see and if i go the opposite direction 0.2 it's going to get much larger so that's how you adjust the scale and of course that's true for the color and it's also true for the lights so if you have any problems i suggest go over to the displacement primer doc okay and especially down here in the notes you'll see an area on micro displacement issues there's also a way to set up micro displacement so this goes through all of that and how to make sure that gets done correctly so that dock is going to help you walk through any issues that you may have in displacement okay now we're back at our basic starship shape and let's go ahead and let's go ahead and add some of those materials so first i'm going to go in and i'm going to grab that displacement material right there add that material and there it is and of course we're in eevee mode so we're not going to show the displacement as you can see this is called tri-planar or box mapping and let's take a look at that again so if we look at this we'll see that we have an object text coordinate going into mapping where we can adjust the scale and then we have this image and the image is set to box under here not flat but box same thing with all the displacement as well as the image all these are set to box so let's just say we want to use uvs and in this particular case it's probably not that necessary that we do but let's just say that we do so first if we're going to uv map this the very first thing we're going to want to do is let's go into our modifiers we see we have a mirror modifier which we was placed on it by shape generator and i'm just going to apply that so i'll apply that so now that's good and then what i'll do is i'll go into uv editing okay we come in here and we select everything you'll see that these are our uvs and you can see that these actually uvs are kind of curved around so i'm going to get kind of a weird a weird setting here and that becomes quite quite difficult if i go back to layout now and i start applying these uvs so i'm going to go into this mapping for instance and the way to do that is let's let's let's do it in the displacement first so i'll say uv to vector right there and then in here instead of box will go flat and so now you start to see that these areas are not quite right they don't look white right long story short is that if you want to use uv mapping then what you'll need to do is make these changes as we just showed here okay so now we're back in here and i've gone ahead and reset this all to try planar box mapping so all of those that we looked at before now are set to box and object so we're back to where we started and what i want to do now is let's go ahead and set up the displacement so to do that we'll go and we'll go into render mode and after going into render mode let's go ahead and let's add a quick light shift a light point oops let's make that not a point light let's make it a sunlight and 10 is probably a decent number for us now move it up here it doesn't really matter if it's a directional light and maybe make it a little smaller five and i'll hit the r button twice rr and that's going to allow me to kind of play around and see if i can find some lighting that i like something like this and in my world i've got a world set up let's make this 0.2 image okay so that's good so we have kind of a quick scene set up and now we'll go into our cycles and we'll turn that on and notice that we've got this really funky kind of displacement as we mentioned we want to go ahead and turn this on to experimental scroll down to subdivision one one let's leave that at 14. okay so after futzing around a little bit with some of these settings i actually made the lights a little smaller and i adjusted the actual displacement map here to be a one-to-one it looks pretty good and my settings over here are 1 1 4 and 14. if i zoom in you'll see that it's not so hot it's not all that great if i want to get it much higher i'm going to have to go to 0.5 so let's do that real quick 0.5 and we'll make this 16 that's about as high as you're going to want to go and we'll go ahead and let that render for a bit and you can see when i do that it generates it quite a bit nicer but it takes quite a bit longer as well so that's why i typically like to keep the viewport at least one or maybe sometimes i'll keep it at two so that it'll actually render much quicker and then of course when we go to render we'll leave it at 1 or 0.5 so now that we have our displacement map all set up and working the next thing that we're going to want to do is we want to actually pick some faces on here that we think would be good for adding a bunch of grebels and in fact even before that we might want to go ahead and throw in a corridor opening in here most of you already know how to create the corridor through synth and my thought is you just take that and you convert everything to mesh and then import it so let's go ahead and do that next okay i'm speeding this up because this is something that i've gone over before but right now i'm just going to create a one button quarter and i'm using the new version of synth which allows you to create different face selections for every single layer and so what i'm doing right now is i'm just copying all those face selections all over to one layer hit a button created the corridor now i'm going to hit another button and scale it a little bit get where i want it uh next thing i need to do is i'm going to parent everything no i've dropped actually what i ended up doing there is changing the actual hull shape and then i'm going to parent everything after getting rid of all the lights so i paired everything get it all set the way i want to and i'll create an insert a kit ops insert very quickly with that and once i've done the kit ops insert i will then generate a quick thumbnail and the reason why i do this is so that i can see the thumbnail once this is done what i'll do next is i will select the outside of the hole because i need a cutter i want to create a kit ops insert of the corridor so i can use it in my spaceship so what i'm going to do is go over here and you'll see that i'm selecting the outside edge right there and i'll go ahead and grab that and i will duplicate it and separate it and then i'll go in and edit that and make it a face and then i'll extrude it all the way back and turn that into a cutter and i'll go in and create another insert and that new insert will have that as the cutter reorient everything around and really that's it that's my simple corridor insert okay we're back to our spaceship now and we want to put the corridor right there in the side here so i'm going to select this i'm actually going through here you can see that i've got a little line here i'm going to actually line that quarter up directly on that line so let's go into kit ops and there's our corridor with that thumb the way we set it so i'll grab that and with that set i'm going to use large remember our scale on this vehicle is huge and i've already set the texture so if i mess with the scale now i'll actually have to redo the texture so that's that's okay let's go back to kit ops and i'll just make this large let's make it i don't know 400 percent i'm not sure what it'll be but uh and then with that i'll just basically hit the button that says add insert and you'll see we're dragging over here now right now we're upside down and so there's a new feature in the new version of kit ops which isn't out it's another beta version but it should be out any day now and if you hold the alt key down you can actually rotate it completely around and so that's that's really nice so i just did that we dropped it in and i'll go to the top view so i'm going to scale this so that it goes all the way across and just barely punches out the back yep it's punched out the back so it's going all the way through and with that done i am going to hit the g button so basically what i'm doing here is i'm just going to move the corridor in place and get it to where it needs to be and then actually place the person that we already have in the scene in the quarter then we'll add a little light and we'll check it out and make sure it works right so that's what all this is about okay next we're gonna do is we're gonna figure out where we wanna put our gribbles in here and that shouldn't be too hard i'll come in here and hit tab and let's say that we want to take this surface to this surface and that's click here and then control shift click here and that'll get us all of those and i'll go in here and i'm going to call this grebel's surface and then of course we assign it so i'm going to speed this up here i'm just going to go in and select a lot of the different faces that i know that i want to put gribbles on and we'll do that in a couple different ways once we get into synth but for now what we're doing right here is we're just selecting faces and assigning them the grieble material next i'm going to create the front windshield area so i'm going to take this and this add a new material and we're going to call that windshield and i'm going to make this one a glass and we'll just leave the roughness down very low and then i can tab out of this and oops tab back in assign that tie back out okay so there's the glass and then tap back in there with this selected i'm going to say shift d and i'm going to right click and drag it off so i made a copy of that p make the selection tab that generated shape is going to be called windshield frame and i'll just go ahead and add a modifier a wireframe modifier very very thin okay and that works okay as you can see i've added a few more selection groups for the gribble areas let's tab back out of that and now what i want to do is i'm going to change these to bump remember these are already set as displacement and we want to change these to bump because i don't want to mess with the displacement i'm going to put a lot of greebles in there and the displacement is going to be moving around and it's just going to get quite a bit confusing so i think i'll just use a different material in here that's not going to displace so we'll go into the bump and because this is a slot i can't just add that into a slot so what i'm going to do is i'm going to add the insert for the material i'll drag it on there like this and as soon as it's done i'll hit x and i'll just delete it but it did load the material in so when i come in here and i go into the scribbles i will see that now i have that bump one and i can drop that in and you can see now that the bump one is in there so as we can see the bump is a lot smoother than the displaced one which makes sense there's very little showing at all so let's go in here and let's go ahead and change that bump to one and one and now we can see that that looks a little better and that's what it's going to look like as we go through there so we have that set up correctly so next thing for us to do is we need to use synth to go ahead and start to populate some of this so let's go into synth and i'm gonna go to recipe i'm gonna load a recipe and i'm gonna use the space service junk recipe i'll load that and it's got a base layer a main layer and an antenna layer so i'm gonna i'm gonna first set this up scale wise so i'm gonna tab into here and i'll go in and i'm gonna select just what i want for that base layer so let's go in here and we'll select that area right there and i'll set that for the base layer and i'm going to turn these others off right now and i'm going to say do it and because of the scale you can see these things are just ridiculously small first let's add another object into this i'm going to add this grebel eight so we have two different ones and we'll leave them all both at 100 and then i can go down into transformation and we can see that the scale is zero so let's let's scale it at about 300 percent and we'll go back up here and we'll quick do it again and now we see that yeah okay that works pretty good so i'm going to speed this part up it's basically a very redundant over and over i'm just kind of tweaking the settings to make sure i get each one of these layers set right and once i get them set right on this one basic surface then i can go and start adding more surfaces and so the point being is that i'll keep tweaking things like the scale and the number and even the frequency like for instance the uh the big storage tanks there there's just too many of them so i can adjust the cover parameter to change how many of those are and here i'm going and i'm just basically selecting a lot more faces and starting to populate these as i go and sometimes i see they don't work and so i'll go back and rework them a little bit and once i get it all done and i'll keep playing with the random seed value so i can make sure that each layer is populated correctly and one of the things that's interesting is it when you use the random placement style instead of the rows and the columns and the grids it's going to distribute the number of inserts over the total face selection so as you add more face selections you need to up that number okay so that looks pretty good so those are our gribbles for now and we may come back and mess with it a little bit later so a quick point i'd like to make and that is if you're actually rendering displacement in cycles unless you see it change you're going to get the same displacement map see as i'm zooming out so if i want to get something really tight like up in here then i zoom into here and then i need to change something in order to get it to work so i'm going to go into this mid-level and notice that this is a radius corner so if i make that something like 0.5 on our displacement map we're going to update the mesh here and this is going to get a lot tighter these will get a lot tighter and vice versa if i go the opposite direction if i go -5 they're going to get a lot looser typically what i could do is just go ahead and add a bevel along here and that's what i did earlier so let's just go ahead and do that okay so now i've gone through and i've actually added bevels to everything so now when we look at this we're going to get a little better better read now one of the things i want to point out is that if i set the displacement if it sets a displacement in the viewport like this let's go ahead and just set that to zero and it's going to update the mesh here and now it's at 64. and so i'm going to zoom all the way in and look how bad the actual resolution is here but if i come back in and force a regeneration of the mesh at this closer scale we're going to see that it looks a heck of a lot better there you go you can see that so in the viewport the actual view makes a difference it won't force a refresh i mean you can continue to do this it's not going to force the refresh the view resolution is going to make a difference so that's something you're just going to want your eye on and that is what resolution did it actually generate at at one point so now that we have these bevels on here we can actually go ahead and up this mid level to something maybe like point four and it will hold a lot better in terms of resolution now of course my settings are very low at this spot but you start to get the idea as you look at this so next what do we have to do well now we need to set up the scene and to do that we're going to go into the camera view and we'll get this the way we want it and i'm going to go into my world new world and the background color is going to be black and the strength is zero because lighting in space is harsh and i think we have some pretty good lighting here let's set this up something like this and we'll lock the camera to view so that we're staying in there and then i'll go under file import images planes i'll choose this earth right here and we'll set it to be an emit with one let's just leave it like that for now and we import the images planes so basically what i did was i went ahead and added that earth and i had to move it around a little bit and get it positioned in the window the way i wanted to and then i adjusted the emission a little bit i added a brightness contrast node to it so that it wasn't quite so bright then i double checked the actual sun setting and wanted to move that around get a little bit brighter and then of course i duplicated it and put one at the bottom facing up to give it a little bit of a blue glow like you can see there and once that was all done it was really just a matter of continuing to play with the settings and you might notice that sometimes i'll actually use eevee to set up the lighting because it's easier than with cycles so this is really all there is to it creating these kinds of super displacement renderings and i'll go ahead and tweak this a little more and then generate a rendering out of it uh keep in mind that if you're having problems actually creating your rendering go to my google doc and it'll help explain that so thanks for watching and we'll see you online bye you

Channel: Chipp Walters

Views: 48,840

Keywords: Blender, b3d, displacement

Id: 5MxWt1Sea8Q

Length: 34min 7sec (2047 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 18 2021