How to Create a Realistic Asteroid using Blender

[Music] [Music] g'day guys this is Andrew price here from blender guru.com and in this video I'm gonna be showing you how to create that asteroid field animation which you just saw now believe it or not this scene is actually really easy to create in blender really super easy this is gonna be a pretty quick tutorial actually but basically to create the asteroid all we're gonna be doing is just using a cube we're going to be getting into some displacement modifiers and subsurf modifier to create that rock sort of texture and look automatically for us so it's really easy we're also going to be getting into a little bit of particle systems for this asteroid field belt here whatever you want to call it and also as well as that a little bit of compositing as usual so hopefully gonna have a bit of fun so if you're playing along at home which I'm hoping that you are by the way not just watching so go ahead and open up blender now and get a new scene loaded now the default cube that is right here in front of us this is going to be the asteroid so first thing we're gonna do is go ahead and add a subsurf modifier and we're gonna crank up the levels all the way up to six the maximum okay I'm going to turn on smooth shading now the next thing I'm going to do is add a displacement modifier now if you've never used a displacement modifier before basically what that allows you to do is to ripple and sort of change the surface of an object by using just a texture so for example I'm gonna go here to the texture panel I'm going to take this default texture here I'm gonna click clout and I'm gonna crank up the size of the texture a bit and that will determine how your asteroid will look as well so just fiddle around with that if you like and I'm also gonna turn up the depth as well maybe to ten just to get a little bit more detail in it now if you go back to the disk this displacement modifier here if we select that texture then there you go you can see yeah and that's the end of the tutorial thanks very much for watching know there's a little bit more to it but I mean that's it's it's really really easy to to create this it's pretty simple if you want to get a little bit more detail in there cuz it's looking a little bit low poly add another subsurf modifier and place it above the displacement modifier and I'm gonna set that to two because like I said before the maximum you can set that to is six so I'm adding another one and yeah that'll give you a bit more detail and they might just turn down the strength of that displacement a little bit as well but yeah now the good thing about using a displacement modifier is that yeah you can go ahead and change the shape of this asteroid very very easily and because it's using the displacement you know you're not messing around with you know hundreds and hundreds of vertices or anything like that you can just yeah fiddle around with these eight vertices and to check how many vertices there um but yeah so that is the shape of the asteroid now done next thing we're gonna do is get into the material now first thing we're gonna do is we're going to go back to this texture panel and uncheck that one because this is going to be just the displacement okay so we don't want that actually to apply to the material we're only using it in the displacement modifier now for this material what I'm going to do is I'm going to grab an image which I downloaded off CG textures calm I'll put a link for it if you're watching this on Blender guru it'll be right there but it's called rock red 38 - so there you go you can check that out now this is a seamless texture which is very important for what we're going to be doing next now with this texture loaded first thing you need to do is change it from flat mapping to cube mapping and that'll make sure that the it's properly wrapped around you know this cube object here and the other thing I'm gonna do is turn up this repeat value because it's a seamless texture we can have it repeat on itself without it looking too weird alright so let's just have a look at how this looks now when render we haven't set up any proper lighting or anything like that but just to give us an idea so it's looking like a mud ball which is a little bit gross so we're gonna turn off the specularity like that and I'm also going to turn on bump mapping for this texture and that'll just give some really fine detail on the surface of the of the asteroid just to get it looking yeah a lot nicer when it renders we check it out yeah there you go so it's looking a lot nicer already and also I might while I'm here I'm just gonna turn down the saturation one notch just so that's not too crazy alright cool we've set that up that's ready to go alright so moving on to the lighting now I'm gonna take this default lamp I'm gonna turn it into a Sun lamp and position it about there now this is space we're working in so it doesn't really matter which way the sunlight comes from cuz yeah it's one of the few times we can get away with just throwing the Sun low and whatever which way we want just kind of cool I'm sitting the energy 21.5 I just give it a slightly yellow value that's pretty cool and I'm also going to position the camera side on just by hitting ctrl alt 0 there we go all right let's have a look at this rendered now so just using a pretty basic lighting setup with the Sun okay so there you go looking looking okay now one problem is is that when we make this background black you'll notice that we won't be able to see that edge of the media or anymore because you know the background is going to be black and yeah that edge there's going to be black as well now the reason for that is because of course we've just got one lamp one Sun lamp and there's no bounce lighting in space as somebody pointed out to me on Twitter so technically there shouldn't really be any lighting from the outside but as you could see that looks a bit weird so it's that time we need to use some artistic license and get a little bit creative so let's just imagine that there's a big media field all around it asteroid field whatever you want to call it and it does sunlight is bouncing off some asteroids that are close to it so let's just um assume that and go ahead and turn on environment lighting I'm gonna set this to a low value of a 0.03 and that should cast some very very subtle kind of bounce lighting just from well surrounding the entire object basically but it'll just mean that it just sort of pulls it away from the background a bit better and yeah so that's looking pretty good so we can go ahead now and move on to the asteroid field so basically I just want to create like a few kind of like little ships like little rubble little bits of rock that are sort of floating around in the atmosphere as well now if you wanted to you could go ahead and hand create those just sort of like place them around you know like that and just position them and but obviously I wanted to make an animation for mine and I didn't want to have to animate each one of those little rocks just for this project so I've got a little bit creative and figured I could do it with a particle system so I'm gonna add a plane I'm gonna rotate it by 90 degrees now this plane I'm gonna make start there and sweep across the scene and drop particles as it goes and that's just a really simple way just to get particles into the scene so with that plane now selected if I just move this stuff around gonna add a new particle system and I'm gonna set the end frame for the particles to 20 so basically all the particles are going to be emitted by frame 20 I'm now going to go down to field weights turn off gravity okay so that's what it's produced I want to set the lifetime to 250 so it gets that result now with it the plane now sitting behind the camera where it is right there I'm gonna hit I know I yep and and then select lock scale which is short for location and scale so it's gonna create a keyframe for the location and the scale at frame 1 now if we jump to frame 20 I'm gonna position this way past the asteroid and I'm gonna scale it upwards to about there and now I'm gonna hit I again and hit lock scale so now if we go back to frame 1 and animate it you should see that happen so if now very quickly just got asteroids just I'm not asked to his little particles appearing everywhere the reason I made it scale is that I want to create you know I want to have asteroids in frame and I found that with you know the plane being the same size like really huge stunning back here there wasn't enough particles near the camera so that's why it's yeah scaling upwards as it goes so there you go now to get those particles to become asteroids it's a very very quick way to do that I'm gonna take our main asteroid here I'm going to duplicate it and I'm going to move it to frame 2 now I'm going to just move some of these vertices around so it's not exactly like the original and I'm not going to duplicate it again and I'm gonna do the same thing twist things around a little bit move that there duplicate it again again and if I want it to be really fancy I could turn on random editing fall off just to move stuff around so as you can see it's just a really quick way to create variations of an object especially when you're using just a displacement modifier this allows you to really quickly just fiddle around with things and yeah I think that should probably be about it after this and scaling loads okay so we've got some yeah randomized types of our asteroids so what I'm gonna do with all of these we should have done this before and we're gonna set their subsurf to level three for all of them yeah would have been better if I'd done that before I duplicated it of course but I forgot to so just bear with me while I do this last to delete the reason I'm turning down the subsurf by the way is that these are yeah they're not gonna be that clear to the camera because we're gonna be using depth of field so they're they can get away with less detail okay now I'm gonna select all of these asteroids right here and I'm gonna hit ctrl G okay now what that's done is its created a group and it's added all of those objects to it and if you press T then you can create a name for it and I call that right go back to layer one select the particle system all the way down in the render section change it from halo to group and then select Royds and there you go each of those particles are now one of those asteroids and if you collect if you click pick ring it just selects one of those types of asteroids just randomly which is cool awesome the other thing we're going to do is uncheck emitter because we don't want this plane to actually show up in the render it's only creating particles we don't want to do anything else now the other thing which you may have noticed is that the particles are a all the same size and B they're all sort of on the same rotation so we're going to fix that in the particle settings here if you go to rotation I'm going to change the random amount to two I'm gonna set the random for that and dynamic and the other thing I'm gonna do is underneath physics I'm gonna turn the randomize size all the way up to one so you get completely randomized sized particles and I'm also going to turn the particles down to size point zero three so now you should see this effect these little particles floating around that one's hit directly on the camera which is just great so I can maybe change the seat a little bit so it's not going through the camera there you go awesome so we've got the particle system set up all of those things should be in play so I'm gonna go ahead and hit render now and see how this looks with all those are little mini asteroids surrounding it of course it does take up a little bit more render time okay cool so it's looking pretty good now what I want to do is put in the background I want to put in some stars okay now there's a very easy way to do that in blender because there is a star feature there you go now using the stars is a little bit fiddly however it does take a little bit you know yeah just to get the sort of desired result you want generally the stars are way too big for what you need so you do have to fiddle around with it a bit I'm just moving to a blank layer just so I can see how the stars look these settings problem is uh you don't want stars that size really but then you try and turn down this size amount and then you lose half the stars so sort of a little bit fiddling around and I usually just create my own star field in Photoshop because you have a lot more control but there you go all right so the stars a star field is now set up the other thing I want to do is create sort of like like a sort of an atmospheric fog or like a milky way in the background like you know usually like a sort of a spacey art project and they've always got that kind of yeah nice thing in the background so to create that what I'm gonna do is jump to layer three and I'm going to add a UV sphere alright and you'll notice that this is now overlapping the entire scene so the camera and the asteroid are inside the sphere and if you know anything about blender you'll know that the normals by default are of course are pointing outwards those little blue spikes there so we need them to flip inwards because the camera is going to be inside the object so doing that and I'm also going to turn on smooth shading okay so we've got a sphere set up so what I'm gonna do is add a new material turnoff specularity to an on transparency and turn it all the way down and going to turn off traceable and now I'm going to go to the texture panel now what I'm going to do is use this cloud texture right here make it affect the alpha value and you can see what it's doing there the sphere itself is transparent but it's using just this texture to to create those sort of solid alpha values so I might just turn down that alpha there like that just so it's a little bit softer and turn down the brightness as well because we don't have to completely show through the other thing is I don't want it to be pink either obviously it's pretty good and I might turn up the size and the depth like so all right so let's have a look okay so that's just that I'm also going to turn on an emit value of 0.1 and there you go so that's a very quick way just to get just some really light kind of yeah milky way happening in the background doesn't have to be perfect I think that's looking pretty good make it a different color you can experiment as much as you like maybe try hard as well no hard doesn't look good okay there you go I'll leave that up to you alright the other thing I need to do I don't want this this Sun lamp here to affect this this UV sphere so what I'm gonna do I'm just gonna make move it to layer one and two because it needs to affect these rocks here as well and I'm gonna check this layer only so now it's only going to affect these two layers and not the sphere pretty simple cool alright so everything is now pretty much set up and ready to go the only thing left to do is set up the depth of field for the camera before I do its render so having a look at this I'm gonna select limits and then drag the distance to about there all right now go ahead and hit render and then we can get into the compositing finally so quickest way to get to the compositor control left arrow like I just did then okay get the backdrop happening cut alright so things that I want to achieve using the compositor we want to get sort of like a soft glow around these asteroids here we want to apply some depth of field we also want to sort of maybe sharpen those textures a little bit maybe give a little bit of a glare effect coming off that rock face there maybe do a little bit of chromatic aberration a little bit of lens distortion of in yet and maybe color correction okay so quite a few things a lot of it's really optional I mean you can see the result already looks fairly decent so don't need to go too overboard I think now to get a sort of glow just around that main sort of rock there what I need to do first of all is just cut down on the lightness to about here alright so that's pretty good I'm now gonna get a fast Goergen blur on just that area maybe turn it up to 20 no maybe 50/50 is better like so and then I'm gonna grab a mix node place that there like so so that's gonna give us you can see just a really light glow around that area and you can turn that down or up depending on what you like and yeah one other thing I might attempt is to put a glare node in don't use glam nodes that much especially for this kind of thing but I don't know it might look cool so let's try this turn that mix up this down okay alright that's gonna look probably pretty weird but well let's just check it out I don't even think I used this for my final render but you know it's worth trying I suppose that's that to add one and then if you are okay so that's yeah it's sort of a space-age II Star Trek type of overblown lens flare type of thing so yeah that's looking okay okay next thing what are we gonna add oh yes we need to add the depth of field first of all before any of that probably so drop that in there let's have a look and I might set this to 20 yeah that's way too much movie for 40 problem is when these things get really close to the camera you can see that awful kind of artifacts around the outside and suppose we could maybe hide it with some preview effect render yeah it's not really working but yeah I mean that's it's just a factor of using the D focus node in blender but that's okay okay cool next thing I'm going to do is add a did you do to do let's add a vignette distort lens distortion and that'll just sort of pull the image closer to the center like darken the edges a bit and yeah make the viewer focus on the center more so of course this is the method I always use for setting up a vignette like so if you are cult and then a mix node setting this to multiply as usual multiply and that just takes the darker parts of that black and white sort of mask okay so you can see it's just really lightly just darken the edges they're not very obvious but oh well the other thing I'm gonna do now is add a color balance node and this is optional but I just found for my final image just to I suppose add a little bit of you know variation to it make it look a little bit more interesting just to make those mid-tones a little bit more bluer so to give it more of a like a sci-fi type look can kind of help a little bit don't go overboard of course but that looks okay and finally I'm going to add of course to be completely cliche some chromatic aberration normally I don't think it fits but in this case I think it does but not that much that's extreme let's go 1-0 for something like that yeah something like that is fine and I'm I turn up the distortion as well yeah make it look like it was a photograph from a space shuttle or something I don't know that looks pretty good awesome one other thing you might want to do cuz the texture on that rock is looking just a little bit dull I'm gonna add a filter node I'm just going to drop it right in here and I'm gonna set it to sharpen and 2.01 that should yeah that should just sharpen the textures a little bit just make it a little bit more clearer but there you go that concludes this tutorial I hope you guys learned something hope you guys a little bit of fun watching and it wasn't too boring um as usual as I always end the tutorial I'm interested in seeing what you guys make so if you make something cool drop it in the comments below very interested if you create an animation as well so yeah I'll plot it to YouTube Vimeo something like that and I'll post that put some sci-fi space music in it or something and yeah as always thanks very much for watching and I'll see you next time

Channel: Blender Guru

Views: 90,590

Keywords: Blender, Tutorial

Id: o7SdmYKirLI

Length: 24min 58sec (1498 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 20 2012