Geometry Nodes Ice Cave Blender Tutorial

hello and welcome to another exciting blender tutorial today we're gonna be making an ice cave let's get started [Music] all right so first thing i want to do in thinking about this is actually i think what i'm going to do is i kind of block it out a little bit to be honest before i even work out how i'm going to make it look right so um i'm going to hit a to select all and x to delete and i'm going to start with a plane and i'll scale it up a little bit just create some ground and i'll go shift a camera and i will hit the zero key on my num keypad and i will open up my side panel within pressing the n key or you can just click the little hidden arrow and i'll go to view and i'll lock my camera to view that's what that says there hide that again and now i'll just pull back and find myself all right i'm gonna make i'm gonna have a cinematic uh size so i'm gonna do my my wide screen again so i'm going to go up here and i'm going to type in the width of my frame so 1080 or sorry the height of my frame 1080 and i'm going to multiply that by 2.35 and that'll give me the aspect ratio of the 2.35 aspect ratio which is the cinemascope ratio and i'll just kind of position my camera somewhere roughly and i'm going to go to my camera tab take the viewport display and i'm going to turn up passport 2. so all right now what we're going to do here is uh unlock my camera to view so this tab back up untick that and i'll just kind of make my view a little bit bigger so we can see there we go all right now let's think how are we going to pull this off i want to have like a cavernous space that we're kind of in but i don't want to enclose the camera because i want to be able to light the scene pretty well so um i will go for a mesh ubisphere i'm going to scale it up scale it down on the z bring it up go into edit mode go into transparent mode i'm gonna leave my camera and i'll look at this head on by hitting one on my number keypad and i'll hit beta box select grab all those bottom vertices and i'll make sure i've got make sure you've got x-ray turned on because that will allow me to select all the vertices even the ones i can't see and i'll delete those and now i want to see where my camera is so the camera is over here so i'm going to go into edit mode again i'll grab this vertex here i'll turn on proportional editing and i'll hit g and said and i'll roll my wheel just to kind of expand my selection i'm just going to pull this thing up like this i might grab this one over here do the same and maybe this one down a bit i'm just kind of creating a rough shape i'm going to scale this thing up so it kind of covers things a little bit oh yeah and i want to change my camera lens as well i'm going to cover it in my camera i'm going to switch this to it 24 we'll go a bit wider and i will bring this up so i got this kind of cave roof right and again we're just roughing this out trying to make this work i'm going to right click shade smooth and let's if i turn off x-ray mode we get a sense of it all right that's pretty cool now let's get some kind of floor going on that works so i might scale this plane up a little bit further i might rotate it a little bit so it's kind of an even in line with the camera and then i'm going to go here to f3 and subdivide and then in my little pop-down menu which is behind my head here i'll turn this over all right i'm going to select uh so do my subdivisions all the way up to 10 here and i'm going to grab uh proportional editing and i will just like i was doing before just kind of shape it a bit random a bit fun again i'm rolling my mouse wheel to uh change the size of the area that's affected i'm not kind of worrying about this far off area yet because i want to have like another region kind of curve off i'm going to right click shade smooth and okay let's figure out this this other side that's going to kind of head off here how are we going to do that let's um let's go shift let's just create another plane actually you know what let's just take this plane shifty to duplicate and uh you know what let's all let's take this whole thing i want to take all of this i'm going to go shift s oh so my cursor is already in the middle of the scene i'm going to go shift a we're going to go empty plane access i'm going to take all of these things click there and then control p to parent them and then i'm just going to look at this from the top down and i'm just going to rotate actually i want my camera in there too take it all and i'll just rotate it on the z and kind of eye it up just so it's a bit more in line with x and y that'll just make life a little bit easier for us now i can take all of these and shift nut shift d alt p clear parent keep transform i can delete that empty so everything's oriented a bit easier for me to mess with this so so i'm gonna take this plane i'm gonna shift d to duplicate and then i'm gonna rotate on the y so now it's a lot easier i can just rotate you know right on the y and it'll get it get it where it was whereas before it was off that angle and it's just confusing all right now i'm gonna jump back on my camera now i can go into edit mode and i can just move these guys around a little bit um grab them in the x push them out remember i'm only worrying about what my camera sees okay i'm not thinking about anything else other than what the camera sees that's the only thing that matters next thing i want to do is think about maybe getting some rocks in here some large rock objects i'm going to use them to kind of like frame the scene a little bit so i won't put one right here maybe one right here and some others around here so i'm going to make a new asset i'm going to make a rock asset but i'm going to take all this stuff first and i'll call this my cave floor cave back wall and cave roof and then i'm going to take these three things i'm going to create a new collection i want to drag them into it i'll just call this cave collapse that down now i can just untick them to hide them for now now i'm going to make a bit of a rock boulder thing so i'm going to go mesh i'm going to go isosphere i think scale on the y i'm going to come over here create a displacement modifier where are you uh there you go displacement modifier i'll click new to create a new texture call this my boulder displace and i'll click this little tab which just jumps me down to the texture tab here and i'm going to switch from image movie to clouds and that will just give me some irregular noise that will shape my rock a little bit and i'll pop back into this and then i'm going to get let's see i'm going to add in a subdivision surface modifier and maybe put it before and i'll turn my strength down so it's not so crazy um and what i'll do is i'll set my coordinates from local to global now whenever i move this object it's going to just change its shape this will allow me to use this one asset a couple of times to uh to make several different rocks just playing with the overall strength of this thing i think i might put one more displacement have it happen first so i'll put this one first in the stack and i'll go ahead and grab my bolded displacement texture and i will bring it down take my mid-level that doesn't really matter i'll set this to global as well and now both of these together actually looks pretty good right click shade smooth so now you see if i move this around it's going to change all the time okay so what we're going to do now is put some snow on top of this procedural rock that we've just made and we're going to keep the snow procedural too because why not i'm going to click new here to create a new geometry nodes in the geometry nodes editor you're going to pull that up first sorry right there and i'm going to call this rock snow as the name of the energy notes you can see it places at the end of my little node tree over here what we're going to do first is we need to get the position we need to separate the position of all the points and just look at the z value so how high is it on our rock that's what we're going to use to differentiate when we're putting snow where we're not putting snow so let's go to the attribute list and we're going to grab a separate xyz we can drop it here now the vector that we want to separate is going to be the position and that's going to grab the position of every vertex on this object this is a list of them here you can get this if you open up the spreadsheet right here yep anyways so i'm going to send my result zed into a new variable i'll call it zed pause and then what i'm going to do is i'm going to grab a color ramp attribute color ramp and i'll drop it here and this will give me a little bit more control i'm going to type in z right here and so we're going to be affecting the zedpos attribute and then we'll just save over it as well you can see bam we get this new value over here that shows up in our list all right now i'm going to take this and i'm going to grab a point distribute node and i'm going to drop it right here and i'm going to set for the attribute for the density i'm going to set uh z-pause there it is i'll grab that i'll turn my density right up you can see what it does it's placing these points along the top of my object so i can adjust this further if i want to decrease the amount of snow so i put that somewhere right about there okay next i'm going to do is going to turn this into mesh so i'm going to go shift a i'm going to go volume and i'm going to say points to volume so create a volume a cloud basically out of all those points but now i want to turn it back into mesh so i'm going to go volume volume to mesh and drop that there now we get this big chunky volume now i want to see what this looks like with my rock so i'm going to grab a join geometry node and i'll drop it right here and i'll grab this input stick it there i'll grab this one put it here and then i'll connect this one here so we're taking the original rock mesh and we're joining it with this new mesh that we've created using the data of the rock now i need to shrink it down a bit so i'm going to take my radius down right here and i can just play around with this until we get something that looks good turn my voxel mount down maybe like that and then we could round this thing out with a subdivision surface so i can drop that on there and then we need to smooth it out so we need to change the attribute uh the um the shade smooth attribute so instead of right clicking going shade smooth what we can do is we can go attribute fill drop this right here and we can set this to boolean and we can type in oh there just shows up automatically shade smooth just click that and we're going to take it on that will turn on shade smooth for this object now we got some gaps i kind of want to fill those out a little bit so what i might do is hold down shift and drag until that that fills out actually it's probably a bit too much instead what i could do is increase the density over here and that will fill it out nicely now what i could also do is i'm getting a lot of this this curve around one thing we could do is we could reposition this particular part so i could uh grab a translate or transform stick it right here and then just move it down a little bit on the z to get it to intersect a little bit more possibly don't know if that's worth it we'll try that we might might take that transform out once we get materials going but um anyways yes as you can see as we move this thing around the snow is going to adapt with it which is cool okay so let's position this in our scene now that we've got all this stuff going on so i'm going to take my rock and i'm going to turn my cave back on jump back into my camera and i'm going to grab now i want to be able to grab and move it but i don't want it to move on the zed so i'm going to hold down shift and z and that will turn off movement on the z direction i can move my little guy around scale them up although we should probably get some materials going for this before we duplicate too many of these and lay them around on the scene so let's go ahead and get that set up so i want to take my rock and i want to create a new material call this rock and i'll give it kind of a just a dull rocky color for now so okay we've got this rock texture we'll just a placeholder texture for now on our rock we need to color the snow a little differently so we need to create a new material slot click new we'll call this snow just leave it white for now but then we need to assign it to our geometry nodes object right so the bit of mesh here that we've made in geometry nodes not the main pipe here the mesh that's the rock so it's going to be similar to this so i'm going to shifty to duplicate my attribute fill node and i'll just get rid of shade smooth as the attribute i will plug this into geometry now you'll notice when you plug in geometry to the pipe you click this you're not going to get any options but if you close the circuit and bring it all the way in and we'll just unplug that one as well now suddenly you get this pop-up menu with all the options that exist you can see one of these here face material index is an option so we can set that now the material index is going to be an integer value and we want it to be the the one that points to the right material here so this is the zero slot and this is the one slot and just keeps counting up depending on how many materials you have so if i switch this to one you can see we're going to get snow now on the tops of our rock there which is super cool let's take this one then shift d and scale this up and grab zed we'll make this look good soon let's go ahead and give ourselves a good view here and i'm going to get rid of the spreadsheet now i don't have any lights in this scene yet so you can see it doesn't look very lit i'm going to hit shift a light and we're going to create a sun lamp and we're going to rotate this guy around and just find an interesting point that's kind of nice that's what i was hoping for with this gap that we had here in the back wall so i'd be able to get some nice light to kind of bounce inside like that i give this a bit of a blue hue something subtle not too too much turn my strength up i'm going to come over to my my renders tab and i'm going to turn on amy occlusion bloom and screen space reflections cool now let's go to shift d this sun lamp and we're going to rotate the other way this i'm going to kind of come around from here now in order to get good lighting what you really need to do is um you need to think about how do i bring the elements of my scene out how do i create nice contrast in my frame so dark areas and light areas and you use your lights to build that another good rule of thumb is actually not to use too many lights now i'm going to expand i'm going to experiment right now i'm going to bring up the angle of this light that will really soften the shadows and cause this light to really just kind of fill this area in a really soft way and i'm going to just bring it up a touch this is going to be kind of a fill light that i'm going to use here in the foreground now i'm going to take this bright one that we've got we've got turned right up and i'm going to shift d i want to get some light kind of hitting this rock along this back here so i'm going to rotate this around and i'm going to try and see if i can get that to happen i might not be able to with a sunlamp i like using sun lamps a lot but they're not always going to be the right lamp to use i'll pop out here let's rotate this thing on the y bring it kind of straight down maybe a bit like that take y yeah we're not going to be able to get enough of an angle to hit that so i'm going to delete that light i'm going to create a um we could go for an area light i might just start with a point light and i will turn up the brightness on this and push it back a bit i might stick it in there somewhere for now you can get that little rim on the snow and stuff it's quite nice i expand the size of this one again the radius it's going to soften it out make it a bit bigger i don't want to do this too much i got to be careful you know it's easy to kind of break what looks good about it but this should still work now i might be wondering like why have i not made a procedural system to place these guys randomly throughout my scene the reason for that is that having something procedural it's really just about helping your workflow like making your making your life easier right when you're when you're creating something you're gonna have to still shape it by hand you know like you need to be able to craft things and so sometimes it's good just to have a couple of procedural assets that can kind of you know create some randomness themselves and then you use those to sculpt out you know whatever it is you need what you've seen it's interesting doing it like that like scaling it up okay so let's let's let's flush these materials out a little bit better i'm going to take this i want to give this material the snow i'll put snow on the roof as well and on the back wall now let's turn this into our shader editor let's start coloring things i'm going to put a tiny bit of blue into it okay and then i'm going to turn my subsurface scattering up these guys and i'm going to click on the radius and i'll make it actually i'll go point one point one and one nope let's try one point one that's gonna be purple let's just try one one and one that will probably give us the best result and i'll give the subsurface color maybe even a bit more of a blue i could do is actually make make the main color like a pure white and then the combination of those two could be quite good so subsurface scattering allows light to penetrate in and like just get these nice soft edges um now i'm going to grab let's see my roughness and i'll bring it down as well start making these things really shiny and ice like we can also use clear coat probably so i can turn the clear coat all the way up clear coat is basically like an extra layer on top of it's like you know if you have like a varnish on top of something i'm going to grab a what do i want i'm going to grab a noise texture and a bump node i'll take the factor into the height and i'll take the normal into the normal we're going to introduce some a couple layers of variation in the noise on the the bump of this thing take the scale and let's go let's go way up now we're probably going to want to have a slightly different thing because it ice and snow like we're not going to have snow on the ceiling aren't we so yeah this is going to be two different types of materials let's take that keep going with that scale get these nice little pin breaks with it i might turn my subsurface up a bit roughness i'm going to turn down because that bump is really going to break things up now i might take turn the specular way up as well that's really important now we get more of a specky kind of like shimmery look i think if we take this noise texture in a color ramp and let's plug the factor in here and let's plug this into the specular see what that does um is this doing much for us looking at roughness see what that looks like that's pretty cool do both specular and roughness nice i like that the detail and the roughness up push this pretty hard one thing that kind of looks cool sometimes if you take a material in eb we go to options and we set the blend mode to uh alpha hashed and then turn on uh subsurface translucency and you get this like really nice really nice look all right let's come up with a different material for this this roof and the in the ground so i'm gonna take this and i'm gonna click on the double paper icon which duplicates the material but makes a new one out of it i'm going to call this ice click my ceiling and i'll assign ice to it and my back wall as well now for ice i'm going to unplug this bump and i will also unplug all this and i will take the subsurface right down need a bit more some more subdivisions to really make it work let's take this object here and let's add a subdivision surface modifier and crank it up you can see it really smooths it out i'll do the same thing on this guy subdivision surface smooth it out and uh we could take clear coat off because we don't need a clear coat on this pull up the roughness a little bit it's really cool looking isn't it all right so for this one we do need some bump though um but it doesn't need to be so small it needs to be quite big actually and subtle so i'm gonna plug this into the normal and uh in fact i'll go even smaller than that that's good i might make the distance point one and a little bit more maybe just play with that a little bit all right now i'm going to take my world and i'm going to maybe drop it to black you can see how much the world's doing it's pretty cool i mean we could push it into blue that looks quite good too all right i might take our ceiling and add in some displacement for this because we need to break up that ceiling a little bit um we could just try the boulder displace just use the same one oh cool uh let's let's definitely add in another subdivision surface afterwards that'll really help smooth out oops i only need one turn the strength down actually up makes a lot of sense doesn't it because then we can have like crazy spikes i feel like the if i go back to my shader this material though what's going on for me is the subsurface is a bit too strong so if i pull this back a bit also like we could use some volumetrics as well let's do that next let's go to our object skill worlds shader and in the world shader let's grab a volume scatter and uh let's drop this into the volume and we'll take the density down to like point one and the anisotropy will drop take it up find that down i mean i guess a little bit isn't bad you know like point zero two just duplicate these lights put some around here the radius as well is kind of cool we can play with that it's kind of nice having one like tucked right at that tip you can see how this is really brightening up the haze in this back section of the cape and that's what i was saying before like if i turn this off you see you can kind of lose it it gets a bit muddy it's dark in here and i can't really pick out the difference between this rock and that background but if i turn it back on i really start to see a difference there so one thing i'm thinking now is right here is the center of our composition right this this rock corner and it's like one of the darkest bits and it doesn't really work well to have that so dark makes me want to have something here that's going to draw the eye so let's do that i'm going to go shift a what do i want a con no i'll go for an isosphere i'll scale it on the zed grab it up go into edit mode grab this tip and i'm going to make sure portion lighting is turned on and i'm going to scale and roll my mouse wheel like like this and what i might do is pop out of my camera grab the top scale this up but keep this small it's kind of dumb doing it this way because you can't really see it but anyways that's what it looks like so it's a nice like ice crystal looking thing so let's get our camera in position scrub this around let's get one of these to work i want to do something similar with the displacement uh or i put a displacement modifier on it i could just grab the same bolded displace to be honest and then let's use global again so now it will change wherever we move it um and then my mid level i'll bring it up it should keep the point pretty good although it does look a little bit gross sometimes but that's right all right let's turn this off and let's go ahead and give this thing a material let's just throw ice onto it i might grab the roof object there and i'll switch to my geometry node editor i'll click new and i'll get a let's just grab a point instance drop it on here and a join geometry so we can join it back with the original geometry oh there we go all right now let's uh grab the icicle object and let's name it ice vehicle let's do point distribute i should always go first and i'm just going to go into this mode so i can actually see the points that get distributed on here and let's turn the density right up now why am i well it's because i'm okay i'll just i'll just plug this here delete that there it goes now i can see where they're going to go yeah that's this is looking all right um so okay now to put my point instance down all right now what i need to do is scale these guys down so i'm going to go for a scale point scale drop it in before my instance and i'll grab a value node boom and i'll turn the scale down so they're not too terribly big so let's just check oh that's right i need to apply the scale so this thing i've scaled out i've stretched it remember and so these are all appearing with like the base scale what i'm going to do is i'm going to go f3 apply scale and that will apply the scale now they all have the correct scale but they're all pointing in the wrong direction right so we need to get them all to orient down vector attribute vector the line rotation to vector and go z there we go all right they're all looking pretty funky so i'm going to just disable this for now because i think they're going to look a little bit better without it what we need to do is actually have a random scale on each of these guys so i'm going to go for attribute randomize i'll drop this here and we are going to use the scale and i'll bring the max down so we'll randomize between 0 and 0.14 should be pretty good also need to bring them down a little bit they look like they're a bit too high we translate that's good so what i could do is go into edit mode and then scale z all right let's see what this is looking like the magic happens when it's all rendered together yeah that's looking good that's a bit better now i can do is i can turn up my density if i want more of them and what am i doing is i'll go into edit mode i'll let a to select all doing this blind s to scale shift z so i'm scaling everything except for the z and then i'll go in like this this makes them much sharper we can go that looks a lot better leave edit mode let's increase the density might take the translate back up now that looks cool i hope you enjoyed that tutorial now if you'd like to get a hold of this project file you can grab it over on patreon at the all access pass level and hire and if you want to watch this full uncut live stream you can find it on patreon as well as well as on youtube if you become a member there um you can find the full live stream which was an hour and a half long which is really cool um you're watching the cut down 30 minute version probably um so if you'd like to check out all the stuff we go through to get to this final image head over there and check out those uh those resources there's a ton of extra content there for you to enjoy and if you liked this video please consider hitting that like button and subscribing to the channel and ringing the bell to get notifications i'd really appreciate it thanks so much for watching i'll catch you in the next tutorial see you later bye wow

Channel: CBaileyFilm

Views: 9,079

Rating: 4.9773159 out of 5

Keywords: blender, blender turorial, blender beginner tutorial, scifi, create a short film, create a fan film

Id: WdgM4jOfzTE

Length: 28min 38sec (1718 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 24 2021