How to Make a Cave with Blender - Tutorial

get everyone and welcome to another blender guru tutorial finally back and I'm showing you in this video how to create a cave so this is the finished result that you can see in front of you so we're gonna be doing a whole bunch of cool stuff some basic modeling some texturing materials as well as displacements as well as creating these these crystal gym thing in the foreground as well as these glowing mushrooms having a whole bunch of fun and learning stuff along the way so first of all I'm gonna show you what the finished scene actually looks like so this is it right here and I'll just zoom out so you can see what it's all made up of looks like a big long stick or a chocolate bar and up this end you can see what the hiker is looking at you're looking at a very disturbing image down through the barren lands of that that cave there and I should say also I'm not actually gonna be doing showing you any of the stuff at this this this background here I'm gonna leave that up to you you can add whatever you like here what we're going to be doing is creating just what you can see right here so the gemstones the actual cave itself these stalagmites these are icicle looking things from the ceiling they're growing black glowing mushrooms and all that cool stuff so um yeah before we get started I thought I'd just show you sort of where the inspiration or whatever came from yeah I've been off I don't know what two months now from the last tutorial I guess and I was at the blender conference but as well as that I went to the UK to visit my grandparents and whilst I was there I went and checked out a place called cheddar gorge which is home of the cheddar cheese which is why I wanted to go there and I sort of like near Bristol if anyone is sort of in the UK anyone out there hello and anyways while we were there I was there for the cheese but there's a also apparently some cool cave so we wanted had a look in side and yeah it's this really interesting experience this pitch doesn't do it justice but it looks like a cathedral inside I don't know how long you know something like this would have to have taken to form but it's just remarkable to see it in person just crazy formations and to be the first person to discover this stuff would just be just crazy you know and and also check this out this is actual cheddar cheese being matured inside a cave so this is actually how they used to do it back in the old days because apparently this cave stays at a constant 11 degrees Celsius all throughout the year making it sort of like a like an almost refrigerator I guess so it's like perfect for maturing cheese so they just yeah this is how they used to mature the cheese and that's how we now have cheddar cheese today by the way if you're wondering what this thing is it was like for Halloween apparently the UK is now into Halloween as well I didn't realize that when I went but yeah they're getting crazy about it yeah so anyways there it is look cheddar cheese and boy did I buy a lot of cheese delicious stuff I envy anybody who lives in Europe or anything like that you guys have the best cheeses so without further ado let's go ahead make that full screen and and get into blender let's get cracking so first I'm gonna do is I'm going to delete the default cube and the lamp and I'm gonna replace it with a cylinder and this cylinder I'm gonna rotate it by 90 degrees and this is going to be our cave so I want to stretch this along the y-axis but it's important that we get the depth correctly because it needs to be a certain length you know you can't just sort of make it like five meters or something like that and it you know it can sort of it won't look right we need to make it look long from the point of view of the camera so but the problem is is you can see that if I just stretch this you know along the y-axis this values here like you can see these values is arbitrary you know doesn't really tell you anything in the real world what any of this stuff means so what I'm going to do is I'm going to change the units of my scene something that a lot of people still don't realize you can do you can do this you go to the scene panel it's the word I'm looking for and all that jumbled mess and I'm gonna click on metric as you all should even you Americans it is the future embrace it and now you can see these values have changed to something readable like 2 meters I'm gonna apply the rotation by the way so that when I now scale this along the y-axis you can see that the Y value here is changing so what I want to do is I want to make my my cave 30 meters long so I'm just gonna type in 30 and there you go and what I'm also gonna do now is I'm gonna just go into edit mode and I'm gonna move this up along the z axes holding down control and you can see that it's now snapped to that that origin point and that grid floor whatever or it's going up one unit but anyways so it's right there and I'm also just gonna just stretch this out to be three meters in the the x-axis so it looks like it's like the ceiling is a little bit more crushed in than the the outer parts so so it gives it a little bit more of a claustrophobic sort of feeling and also you it'll allow you to see the stalagmites those icicle things from the ceiling a little bit better so now we've done that let's go and what we want to do is want to position the camera at this end of the tunnel so in front view I'm gonna hit ctrl alt number pad 0 and there we go look at that the camera has now snapped to that location and I'm now just gonna position it around about there and we're making progress so next thing I want to do is I want it with our camera here selected I want to turn on the rule of thirds composition guide and the reason I want to do this is I want to make the entrance for our cave to be at this point right there okay so the way I'm gonna do that is uh well actually first we need to give it some geometry because if I was to just grab this and move that up there you can see that we've now just got a very straight looking cave so what I want to do is to make it look sort of curvy looking shaped is I'm gonna give it some geometry so I'm gonna add a loop cut so you do that by hitting ctrl R and you can scale this up along the you know scale it up or down by using the mouse wheel but what we want to do is we want to make sure that we get square faces and it's important that we get square faces because when we use the displacement modifier if you get rectangular faces then what you get is like a stretched looking texture so we don't want that so what I found to work for this scene is a hundred cuts so you can scroll that all the way up to 100 by the way you can tell this in the bottom left hand corner it'll actually tell you the number of cuts so I'm just gonna type in 100 and then hit enter and then just right click so that it or left click whatever you've got your sort of alts I've now set my my inputs to left click to select now because yeah that's what I'm feeling so so now we've got some we've got some square faces now excellent so now that I've done that I'm gonna delete this face at the end there and now if I split this view here and go into let's say top view yeah and if I turn on proportional editing by hitting it oh now I can increase this the fall-off of this proportional editing with my mouse wheel and I want it I just sort of move this over to be about there and upwards I guess so something like that and I also just want to rotate a little bit so that it's the sunlight is able because I got a places some sort of shining in down this this angle so I'm sort of just moving it a little bit just a little bit like that and there we go so now is the the interesting part this is where we actually get to start fooling around with the geometry of the of the cave sort of giving it we get this is where we get creative ok so if you want to add like a little sort of like a bunker off to the left hand side here you can do that and I'm actually going to just stretch this opening out here because what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna put a column in around about there or up there whatever but anyways so you what you want to do is you just using the proportional fall-off is you can add like little dips and you know little stuff from the ceiling you know something like that I could look kind of cool we're gonna be using a subsurf modifier as well so don't worry about if anything looks really sharp at this point and really all we're doing is just trying to make it look like a natural cave so if you want to have a look at some reference photos online you're welcome to do that I mean there's all different types of caves as well so there's like really like dirt ones and then there's ones that are like I mean it's like underground underwater caves and I mean there's some that I just huge ginormous things that look like cathedrals inside so you can get all sorts of cool little formations the one I'm sort of going for is I guess your standard sort of you know where you'd find a pirate's treasure sort of sort of look you know like a stony sort of rocky sort of look it's very damp inside there's a lot of moisture in caves I've noticed which is I think is where you get those stalagmites from those icicles from the ceiling so yeah so all right so I'm just just playing around with the shape of the cave and you can go into as much you know detail as you want with this part here I did a lot of fooling around with my cave but this is sort of looking okay as it is and this part here I just want to sort of create a nice little dip here or actually maybe mmm anyways I'm gonna put a crystal like a GM like right here so I wanted to be sort of like make it look like it's sort of a hidden just a little bit away from the entrance anyways but anyways the next thing I said I was gonna do is I was gonna add a column didn't know I was gonna add a column and columns can actually form in real life it's not like a fantasy sort of look although it does sort of have that look so something I round about here so the way I'm going to do this is in top view if you just select two vertices and then delete those vertices and then if you hold down shift and alt and then select those two edge loops then if you hit W and select bridge edge loops you now get that are a wonderful-looking column so now I want to give it a little bit more shape I don't want to look like a big old concrete looking thing so I'm gonna add in some loop cuts here just like that and what I'm going to do whoops turn are proportional editing is I want to make it look like an actual column would form in in real life now I'm not a sort of a haven't studied caves or anything like that but I'm pretty sure the way that these columns form is by drops so dripping from the top of the ceiling where you get those stalagmites as little icicles and if it drips for a long enough time then it starts to pool at the bottom and you get this sort of like calcified sort of buildup and then eventually it reaches the point where it's dripping from and then you get this sort of weird looking sort of column so that's sort of the idea of this so you want it to be really thin at the top and and really thick at the bottom like this was actually brought to my attention when I originally posted on Twitter and someone said that the column looked really fake because I made it look look sort of like curved like that looks sort of like a fantasy sort of looking column so so the guy in for something looks a little bit more realistic so this is something that I found I don't know I think it works a little bit better I don't know somebody will tell me it's wrong whatever okay so that's pretty good um but it's very squarish so what I'm gonna do is in top view right here I'm just gonna make this more more rounded okay so if I just pull these uh just pull them out on my one eye like so and this one here as well so just trying to make that look like a circle doesn't have to be exact as you can tell it's not but yeah something like that and then if I add a subsurf modifier hotkey control one then you can see everything is looking nice and smooth and everything's going well okay so next step whilst we're in the editing sort of mood of things is we're going to UV unwrap the entire cave now why do we need to UV unwrap it well if you want to add any sort of decent texturing or any sort of decent displacements as well because it's going to affect the displacements you need to you've you unwrap it okay so you might think something like this is gonna be really hard to do but it's actually surprisingly easy so really all we need to do is we need to create one scene just along the entire column like that and it needs to be in a place which is isn't gonna be that obvious to the viewer because once you add in the displacement and if the text is viewable viewable to the viewer then people are going to be able to see that there is a seam there and it's not gonna look so good so I'm adding it here because it's sort of in the shadows in the dark because the light is gonna be hitting this left-hand side here so this is a good place to create a seam okay and as well as that of course this big face here that is going to be a problem if we don't create a scene there so I'm gonna make a scene there and also the last place is this actual column that we've created as well because now it's actually like this sort of complex you know part that's joining the middle of the cylinder that would give us really horrendous UV unwrapping so I'm making a seam and just sort of cutting out the entire column like so I mean a lot of people sort of stress over UV unwrapping and I suppose it is very important if you're doing something like a face character a face of a character then it is really important to get the UV unwrapping but I mean really just needs to work for your scene like I mean this is a still image it's one image so it's not doesn't have to be perfect I usually just half-ass it and then by the end of it I finished the image and I go oh yeah I guess that that terrible UV unwrapping job that I did actually paid off so anyway all right so now that I've done that I'm gonna hit you and then select unwrap and you can see look at that we got a horrible looking result doesn't that look awful so the reason for that is that this is we haven't applied the scale of it so we scaled this crazy along the length ways right so now that UV unwrapping is sort of going by that weird scaling so these values here these values need to be all one whenever you're doing UV unwrapping for anything so normally I think it actually gave me a warning there to give me either you go in the top right hand corner says object has non-uniform scale so if it ever says that you need to just hit control a apply the scale and now these numbers are all one which means that now you can see we get a correct more correct ish looking you rap okay so I'm just gonna rotate that by 90 degrees and you can see it's a little bit squished sort of horizont in the horizontal axes so I'm just gonna hit s then X and then holding down control I'm just going to extrude that sorry scale that to 1.5 if you look in the bottom left hand corner that says 1.5 okay and then I'm gonna hit s and 4 so I'm gonna scale that by 4 now the reason I'm doing that is I'm going to be using a seamless tie level texture so it won't actually matter that this is sort of overlapping so I do mostly tie level textures for everything so yeah I'm scaling this up so that it's like that okay okay so now looking at it from the camera point of view now we can actually get into the well I was gonna say the materials but doing the materials now be pretty pointless because there's no lighting so let there be light as it was once said so first things first I talked about something that's pretty cool that I've only just sort of discovered blender has a cool feature I don't know if it's new or if it's uh I've only just discovered it go to a new layer alright and go to the world panel over here and set this to node editor alright and I'm gonna go ahead and click on use nodes and then here click on this world icon so we're now looking at the world node editor now you can see with the world panel here you've got the color so this is the color of the background right and normally what I would do is I would use an environment texture like an HDR but I decided to experiment with something called a sky texture which i think was just improved or just added by Thomas dingus I think he mentioned that to me at the the conference that we had little fellow dingus I talked about in the podcast yeah he's he's working on stuff so uh yeah anyway go ahead and click on sky texture I think it was him anyway I don't know okay so I'm gonna go and just go into rendered View mode and you can see this is what it actually looks like but uh it looks like an actual sky doesn't it it's pretty cool it's not too bad and what this what we can do with this little sphere here is you can actually click this and drag it around and this will change the position we're blender thinks the Sun is so that is kind of cool right so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna position it to be just to the right about there okay and then there's this turbidity this is gonna change the the atmospheric decay you could say which is you know like when the Sun is on the horizon it changes to like you know crazy colors orange and pink and stuff that's because it's passing through more particles in the air so you're getting interesting colors so turning this up is gonna make it look more like a sunset which is what we want so a value of around about five or six six yeah it looks pretty good so that's the sort of that's what I'm trying to go forward with this this cave image I want to go for something which is a sort of a sunset look so we've got warm colors coming in through that that are that opening there I'm gonna turn up the strength of it to be 25 what you think is crazy but it's actually pretty good for this scene now you can see you're getting a lot of this speckle T Firefly nonsense so what you want to do then is turn on multiple importance sample now multiple important sample is something I can't even pretend to acknowledge or understand I have no idea what it does but I know that you use it whenever you're using an environment texture like an HDR lighting or in this case a sky texture and that will it'll take it a little bit longer to render but you'll get less fireflies so obviously it is superior so I'm turning that on and you can see just with this actual this sky texture this is the lighting that we're getting so already it's pretty good the next thing I'm gonna do is add in a Sun lamp alright so I'm gonna add in a Sun lamp right here and I want this to be shining down into our cave here so that we actually get the light sort of reflecting off the off the material off they're off the sort of the walls of the cave I should say okay and for the Sun I'm gonna give it a strength of six which is pretty high and I'm gonna give it a color of an orangey pink color like that something like that's pretty cool oh and the size of it I'm gonna set that to five centimeters the size applies to the size of the shadows even though that is not clear from from this should be something that it's just shadows anyway getting into UI stuff again so um oh yeah I just hit ctrl s without even sort of unconsciously go ahead and save it last you can you know he's a good rule of thumb and let's go ahead and give this a render and let's see how this all looks Dada so that yellow is obviously coming from the sky and these orange light is coming from the Sun but you know overall it's looking pretty good not too bad cool so now finally we can get to the texturing of the cave so switch this back to the object node view okay and without cave here selected you can see we've added a material and I'm just gonna call the material cave alright so first we want to do is we want to give it an image texture now this image texture that I'm gonna use is one which you can download if you're watching this on Blender guru it's it's from CG textures it's this one right here and what I've done is I've taken that and I've put it into crazy bump and I've just generated a displacement map which we're going to use later a normal map for the bump map in which we're gonna use later as well any specularity map which were also going to use it also generates an occlusion map which i don't think i've ever used and we're not gonna use it here but anyways so to start with we're going to use the color map okay so this is the actual texture load this in and i'm gonna connect this to the diffuse right there and let's just take a look at how this looks with just the diffuse yeah you can see it's already starting to look like rock even though we haven't got any displacements or any interesting modeling or anything like that it's already trying to look like rock which is good alright so next step we want it to look like a shiny cave right we want to look damp like an actual cave does so the way to do that is to add a glossy shader so we're gonna add this in and as you always do when you combine it with a diffuse is you use a mix shader' to combine the two together and look at that and I look like a silky golden cave looks horrible alright so turn the roughness down 20.1 and the reason this is coming out as so shiny at the moment is because it's 50/50 diffuse and glossy which is obviously way too high for pretty much everything so next thing I'm going to do is add in a another image texture and this one we're going to use the texture that I generated right here this is the specularity map so the black values of this image are where there's going to be no reflection and the pure white values are where there's going to be lots of reflection so it just gives you a better looking material by the end of it right now for this you want to set this to non color data which just tells cycles don't use this like a normal color map it's it's something which is going to be affecting the material values that's the best way I can describe it and now if we just plug this straight into the mix factor input that will actually alter it you can see already there are parts of this where it's there's no gloss coming through at all but you can see it's already it's still far too glossy so something I always add with this I add in a color ramp node I drop this in here and then this white value here this is gonna become the maximum value of the glossiness so if I just take that value there and I turn that down 2.2 that's effectively going to be like taking this and turning this down to a point two as well okay so if I just plug that back in there you can see that we pretty much get the same result but we also get the added benefit of the texture adjusting the specularity okay so another thing we want is bump that's what I'm missing it looks far too smooth right so I'm gonna duplicate this image texture and we're going to use our fabulous normal map now the normal map I'm gonna set again to non color data very important for the normal map otherwise you'll get horrible looking results as I learned in my tutorial that was advanced texturing tutorial I made that mistake very embarrassing anyways we're gonna add in a normal map so with whenever you're using an actual normal map which is that purpley looking texture you need to add in a normal map texture a normal map node so I'm getting a twisting my words not the normal map node we'll take those values it'll use it to tangent space or whatever I have no idea what it's doing but I know that you need it and so you plug that into the diffuse and the glossy inputs like that and you can see having a look at our image here look at the wall doesn't that look cool it already is taking effect but it's far too much because you can see that it's it's affecting the gloss like crazy so the strength of one is usually always overkill so if I turn that down to be something around about a point 3.2 value I think points let's go to 0.25 I think it should be the sweet spot yeah I round about that that looks pretty good awesome okay so we're getting some nice reflections we're getting the texture showing through and so far everything is looking good but it looks like the walls are sort of like made of mucus or something like it's it doesn't look very natural right so now this is where we're going to get into the interesting stuff which is where we're going to be adding in the displacement map sorry that the displacement modifier whatever you want to call it so first of all I'm just gonna run a quick render so we can see how everything looks now and then we're gonna add the displacement map later okay so there we go so now you can see everything is looking tip-top yeah ready to go okay so displacement mapping let's go so to do this we're gonna jump over to the the modifier stack here and underneath the subsurf modifier I'm gonna add in the displacement modifier and then with the displacement modifier we of course need to give it a texture so I'm gonna click on new and automatically you're gonna get what looks like a thousand jagged I don't know it's not like what you'd imagine like falling into hell is like just millions of teeth trying to grab you she has a scary thought mm all right um it's got a bit dark there we're going to the texture panel and we're gonna select that displacement texture and you can see that it is by default using a cloud texture which is why we getting this horrible result so we're gonna change this to be image and then I'm gonna click open and we are going to use a texture that we already have which is this one right here so i'm gonna click open and there we go now the next thing that's really important we need to do is underneath texture coordinates you need to change that to be UV and there you go it's automatically looking a lot better so if I turn that strength down to be about 0.3 that is sort of the value that looks I found to be one that looks pretty good you can adjust it to what you sort of want this will also the the subsurf an out that you apply it before the displacement will drastically impact the the result of the displacement you can see as I increase this subsurf you get more and more detail of that displacement showing through for my final render I think I only used three I'm just curious to see like how cool it looks if we add like higher levels I actually don't know there we go okay so now you can see it's sort of like at the head the limits of the texture but that's sort of what you get so I ran about four words probably the maximum you're ever gonna get from it so just set that back - I'm gonna set it back to three three it's fine for me okay so let's have a look at it now with the displacement map so a very simple little touch file let's give it a quick render and it should look a lot nicer Donna and so this is the before and this is the after so you can see they're adding a displacement modifier has a very drastic result it's just leaving up all that it's leaving the the modeling up to the the texture really so the texture is just deforming the mesh and it's giving us some cool-looking results so now at this point if you want to go nuts and and sort of customize the the sort of the shape of your your cave you're welcome to do that I might do a little tiny little bit what I sort of want to do is I want to make it look I don't want it to like the I'm gonna place a crystal that's the next step that we're gonna do in a moment I'm gonna place a gym like a crystal right here but I want it to sort of look as though like it's not that visible from the entrance of the cave you know like it's sort of a bit of a bit of a secret you know a bit of a I don't know what you'd call it a buried treasure you know I see the crystal was supposed to look valuable that was actually what what I originally planned for this whole tutorial I plan to make like a cave with a pirate's treasure in it and as I was gonna put like like money and like a treasure chest and like all this stuff and so I that's why I originally people that follow me Twitter you'll see that I originally like tried to do something with coins like just throwing coins on a table and just experimenting with that and yeah I just all the result always came out terrible just the cave that I was trying to make it just looked whole rendus so I spent a whole day and a half on it and then I decided you know what screw it I'm just gonna try and whole new scene so I opened this up and automatically I was getting way better looking results by having like an opening at the end here and just starting from scratch so that's a little tip for you I know in my podcast recently I gave like advice or like what to do if you're if you're stuck and you don't know what to do with your finished scene and so I gave a bunch of advice one of the advice I should have given is just start from scratch because sometimes just the scenes are not salvageable sometimes just bad I just to just go you know what screw it and that's alright if you don't have a deadline which I actually sort of did for this tutorial I plan to have it up by Wednesday or Tuesday and then I said Wednesday and then it finally said Thursday because of this exact problem but anyways alright it's enough filler talk enough chitter-chatter so the crystal is gonna be sitting right here okay cool alright I'm gonna give this another quick little render right now on a new slot let's go ahead and hit render and there we go so this is what it looked like before and then after so I'm sort of just giving it like a little bit of a sort of private space here I don't know you can do more altering later moving on let's get on with the gym okay so we want to be creating what looks like a gemstone okay so this is oh this is Camtasia preview but whatever it's supposed to look like this okay that's the that's what we're aiming for so this nice you know like sort of like a cartoony crystal blue sort of looking thing now if you were to try to model your own gym it would take you quite a while thankfully though there is an ad just for that so if you go to your add-ons here it's all already in blender you got to add mesh and then click on extra objects like that and now if you hit shift a at the bottom here you've got extra objects unless you've got gears you've got math functions you got stuff that I'll never use in my life but look at this gemstones we're gonna use a gem that uh and if you push T brings out the toolbar you get more options and this is what we're gonna do we're gonna set the segments to be five okay and I'm gonna use just values that I've found to work quite well the radius I'm going to set that to be 0.5 and this is so that we get like a nice bowl like this tip of it is sort of pointing out of it a bit now the table radius what is that let's try adjusting that oh yeah yeah it's like the base of it I sit at 2.5 table height what's that oh yeah that's good point 4.4 looks pretty good I guess and the pavilion height let's go to point 6 for that so that is like the tip of it I guess maybe increased mmm eight point seven okay that that's that's yeah that'll do alright cool I'm gonna rotate that now now that I've rotated all those options have disappeared so we're stuck with this no okay but it looks fine okay so now what I want to do is I just want to move this up so that it's sitting on the grid floor like that origin point is at the base which is always good and that's cool so we've got the gem yeah well that's great um but as well as that we also want it to look a little bit cool I can't just have this huge old rock just sitting there by itself so that's a little bit more integrated with the scene so what I did is I added like a whole bunch of shards sticking out of it okay so the way that we're gonna do that is um I'm gonna add in a cylinder alright and I'm gonna set the vertices to be six and I'm gonna move this over like so and in edit mode I'm going to move this up place it on its origin point right there and then a scale this down to be roughly this size okay and then what I'm gonna do is just grab this and extrude that up to be about there and then hit alt M mmm alt M seems to not have any function yet oh that's right I think that's like the AH does way okay all to a Med Center yeah like one recording program if you use the right alt in line geez it's just as I've said before whenever you're recording something just doesn't work as planned anyways alright now I'm actually gonna be duplicating this a lot and creating so like different sha different Schad shapes but the first thing we need to do is we need to UV unwrap this because we're actually gonna be applying a texture to these crystals to make them look a little bit more like glass somebody's going to edge select mode I just grab these edges right there and then this one too I'm gonna hit mark seam and then go to the uv/image editor and you view unwrap and there you go Bob's your uncle oh maybe uh crease out a bit more yeah something like that okay let's cool there poke the whole point of this is dumb well the reason we do this now is so that we don't have to suffer later um because uh yeah I found it's just uh it's just one of those things if you if you duplicate a whole bunch of stuff and you do all the modeling and then later and you realized whoops forgot to UV unwrap it and then you have to do each one individually tonight speaking of which we actually need there to be two materials for this because you can see from our you know what I should do I should just actually load up the final image right here you can see it full screen there you go you can see that the bottom of it there's this light this blue light which is shining up from underneath it and then the top part is made of this glass crystal sort of thing right so the base of this needs to be a different material to the rest of it so to save time later on again I'm just gonna add a new material I'm gonna call this top one crystal and then hitting the microphone and hopefully you can't hear that and then underneath that I'm gonna add this under light like that okay and I'm just gonna let's just make this video put below so we can actually tell and I only hit a sign okay cool so that's good awesome alright so now we can actually start doing some stuff so we need to essentially just create like a ring around this crystal around this gem and if I go into vertices select mode and then click on this what do you called the widget tool and then go to local transformation this is going to be handy later on I can if you turn off proportional editing I can pull this up okay maybe scale it up there we go okay something like that all right and then I duplicate it create another one over here and this one this is where you can sort of get creative you know scale it down pull it out of it okay now each one of these you'll notice that this doesn't exactly look like SH odds right like our final image it looks sort of like plates of glass you know but there's gonna be a cool step that I'm gonna show you in a moment and it's gonna it's gonna allow us to do all this cool stuff to to these individually and make it look like shots okay so um yeah just get you get your creative boots on whatever then you start moving it around I got to pause the recording while I do this tada okay so that day actually didn't take very long like two minutes but anyways so we've got something that looks like this okay cool but it doesn't look like the shots that we had planned right so this is the shots here now check this out if we go to the modifier stack err and we add in a decimate modifier this is something you probably maybe have never used before because it doesn't really have much of years I don't know what use it has but check this out if you turn down this ratio look at that it starts like snapping away at this uh at our mesh here and starts like collapsing it like dissolving it to create yeah I don't know what purpose it has you know I'm sure somebody knows but I use it for this and it looks cool it's I I'm pretty sure it's like a creative tool like by the way if you want to save time on all this instead of having to add the modified to each one of these individually hit ctrl L modifiers and there you go and you can like vary the amount of this so you can get different looking shards for each one that's why it's cool but you know I'm pretty sure this is just like a maybe there's some use of it for like the like game development I have no idea but I just use it for like doing doing like twisting meshes and like just like just making them look all warped and everything like if you actually use it on this thing you can see how it sort of works with more virtually like it just gradually just starts like dissolving the mesh down to its like bare minimum so it's kind of cool I don't know I don't know what it does but it's very cool for creative purposes like this so da da doesn't that look cool awesome alright now one final thing for our main gem here I'm gonna add a bevel okay and let's just turn width to be about there and these segments to be about there and that's just gonna allow it to look a little bit softer and get a little bit more of that refract refraction and all that kind of stuff so there's something like that and there we go now I'm gonna select everything hit ctrl P and then hit parent to object keep transformed and that means that now if I move this all the crystals come with it yay alright so bring back everything drag this all crystal down to be right in front of your camera and look at that look takes up like a whole camera alright so pull it down alright so you're just getting it down about there now I actually want this to be facing the camera a little bit if you double tap all by the way maybe you didn't know you could do that but that's trackable look at that it's kind of cool so something like that okay now in that case if I turn on proportional editing see it's sort of weird when you've got the you've got the displacement turned on as well because when you go out of edit mode things look a little bit different now you can turn that on if you want like so the displacement actually affects the edit mode but then as you move around stuff in the edit mode it's like really slow so it had what do you call it's a two-edged sword no it's a it's something I'm not a wordsmith you know it's something I've accepted I am I'm an artiste all right scale this down all right I'm just trying to pull that to be about that okay cool and drag that down excellent I think that's looking pretty cool yeah it's gonna be great awesome all right so now comes the part where we actually adjust the material for this crystal so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to split this view and we're going to be using the node editor to adjust the materials but first things first with the world here selected just holding down control just slice okay and just disconnect the world from this stuff over here and what that'll do is it'll make the background completely black whereas before it was this blinding white color okay so just make it completely black now switching back to object mode select our main gem here whatever um and actually we need to give it the crystal first of all because we we gave it to these shards here we gave them the two materials but this one we haven't so select under light and right here select all of those and hit a sign okay cool so for the under light it needs to be any mission and give it a strength of 50 which is really really high and then give it a color of something I found a random out of point is pretty good something about I use the s HSV hue saturation value I find that to be a lot more effective a hue of like 0.55 zero and saturation of 0.9 gives it like sort of an aqua not fully blue but sort of ghoulish sort of look and that's the light which is gonna be shining through the gym so that's very important okay now for the crystal itself the actual crystal material this is where it actually gets important okay so listen up at the surface we're gonna change that to be the surface type to be glass okay no surprises there that's probably the closest thing that matches a crystal right what we want to do is we want to give it a look of like if you go online to Google Images I probably can't show you because I probably break some copyright law now if you have a if you just type in crystal and try and find some like close-ups of some actual minerals and and you can see they have like this almost glass sort of bubbly sort of texture to it so what I did was I went on CD textures and I found an image which I'm gonna add in right now which is ice okay so you can download these textures I'm putting them in a zip so you can download it so I'm taking these ice texts to here and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna put it through a color ramp like this and then with the color ramp connect that to the the roughness input so the roughness defines like if you have a look at this preview window over here if you turn up the roughness that just makes everything looks like the refractions everything looks softer so it's like frosted glass but if you power that with the texture then you get this cool sort of look like parts of it that are clearing parts of it that are frosted it looks that looks really nice so if we just adjust this the black value like if we just bring this black value in more parts of it will be clear and then the white part will be completely frosted over so we sort of just want to play around with this but check this out blonde look at that so now you can actually have a look at it in its rendered view mode so I sort of want to bring this black value in a little bit did i UV unwrap the main gem I don't think I did do I know I didn't okay and you asked forgetting something there was something so I you've you unwrapped all the shards so that was good but I haven't UV unwrap this so this is she's gonna select you know a seam around the back of this it doesn't really matter all that much hit Maxime uv/image editor you've you unwrapped and I'll just scale this up so that sort of fits this grid floor a bit better that's good okay now let's have a look at it we should actually be able to see it now okay can we geez good grief it's a rendus okay maybe pull that in okay I'm on tighly sure but it looks uh we're getting weird stuff there maybe I have a feeling one of these shards is sort of overlapping in the background or maybe it's the bevel mm the bevel itself supply the scale okay let's turn down this bevel well maybe just turn it off for this next part let's just try turning it off all right no that hasn't really affected it all right what if I hide you guys know all right well maybe that's just the actual texture of the image texture whatever alright just say that to non-color no we need the : Dewey huh so that's a non color data and you actually get better results okay that's cool I didn't know that for my final render but whatever okay so it looks it's very hard to see it from this like it's uh I don't know why but it just looks just looks strange from where I'm looking at it it's not at all what I was expecting this is what happens when you record a tutorial oh okay increase the IOR to be 0.65 I don't know if that made any difference maybe not dang it so that was gonna fix everything all right maybe the under light is a little bit too bright yeah maybe that's it probably not set this to 20 okay all right maybe it was just too strong and I couldn't actually see what was actually sort of happening alright ok so now let's just play with this a little bit more so basically the more I drag this black value over the less of that frosted and as I get ok so if I just sort of adjust it nicely I sort of put it in a right place then we'll get like I'm a nice mix between the two and if I can turn down this pure white value then we won't get like a 100% frosted sort of look I don't know if we want that or not anyways this is one of those things that worked really well and instantly when I was experimenting and I'm doing my scene and then you record and then everything just it just goes uh goes terribly but anyways alright that that should be fine yeah I hope all right let's give it a test render yeah test render time with the rest of the scene ok so this blue light should be powerful enough oh oh I know what I feel like to do ok so the glass if we if we just leave it as a glass the light isn't actually going to shine through the crystal you're gonna get a lot of caustics coming through the scene and we don't want caustics right we don't want that that weird you get fireflies it's terrible right so what you want to do you want to add a mix shader' and you want to combine it with a transparent shader ok what we're gonna do here me out is if we add a light path node if we take the shadow ray the diffuse ray and the glassy ray and then put that into here then what that will do is it will use the tray it will treat the material as transparent for everything else in the scene except as it's viewed to the camera okay so for example let me show you what that does if I grab we need to add in a math node to combine them come man Chito is coming up on an hour already no anyways so I'm just getting to math nodes with ad like this I don't know if there's a better way to do this maybe somebody can tell me but this is just how I've done things and it has always come out working pretty good so let me just have a look at that again I don't know if I'd likely make much difference from this view it has actually kind of hesitant huh all right so maybe I'll bring this back then okay all righty then I I'm honestly not really sure I guess because maybe the the the light was sort of bouncing around inside the glass I was giving it this weird sort of look but that does look a lot nicer bring back those other shards in the background there okay so you want to get it so there's a little bit of texture and a little bit coming through okay that's good and it's turned back on the bevel see how that affects it that's good all right excellent okay now we can actually do the render huh nice very smooth angry go ahead give it a run it probably take a little bit longer now but let's do a steel before and after again hit render let's see how good that looks hey hey hey look at that it's looking pretty cool already something I didn't do is I forgot to plug the world back in yeah hey when you forget to plug the world back in huh yeah wonder if God if it does that no go back to the node editor world view plug it back in hit render and we should actually get the the sunlight sort of shining through as well so let's have a look at it with that as well awesome there we go so it's looking cool so next part we're gonna add in some glowing mushrooms yeah that's gonna look cool right so the glowing mushrooms very easy to do we create a bunch of mushrooms and we make them glow and then we use particle systems to just place them on the floor right here around the crystal so excuse me um so yeah let's uh let's jump to a new layout and let's start creating some shrooms all right so the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna create a stem okay got a stem cell a stem all right so we're gonna grab this cylinder and I'm gonna go in to add our edit mode put it at its origin point right there and I'm gonna scale this down down down down and I want the real-world height of this to be like 10 centimeters so you can see it's still 20 I'll turn that down - oh yeah okay and then I bring this total proportional editing bring that up okay now I run about right okay nine centimeters that's good okay so we want it first of all delete the the faces on this cylinder here and because we want to be able to like Bend around the stem and stuff like that I'm just gonna create three loops right there like that okay and then to create the actual mushroom head if we duplicate that little edge loop there then make it its own separate object okay and then grab that and extrude it outwards this is gonna be like the maximum sort of radius for the mushroom okay and then if I just create a face right there you know a second my wife is sending me a text message she was making me dinner and I said I was gonna be home late because I'm still recording the tutorial and she's made dinner already mmm that great um anyways so um I'm gonna create some loop cuts right you know what I'm gonna pull it I gotta send backup tags I'm gonna be nice to anything already all right done cool it sent the message back on track uh so we've got this little umbrella looking thing going on here so what I'm gonna do a turn on proportional editing and set the proportional proportional fall-off to be sharp and then if I push I push G and then go to scale that Mouse down there we go now we can create what looks like an umbrella okay but this is our shroom so if I hit ctrl one let's set that render to that okay and then go smooth shading you can see that's a little mushroom head down okay now this is the getting to the important stuff so what you want to do is you want to add a new material and we're gonna call this mushroom top okay and for this material I'm sorry for this yeah material type it's gonna be emission and I want to give it a sort of an aqua blue color like that but you want to turn down the saturation I found from looking at reference photos online of actual mushrooms that glow did you know that actual mushrooms glow people said that in on Facebook they're like oh so this is like a fantasy scene where mushrooms glow I think I know and mushrooms actually glow in the real world look it up on Google Images type in glowing mushroom it's it's real man it's out there anyways I find that the the top of the mushroom is like less saturated and less bright but then underneath it is like more bright and the stem of it is a little bit bright okay so that's the sort of look that we're going to go for okay so less saturate it on top and then underneath it let's just duplicate that chip okay save save us some time mushroom bottom and then I'm gonna set this emission to be two and then I'm gonna make the saturation a little bit a little bit heavier okay that's good and then underneath that let's go oh no no no we don't need a material for that that's yet see this part here okay alright so now we've got two materials now we're gonna add a solidify modifier and the whole reason we're gonna do this so we can give it some thickness okay the thickness is not really what I'm interested in I'm interested in using this function right here material index offset which allows me to apply a material to one side of this mesh okay so if I just I'll just give this a different color so we can actually see the difference so now it's using this bottom text to this bottom mushroom bottom for what's inside this solidify so this side of it okay so that's allowing us to do that now for this actual stem here set it to smooth it's a little bit thick so make it like that that's good and then I'll give it mushroom top and let's set that to mushroom stem and then for the I think the brightness I think it looks better if you can't really see the stem that way so something like that and then maybe just turned down the you know I felt like the Sten usually looks pretty white in the photos so something like that okay and then I'm gonna apply the subsurf and apply this a little flame modifier and then make both of these one that are okay so I mean we're mainly just gonna be looking at it from this part here we're not actually gonna be seeing underneath it but it's important because that part is gonna be casting the light down onto the rest of the floor so that's why it's important now if we just have this one mushroom just displace all over the floor it's gonna look very very fake to the viewer because it's just one duplicated mushroom and the viewer can spot that really easily so what we want to do is we want to create some variations to the mushroom right so we do that by like I just grabbed this proportional fall-off make this side a little bit droopy or something you know something like that and then that's duplicated again this is my vanilla one I love that a blender conference vanilla means like the basic like the the standard you know so if I can make this stem a lot of them have like this stand that looks like this like I sort of like just coming out of side a little bit so I find that it looks kind of cool if you do that you get this sort of like mushroom a little bit of it a look that um and then I'm gonna make this one a little bit taller like so and you can play around with it I'm gonna pause the recording on a quake create a few more variations okay so there we go it's like three minutes of work whatever just got a whole bunch of weirdest looking mushrooms probably can go to a bit more effort if you want but that's enough enough that it's not gonna you're not gonna be able to tell too many that look too similar to each other that's the point of it anyway maybe I made me make this one a little bit smaller so a bit bigger I don't know it's still making variations whatever alright so now I've got the mushrooms and I create a group by hitting ctrl G let's give it a name like shrooms that'll do and then now that we've done that we are now ready to start using it as a particle particle particle right so um give it with the cape selected add a new particle system and go to hair I set the type to hair and then click advanced and the most important thing you want to do is you want to set the render to be the group of shrooms so now each one of these particles which you can't really see at the moment there's sort of their there they are they are the shrooms so now if I click on rotation they're still not pointing up the right direction let's go rotation and then set the rotation type to be none and now they actually point up in the direction that I want which is kind of cool it doesn't allow you to sort of get that random rotation but it's a lot of effort to sort of get that working it's got to be a better way to do that it's something I got to put through to the developers or something but to get like random rotation of the particle you're gonna like twisted 90 degrees and it's all yeah anyways but none is fine for this so anyway so now that I've done that you will notice these particles are everywhere including on the roof and on the outside of the mesh which is not what we want we actually want them to be just around here like we want to make it sort of look like around this crystal like this dark area here this is where the shrooms are growing but up here in the background where there's too much light the the mushrooms don't grow very well so they've got to be down here like in the damp sort of area here so the way we do that is by adding a new vertex group and we shall call it shrooms and then let's just turn it off so we can actually move around yeah having it turned on the whole times makes the viewport really slow control tab now we're in white paint mode and what we can do set that strength down a little bit is we can start painting areas in our scene where we actually want the the shrooms to grow so this is pretty easy to do obviously the blue areas are zero and the red areas are where it's most visible so I want there to be some in the foreground it's very important and I want that to be like a few just don't like this edges here you know oh you don't want to go like up vertical too far but something around about there should be pretty good and something you want to check whenever you're painting from the camera err you always get this problem if you're painting from the view of the camera you'll sometimes it'll catch stuff that's in the background and what you obviously don't want so I'm just gonna paint this out okay so yeah yeah yeah about that that's pretty good okay excellent so now that I've done the white painting now we go back to the particle system and then down here underneath vertex groups I'm gonna click on shrooms and now oops if we turn on the particle system for the shrooms no oh look they're in the wrong place okay so this is a problem it's a bug in blender I'm fairly certain I actually reported it just recently but you need to click use modifier stack and then it will actually appear where you want it to but you shouldn't have to do that anyways okay so now we've got them appearing while we want them to I'm gonna turn down the emission amount to be 600 we don't want there to be that many what I want there to be is I want there to be little bunches of them because I found from looking at photos that they often are bunched together okay so the way we're gonna do that is by using children so I'm gonna set the children amount to be 5 so therefore each one of these actual mushrooms there's gonna be five surrounding it okay and I'm gonna give them a random height so let's give them a random height of like point eight okay and then I'm gonna give it a length of 0.8 and then their threshold of 0.2 so you get like one big one out of the bunch which turns out to be pretty good and then the the radius I find like a radius of let's get point zero point zero six you want there to it you want to look like little patches of mushrooms which it sort of is at the moment which is good okay and the other thing you want to do is you want to get that the size of it right so you can play with the size here you also want to turn up the random size as well turn that up to serve like as big as it can go and that should if it's not too big that should actually look pretty good now one thing I do want to do is I want to I want there to be some in the foreground because I want there to be with the depth of field I want the depth of field to sort of make these make they're these glowing mushrooms which are in the foreground so if I just bring up this ground here okay like that and there we go all right now let's turn on the displacement lets you see that okay that's looks like little waves or whatever but yeah whatever it's the strength to high ya know maybe strength 0.25 it's a bit better okay and then if I turn on a white paint mode all right so we've got to add some some area in front of the camera yeah oh for goodness sake this is pathetic come on I just want to have a look right here okay there we go so I'm gonna paint directly in front of the camera right here okay and there we go okay almost oh gee this is boring isn't it gotta be boring to watch just listening to me talk and try and work out the scene alright turn on the shrooms and there we go alright so now you can also by the way play with the seed value yeah just like that and we can sort of get some different patterns of the the streamers just showing up but that looks pretty good I think there perhaps a little bit too big so just going to turn down I played with the size of these so much by the way like if you're curious why I'm keep going back playing forward it's I just that this is just how you do it like you just you render it and you'd find that they're too big and there's too much whatever and then you just try it again but anyways that's actually turning out to be pretty good so what was I gonna do oh yes the shrooms here I'm actually gonna rotate them just so that we've got you can actually see the bendiness of them because I noticed that from the view of the camera you can't actually see there there we go now you can actually see the bendiness okay cool so I'm gonna give it a render now it should take a lot longer to render because I think each one of these are quite a few Polly's but anyways give it another render and let's have a look at how it looks once it is finished alright so there you go we've got the got the mushrooms in the scene and yeah it actually looks pretty good I actually thought I would have to rerun to that many many a times but it's said she turned out pretty well so that's good one thing I might do though is I might just increase the this whatever is viewable in the foreground just so that I can get some yeah just some cool-ass of no no that's sort of crystals disappearing man come on it's really hard to get this right come on it was big wave coming through what is that wave from and I I swear sometimes it just doesn't work what am I actually looking at right now just a simple adjustment man come on alright so uh so that didn't work at all it's just reversed everything that I just did and I think it was better the way it was before yeah yay great maybe I'll just make the foreground appeal like in this side only because I think this side can actually deal with it okay let's bring that down okay there we go alright cuz I want there to be some mushrooms in the foreground that are gonna be out of focus right that's the whole point of it G alright so we've got we've got the mushrooms on the floor now the next step is to add these stalagmites okay now for my final scene actually along the floor here I actually created some rocks as well so if you have a look at my final one they're just really really low poly basic looking rocks I'll show you what the actual rocks look like right here just little cubes that I've just deformed in weird ways and I place them in the exact same way that I place those the mushrooms just before so go ahead you're welcome to do that you'll have to of course create another vertex group just for the rocks and paint just along the entire floor there but you're welcome to go ahead and do that I'm gonna skip that because I'm sure you guys can figure that out for yourselves so the next part is to add these two lag mines so they're pretty easy they're just those icicle looking things so I'm gonna go ahead and add in a plain scale this down and I'm gonna delete this top face here and then if I turn on a subsurf modifier you can see that we have a whoops look it's an icicle so easy or a stalagmite if you want to call it that alright and again I'm just going to create a few variations of it not too many this time something like that there we go okay all right so I've got I got four variations I'm gonna hit ctrl G and let's see if I can get the correct spelling still like might I think that's right I've had to like find out a way to remember how to say it so I just kind of think of stalagmites that's how I think geez all right go back to the cave back to the cave and I'm gonna just basically duplicate the particle system that we've already got there so let's first of all let's just turn it off okay and then let's set this there okay and make sure you click that to next to it so it actually becomes its own separate thing right and for this one we of course need to give it its own let's just turn down the subdivisions that'll probably help and turn off this for now so we need to give it its own vertex group just for this - like mine so it needs to be on the roof so like mines okay and so for this I'm just gonna go into top view and then let's go to strength okay all right and I'm just gonna stop painting so just painting along the roof of whatever you want there to be those icicle things the stalagmites to dying down from I know whose idea was it to call it stalagmite geez historical I'm sure some bearded dude some Explorer it's probably had a Flemmi throat with something and what was that sir that's right he's pretty trying to say something else and they just wrote it down in a book is stalagmite I don't know you gotta fill in this time with something don't you so I gotta talk about random stuff there we go all right so it's painted pretty well there's a little bit of this area here where it's not but most of it's pretty good cool so that is that's labeled correctly and then down here I select the correct group turn off children and then on the vertex group I enabled stalagmite and then we should if we oh we haven't actually got it enabled that's what that'll probably help there we go now they're hanging from the ceiling how about that pretty cool right now I'm gonna increase the count to be 4,000 and I'm gonna increase the size to be that's too much how about three and set it to random there we go pretty good awesome so that is pretty much it I think if we let's have a look at this if we want this is where you can actually do the finishing touches and make sort of make your cave have its own you know personal sort of flavor to it you know so I want there to maybe be of like a few more areas where it's sort of like hanging down a little bit so I'm just gonna do some work on that so I'm gonna pause the video and I'm just gonna do a little bit of adjustment to the cave and then we'll come back alright there we go so I've just added a whole bunch I like bumps to the roof and like to the floor and pulled some of these walls in and we should hopefully now have a cool-looking render one thing I'm going to do though is I'm going to before we do the final render I'm gonna set the camera to have something to focus on so we get some depth of field something I've been talking about for a while so I want to focus on the gem this part right here that that is what needs to be in focus so the name of it is Jim so I just type in GE Jim there we go that's the point of focus and now of course for the aperture I'm going to use f-stops because I like that and I'm gonna use 2.3 the lower you set that to the more out-of-focus things become so that's all well and good everything is fine now one other thing before I do another final render I want to be able to add a glow just to this crystal here as well as a glow just to what's outside the door so the way that we do that is for this crystal is this gem here I'm gonna give it a pass index so a pass index is gonna allow us in the compositor to apply it just to something with a number other than zero so if I set this to 1 then I can apply an effect just to this object and then if I was to set this to 2 then I can apply it effect adjust this object so because all these gems I want them all to have the same effect I'm just gonna give them all the same pass index of 1 and I don't think there's a way you can do it like all at once so I'm doing them all individually right now I'm hoping it was gonna be fine ok that's that's good excellent and then once you've done that you need to go over here to the render layer and underneath passes you need to enable object index Pass if you don't do that and then you render it you'll have to re render it and then click that so as well as that because I want there to be a glow outside the door I'm now also going to enable a pass for the environment as well so now that I've done that underneath your sampling I'm gonna increase the sampling to be 400 for my final one I did a thousand but just for the sake of this 400 is going to be perfectly fine for the light bounces I only use like two and then maximum five and it turned out fine and for the performance 256 by 256 that should be fine as well so with that all done I'm gonna go ahead and give it a final render and then we'll jump over to the compositor and hopefully do some cool stuff all right so this is the final render and it is ready to be filled within the compositor something I did change I changed the f-stop to be 3.2 instead of 2.3 also I adjusted the sunlight a little bit just so that it wasn't so harsh on that wall there but as you can see most of everything else is pretty much as it was so now to jump over to the compositor so some things that we want to do in the compositor it's actually kind of cool this is the fun part right we want to add some glow to the crystal first of all so as I did before as I woke up what we created before was that ID mask just for that object so if I go converter ID mask then I get this right here and what I do is I take this output from this index OB which is index object which is what we enabled in the the panel down here so now if I take that and put that in here now I just set this number to whatever the crystal was which was one so now that I've done that listen now it gives me a nice sort of would you call it yeah this whatever you can see that it gives you a it's an outline of whatever the object was so now what I can do is if I add a excuse me chewing gum if I add a mix node and then drag that into the factor input then take the image and then put that into the bottom input now you can see that I get the actual crystal against a white background now I don't on the background to be white I want it to be black so I just turn that down to black and there we go great so now we've got the crystal by itself I can now add in a glitter effect but just like this so if I increase the streaks to be eight yeah that looks fantastic and I'm also going to turn up the color modules as well as the iterations and I think that should be pretty good now I want to turn the mix all the way up to one so that we only get the effect zero gives you both and then minus one gives you just the original so setting it to one will give us just the effect and that's important because we want to apply that with the rest of the same now as well as that I also want to do pretty much the same thing to the the outdoor what's outside this window over there so what I'm going to do is add and I'll basically duplicate this glare node and then take the output from the environment I'll show you what the environment looks like by the way just like that it looks like just like that so so now with that that uh look at that Jesus Christ is risen I can increase the increase the the streaks yeah someone like that that should be pretty good and yeah color modules that's pretty good good excellent so now all I'm gonna do is combine both of those together just like this whoops okay and then set this to add and there you go so we now have both effects together now I actually want this top effect this this background Mon to be not as strong so I'm turning down to the wrong order then so I'm turning there we go okay so you just turn down the ad value make sure that it's in the bottom and then you can turn down that value there and now we want to combine this with the rest of the scene so to do that I just take that mix add input combine the two together and there you go look at that huh supernova coming from the door so I'll turn down its I think I'll turn down the amount the length of these streaks from that I'll turn down the glow effect from both of them actually because they're both coming on a little bit heavy I think so this if I alter just this one this is going to adjust just the amount of this outdoor glow but this one here will adjust the amount of both of their glows so I'm just sort of turning both of them down because I don't want to be too overdone okay which is something that I have a tendency to do but I'm trying to avoid that so yeah something like this you know I went up okay so something like that's pretty good all right now I also want to turn down the amount that's coming from the door so actually wasn't too bad as it was actually I think it should be okay no it's too much turn just a little bit down there we go awesome all right now the next big thing I want to do is I want to add in a atmospheric fall off so that it looks like in the distance there is some mist like some moisture in the air and this is really important because as a sunset scene with the sun shining directly into the cave it's likely that you'd see a lot of particles and stuff so although blender doesn't have volumetric rendering yet we can fake it in the compositor by using a map value node and then you take the Z input put that into the map value node you know what I'm gonna clean this up because a lot of people have told me that I should start using groups so I'm gonna do that right now okay awesome that's going there that's going there that's going there Oh No there's a group within a group you're kind of that all right let's pull that out Oh what's going on here I got red red lines okay they shouldn't be red line there we go okay so now we've got just a crew that's good awesome so having a look at just this view here if I turn down the size of this to be point zero one like that now you can see that you've got the z-depth of the camera so it's a little bit fuzzy but it'll work fine for this and what I want to do is I want to turn down the offset so that the mist starts just after the crystal so something about there and then what you want to do is take a mixed note and then plant this firmly into the factor input and then take this and put this into the top input and then if you set this to be screen then what this will do is it will now take this color whatever color I set this to and that will now become the color of the fog now if you're wondering why the background is suddenly gone all crazy looking that's because we need to enable use maximum so yeah use maximum as enable now so good so the color of this I want to give it the same color as the Sun so something like an orangey color like this there we go that's pretty good and the law because this is set to screen if I just want to turn down the the amount of that you know the thickness of that I can just turn down this value here this slider just acts as a sort of like a thickness but something like that should be pretty good and the next thing the almost the final thing I want to add is a color balance note and it's gonna allow to do some fine color grading so what I want to do is I want to make this less aqua looking so that the mid-tones I want to make it look a little bit more blue so something like that and then I want to make the Sun look a little bit more Orange II red pinkish almost so something like that what if I set it to pink how would that look mm-hmm yeah it looks a bit like that which is uh I don't know if that's like accurate or better or maybe it should be a little bit redder because you want to get a nice color scheme going so blue against red they're like opposites on the on the color color wheel so red is down here and you've got aqua up there so if we can get this to be a nice rich sort of red looking color the backdrop then there you go it actually does look well it looks overkill at the moment but it does actually have an eye-pleasing sort of color palette to it anyways you can fool around with that as much as you like I think I think I'm sort of done with it what I'm gonna do finally though is of course add in a nice happy vignette so the way we do that is a lens distortion with a blow node you connect the two like this distort one hunt set to 1 and then blur set this to fast Gaussian relative and then why I'll just set this to 10% this distortion you actually don't need to connect to anything and if we just set this to mix and then set this into the bottom input and then set this to multiply then now this will act as the the basically we've now got black edges around it so that's essentially guiding your eyes to not be around the outside but more to what's on the inside it's one the inside that counts isn't it so you don't want it to go 100% black but a little bit a little bit it's always better than nothing I find so yeah that's pretty much it I'm not really too happy with how the sunlight is like blooming in there so I could probably turn that down a little bit with with this perhaps and maybe the the length of those rays they're a little bit much as well but if we try that oh yeah there we go does look look let's just sort of uh summer's wiped it out hasn't it one that it be some so come on a little bit there we go alright so that's not too bad now but there you go that pretty much concludes the tutorial guys so I hope you enjoyed it I hope you got something from it as you can see you can do a lot with this sort of premise so I'm keen to see your own caves like your own unique looking caves so if you can take this tutorial and then like create like a cool awesome looking cave then that'd be sweet I'll show you yeah finished with the final image here so this was of course how can I make that oh no it's disappeared um yeah this was of course my final image but yeah I'm really curious to see what you guys create so if you create something cool please post it in the comments on Blender guru I'd love to check it out and yeah just make something unique I'll post a link to some reference photos of caves you can have a look at all the different variations and stuff there are maybe come with a story like some pirates or I don't know I don't want to put ideas in your head but I'm always interested in like you know seeing what other people create with the tutorials so yeah that concludes the tutorial hope you enjoyed it and until next time have fun bye

Channel: Blender Guru

Views: 286,397

Keywords: blender, tutorial, cycles, cave, rocks, Blender (Software)

Id: 1J4r0mt9zz0

Length: 83min 33sec (5013 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 21 2013