Easy Procedural Nebula Blender 2.9

hey guys how's it going katsu here thank you for tuning in to another tutorial um so since i started working with blender i've been quite obsessed and as you if if you've seen my videos i i have a passion for astronomy and astrophotography and i've been trying to recreate some of the astronomical objects uh using blender and also not only using blender but doing it procedurally it's something that that i enjoy a lot it's uh very relaxing to me and i'll i try to replicate um as realistic as possible um the different astronomical objects and one of the the objects that i've been uh experimenting on a lot is the nebulous so i did a last year a three-part tutorial on how to create a procedural planetary nebula and um [Music] the thing is that i i one of the things that i didn't like about that tutorial is that i didn't have um much control over the textures or i think they weren't as realistic as as it could be so i've been experimenting a lot with that and i think that i found a a better way to do it and a simpler way to do it so what am i looking for what is the objective of this tutorial and it's to create structures that are more complex like this let me just go ahead and zoom in here see if we can get a better look at this image so i want to create these type of structures this type of clouds that have a that have depth to it um so that's what i'm going to be focusing on this tutorial and without further ado let's go ahead and get started as usual um well in this case i'm not going to delete my camera in the queue i'm going to use them so i'm going to delete the point i'm going to use use it as well however i'm just gonna delete it for the time being so i'm going to go ahead and scale my cube by 10 by hitting s and then 10. and let me reset my camera location to 0 and rotation to 90 and zero also and i'm going to pull it back just with g and y on the y-axis and also on my focal length i'm going to try i'm going to try to mimic that of a telescope by going up to 400 millimeters my focal length i'm gonna bring it bring it way back here and let me just uh look at it why am i not looking at it what's going on here is it too far away that i went too far okay let me bring it in oh there you go so okay okay i see what's going on it's the um the camera distance if if that happens to you like you have an object that's like too far away what you can like and and it just disappears what you can do is just going to view and increase the end distance and that i think should fix it let's see here [Music] why didn't i fix it ah let's see here this is my my n there you go so let me ring it like here i think that's good and also since we're being since we're going to be working with bolo matrix as well uh on eb right now i'm going to also increase my end distance here to 2000 as well just to be able to look at the volumetrics uh from a long from far away i think uh so let me go ahead and split here and we'll change this to our shader editor let's change this to render and also let me add a light a light source it's going to be a point since we scaled it by 10 i think i'm going to go for a 5 meter radius and just crank it all the way up here to 20 000 watts okay so selector q get rid of our principal bsdf and let's add a principled volume here let's plug it in there you go nice and easy so how are we going to approach this um first of all i am going to create a gradient texture in order to control the nebula like the base shape we need to change our texture coordinate to object and point to texture also how did i do this uh make sure that you have your node wrangler addon enabled go to add-ons and then node wrangler make sure it's enabled and then ctrl t as in thomas and you'll get your mapping and texture coordinate so object to vector texture linear to spherical and plug it in and just like that you now have a sphere so this is going to be our base shape so i'm going to frame it like really pretty here and just select our frame f2 base sphere so now that we have this what i want to do next is i want to create a irregular texture because uh we're not doing a planetary nebula or something that's more spherical in in nature so in order to achieve that real simple noise texture with a color ramp to be able to control it let's plug our factors here and then i'm going to add a math node so that i can control the strength we're going to set it to multiply i'm going to duplicate my math node and i'm going to subtract it from our base sphere so if i plug this here voila now we get an irregular shape now i'm going to decrease as we can see here this looks kind of blurry and that is because our samples are set at 64. so i'm going to increase that i'm going to decrease my tile size and also it looks blurry because it lacks the detail and the roughness so let's go ahead and add detail add roughness and now as we move it along we can now start seeing more definition towards the edges now that we have this the other thing that i want to do is i need to increase my multiply my math node let's say by two big difference now we see a small smudge here so we can start controlling it by moving our sliders so we can bring it back up and look at this looks beautiful completely irregular it has like long strands towards the edges and if i want to increase this effect i can just decrease or bring my white slider down just like so and now this looks more defined so it's much better looking and just this is just a matter of taste and something that you're experimenting a little bit until you find something that uh you find uh pleasing or appealing to you and that's how you create now your let's call it a nebula edge structure just to give it a name so this will be our nebula uh edge structure there you go and now that we have that the next thing that we are going to work is with our inner texture now um i've been toying and experimenting with different methods in order to achieve a good result i've been working with uh combining voronoi textures working with noise textures combining them together a lot of different things and one of the most aesthetically policing that i found is the one that i'm going to share with you right now and it's quite simple it's really simple the way we do it is i'm going to use basically the same thing as this which is going to be like a noise ramp math multiply uh math math multiply there you go just plug it in here and we are going to let me just duplicate this math node and i'm going to change it to multiply so that we can combine both of them together so basically i'm combining this result with what i'm gonna do right here just like so and also make sure to increase your strength because this is set at 0.5 right now so i'm going to increase it at 2. and if i start messing around with the sliders we can start seeing a different result much more compact but with uh more structure on the inside and you can increase that by just giving it more detail and increasing the roughness i won't i wouldn't go too high in the roughness because if you go too low it looks blurry as you can see here if you go too high it looks just too noisy so i'd usually go between 0.6.7 something around there it's a good number same with the detail you can crank it up up to 16 but again you might get interesting results going between 10 and 16. i would i would recommend going uh over those numbers and with the scale you can go crazy with this i would tend to go no higher than eight perhaps if you go to smaller scales you get a more interesting results as you can see here so now you're getting a more defined structure more defined texture for your nebula now here's where it gets very interesting and this is the last trick and honestly um the way that i um achieved this result was by going over tutorials for procedural textures and i looked into a tutorial on creating procedural leather and i found the result quite interesting and i tried basically imported that that procedure or that method here and it gave a astounding result which is what i'm going to share with you and it's quite simple what you have to do is add a mapping node before this noise texture just plug your vectors together change it to texture and then i'm going to alter or distort this vector by adding a noise texture before so like so now let's take a look at our result here just let's give it a minute for it to start uh to finish compiling your shaders and uh one of the things that i want to experiment right now is just uh i want to see if plugging the object to the vector makes a big difference or not i think it does but let's let's see so what happens if i'm going to set this back to default so i reset the color ramp by just hitting backspace and i'm going to do the same with my noise texture i just reset the noise texture again by doing backspace and i'm going to bring the detail to zero and the roughness to zero uh i'm going to move my scale to two and again this is just so we can look at the result here okay so look at this if i bring the slider here you start to get those like uh squiggly lines which are quite interesting let me plug the object here to the vector and see the difference okay so yeah i it looks better if you plug the object to the vector so you start getting this abstract uh figures right but the cool thing about this and again in order to to get this definition i highly recommend decreasing your tile size and increasing your your samples so i'm going to go down to again to 4 and 256 and now let's increase my detail around 10 and let's increase our roughness and something really cool starts to happen you start getting this like um lightning patterns but they start adding together and if you look at that it it looks really cool it it starts to look like um like uh the cloud structures from the nebulas that we're trying to achieve before so you can just work with your detail and your roughness until you get something that that looks pleasing and interesting to you you can also toy with the the scale i would recommend leaving it quite low if you have a low scale i think it looks better because the clouds looks uh look more defined and you start to get like uh some contrast and shadows would look which looks pretty pretty cool and i think that we can decrease our multiply value so in order to decrease the brightness and if this still looks quite white what we can do is maybe uh decrease the um the power let's bring it down to 15 thousand uh let's say ten thousand okay perfect so this looks much better you can start seeing these structures much more defined and quite pretty and then again once you've done that what you can do is increase the detail again just bring it up a little bit just a tad of of roughness here just to play with this a little bit maybe uh we can have her yeah i think that the scale at five looks good and let's bump our value again up to five or what we can do if we want to increase the overall brightness of this scene what i usually do is i add a multiply node after this and we can just crank it up let's say let's wait for the shaders to finish compiling and i'm gonna move it up to maybe five and see how it looks i think that between two and five works pretty cool so if we move it to five again we can again see these structures and if i bring the tile size to two this will make your computer quite slow as you can see here but you start getting really really cool uh detail on your nebula and finally so basically we have it like so right now if you want uh you can just uh play with your nebula edge structure as well in order to make it more uh if you wanted to show more like something like this perhaps i think this looks cool you might want to toy for instance if i do it like this this dark structure right here and this one right here looks really cool and i think some i like i quite like this maybe i would bring this the watch later okay so i don't quite like for instance this is too regular for me so i might want to decrease it a little bit and maybe just bring the white slider on here perhaps and this looks quite interesting with the contrast that we have right now i think this looks pretty cool and okay so this let me just add a frame here so that we can frame all of this this is like the main nebula texture and finally in order to add color uh what you can do is from this multiply node right here you can just duplicate it and plug it like this again this will allow us to control the strength of the color uh quite simple just add a color ramp plug it here and we'll plug this result to our color node as so and this remember it's currently at 0.5 so i might want to bring it up to 5 maybe uh let's take a look everything looks fine and dandy and we're going to play with our colors now for instance if we look at this this has like uh some white some red or pink and some uh between it's green but might be a little bit of a blue tint to it so we can start start adding those colors oh right it's a it was a two pixels of tile size so uh let's change this white to a sort of um something like that we can bring it uh let me just i'm gonna add like two more so let's give it okay like that i think maybe i like uh this shade oops yeah i think i like this shade right here um and i'm going to i'm going to add a white one here so and again this is all experimenting see what works best what's going on there you go so i'll leave this at one so that we can have like the core of the nebula bright and then we can change this to green like uh between green and blue perhaps something like that there you go and if we wanted to either we can add for instance a hue saturation node right here crank the saturation up a little bit like 1.2 perhaps and we might want to also let me just see if this looks good and i might want let me just increase it again to like fifteen thousand make it more bright now also there are work our world i'm gonna bring it uh back to black so that we can see it better um and i'm going to do a quick render just to see where we're at right now um i don't think ambient occlusion will give me uh like different results volumetric shadows will maybe increase the sample of our volumetric shadows but this i don't know because it might slow the pc down just let's render it see how it looks right now this should take a minute so let's um let's wait and i'll share the results with you as soon as it's done oh there you go so look at this boys and girls beautiful structures it looks it has depth you can see um the core uh that's hollowed out so this this just looks amazing as it is honestly and so what i'm gonna do is i'm going to add the star background uh i'm going to use the method that i've shared with you a couple of times on my videos which uh is going with uh some volumetric or some voronoi textures so let me go ahead and do that and i'll get back to you as soon as i finish it okay all right so i've finished working with uh with the notes uh and so let me go ahead and i have my notes set up here it's like a not that detailed but i think it'll do the trick so let's just plug our add shader into our surface here and let me bring this here like so and there you go so we have our nebula pretty cool nebula right now our tile size is at 2px at 4 pixels if i go all the way down to 2 pixels it looks much more detailed it looks much more it has much more contrast to it looks just beautiful so uh if if your computer can allow it i highly suggest going for that two pixel tile size 256 samples um and let me go ahead and render this so that you can take a look at how it the final result and as soon as i have it ready i'll get back to you so just let's go ahead and increase our render i'm going to set it at 1024 samples and i think this is going to be it so let's go ahead and render it and i'll see you in a minute hey guys so the render is finished and here's the result that we achieved with this as you can see it is a very simple way to creating something quite spectacular and there are a lot of things that you can customize or control it has a lot of flexibility in order to achieve something um that it's that that's what you're looking for so um again quite simple uh let me just return to the uh i'm gonna go up to the 8 pixels again just to make sure that i have that it responds smoothly so just to summarize uh on what we did today with our nebula again we need a mapping node set to texture type we create our base sphere and we have a nebula edge structure that we subtract from our base sphere and then we have a main nebula texture with the interesting uh finding that is adding the noise texture in the mapping before your main noise texture color ramp and multiply we combine the two with a multiply node and just add some colors up here and that's basically it again this is a result i hope you liked the video if you do please consider liking subscribing i'm going to be sharing i'm going to continue experimenting with different textures uh different results and i'll be i'll be making sure to post or create a tutorial in order to share my experiences with you once again my name is katsu i hope you like the video and have yourselves a great day

Channel: Kaetsu's Studio

Views: 59,588

Keywords: Blender, nebula, nebulae, procedural, easy, astronomy, astrophotography

Id: UT9lEsTtoM8

Length: 24min 13sec (1453 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 22 2021