How to Make an Underground Cave in Blender

okay let's do a quick breakdown of this exact render right here so I've done this kind of interior cave type thing so many times over the past few years so in this one I'll just show you the most efficient way that I've found to put this kind of scene together and make it look good and uh everything is very very simple on this one so it should be fun easy one to follow even though it looks like there's a lot of detail and complexity going on in here especially when you look at the blend file like when you look at this it's a bit crazy but I promise I'll break this down in a way that's very simple and easy to understand and when you see how simple this actually is you're gonna see like this scene right here a little bit differently maybe a lot differently so the first thing I want to mention is these guys at the bottom uh if you noticed in the render there's these like skeleton guys it's not making a huge difference to the render and it's literally just a model that I bought from CG Trader so I just went on the website CG Trader and then just typed in like a search for I think this this exact model is called skeleton zombie so if you search for that you'll probably find this exact one but I'm not gonna do a tutorial on how to like buy a model uh so all I did was just put that in here put a texture on it and then that was that so not going to talk about that but let's talk about the rest of the scene so I think the the number one thing that that most people are going to be wondering about is these like rock formation type things on the side I don't really know what you call this but it kind of reminds me of like in Iceland those yeah natural weird hexagonal rock formations it's kind of the vibe I was going for but this basically is very easy to do even though it looks kind of hard to make it's very simple so I just took one of these clusters of of these things here I just moved it off to the side for this demonstration so basically you can see what it is I I just separated a few of the individual pillars that I scattered on here I separated them out into their individual things that I would have modeled so the way you do this is you just model like three or four hexagonal shapes you add a little bit of like damage or natural like uh variation just so it's not so straight and like straight lines everywhere if you really want to see exactly how you do this I'll show you right now as usual it starts with you know Cube so this kind of shape people add a loop cut right there take this Edge pull it out like this and then take these edges bring it in you can also just add a cylinder with five or six segments and there you go and then you know you just if you want to add some extra geometry and just mess with it like this you can always do that and just kind of pull edges in and out here and there uh bevel little things here and there Supply the scale first and then you know go in and bevel things uh you can hit Ctrl shift B to Bevel one vertices and you just go in and make damage and just mess it up a little bit do that three or four times and then you'll have a collection of just three or four different pillars you just take those add it to a collection and then you can just use that to scatter onto some kind of object if I go to top view here you can see the the kind of object that I would have scattered this on it's you know it's very Square here so the way you do this I'm not going to show you exactly how to do this because there's so many tutorials going over how to like scatter an object onto another one so you can use um geometry nodes if you want the you know probably all the introduction videos to Geometry notes that you'll see are how to scatter an object onto another object so I think I've done a video on that too if you look up um one of older videos of like I think it's called making crazy renders with easy geometry nodes you could also just use a particle system so you know um a hair particle system or even maybe in the middle particle system are going to work totally fine point is you take something like this and you can see how it's going into like a vertical slope kind of shape like this so you would just take some kind of sloping elevating thing and then scatter these onto that so that's all it is and you can see that's the kind of shape would have been scattered on and you can see exactly that square that is showing up in there if you really want you could literally just take this and press alt d a ton of times as well like take a bunch of clusters and just actually spam it around that would work too but it's just a bit faster to to scatter it because it's like a few hundred of them but you could honestly just take sometimes I'd just do this I'm really lazy and the point is however you want to get a cluster of things like this is going to work just get a cluster of them and then join them together so I have just a thing here if you're using a particle system or geonodes you don't actually need to join them you can just kind of I I join them here but you don't need to you can just use it as a cluster and just hit shift d and then duplicate that chunk around a bunch of times so that's exactly what I did here I just took that cluster of those pillars duplicated it around a bunch of times and if I click around here now you'll start to see it's really not that much stuff happening it's kind of the same one or two versions of those clusters flipped around a bunch of times upside down scaled vertically like some of them are stretched out some of them are stretched in and you just do that and that's how you get like a lot of variation in the OR seemingly a lot of variation in like the the terrain or the uh the Clusters here and so one other thing you'll notice is there's these models kind of intersecting that I just chucked in the sides here and these these are just rocks from quixel Mega scans if we look at this in material preview you can see it's just some rock from quixel so however you want to get rocks if you want to use pixel or if you want to just go find some on some other website like CG Trader or something it doesn't really matter the point is like if you intersect real looking like Photo scans of rocks inside of these models it kind of gives it a much more natural look than uh than if you just have it by itself it kind of makes it feel like it's more part of The Rock versus some separate like thing you modeled uh it just gives it a more natural look oh and I forgot to mention texturing these is very easy you just take um if you want this look what I do is I just take a rock texture from quixel again you don't have to use qixel but any any Rock texture is going to work like you can go on ambient CG or textures.com and you could just pick up uh you know ambient CG has 4K Rock textures you can just go there grab one of those throw it on here and as long as it has a normal map that's decently um decently detailed that'll look totally fine in here and so you can see that is just gonna you know oops that's displacement in my bed the normal map is going to be what's carrying a lot of that detail throughout the scene and you can see what that's doing I actually have it turned down quite a bit but it's still on and uh I guess the color and and uh that's gonna add a bit of detail as well I guess a lot so just pick a nice detailed Rock texture and you throw that on there and then maybe since you have three or four versions of that pillar that you've made you can just tweak you know the UV map a little bit so it's different spots on the texture and then once we have a few of those make a cluster however you want to do that and then you're good to go you got a big one of these you can use that to just throw around as a big chunk of stuff that will really easily fill up the scene very fast when you start duplicating that around so that's exactly what I did here and then you know I just intersected that with a few other models to add some some variation spice it up a bit like those those rocks I showed you and also some of these other pillars like this that's just some random thing I made in kind of just intersecting in the wall there and that's duplicated around a few times too and that just gives it a more I don't know like human-made Vibe um I think I call this one Sanctuary something so it's not like I don't know you don't need to use these exact types of models but the point is like if you just have it intersecting with something a bit more natural or some other type of pillars that can give you a really cool look and a really complex look and it makes people think like how the hell did you make that one really is just a few of the same or even the one same chunk duplicated a ton of times with like some basic rocks chucked inside of it so that should make a lot more sense now looking at this what's actually happening here uh this thing I'll talk about now but if you look at that that's all it is I'll talk about the water and the lighting in a second but that's most of it is just what I explained there is that chunk duplicated a ton of times let's talk about this thing in the middle though because this is kind of fun I think I've done a video on using or creating like shattered things like this I think it's called um creating shattered crystals in blender if you want to find it on my channel but this type of thing is very fun you just take some kind of shape I'll just do a quick demo right here so Cube let's just add a loop cut there take this face this face bring this up scale it in make some like ethereum type shape rotate it and then all you do is you take the uh you use cell fracture and if you don't know what that is I'll show you it's object quick effects and then this one right here cell fracture I don't think that's an add-on you need to enable uh if you do though it comes with blender so you just go to edit preferences and search for it but I'm pretty sure it just comes with blender by default you don't even need to turn anything on but if you don't see it just check that on this but I'm pretty sure you don't need to do that anyways if you click this that will bring you into here and I've explained this more in depth in another video I did that other one like creating shattered glowing crystals in blender but the settings I use is just noise up so it's a bit more random recursion up if you I'll just do one here because it's going to slow it down quite a lot but if you do two or even three sometimes you can get uh really intricate results and basically what this number does is it's just how many times will it divide the mesh into smaller and smaller pieces so the higher that number the more smaller shards you're gonna get versus bigger chunks so I'll show you here the difference between these two but I'll turn it up to one for this one but usually I think I think in the one in the render I did two and then this setting right here this other random Factor I'll just turn that up I don't know exactly what that does but more Randomness seems better and I'll just hit okay and then it'll just run through the cell fracture and just do its thing so you can see how it's dividing into big chunks and then it's dividing those big chunks into smaller chunks and so the higher that recursion is it's going to divide those smaller chunks into even smaller chunks you'll get obviously slower but sometimes more intricate and cooler results and then you can see it's it's uh it's got the original mesh just over top of it I'll usually just delete that because I don't need it and then we can take all those individual pieces and just because it's annoying to deal with so many separate objects at once I'll take an empty like I've done here so the square around it is just an empty that's all these pieces are parented to so that means I can go in and move them around individually but if I want to move everything at once I just move to empty or scale it if I want and so that just makes it a lot easier to deal with so let's just hit shift a empty and then I'll just pick q but it doesn't matter which one you pick but Cube's gonna work here just put it roughly over this and then just take all of this stuff make sure the empty is selected last so it's the lighter selection and then hit Ctrl P for parent and then object keep transform or just press K and that will just make it so that when you move the empty around all those pieces will follow but you can still move them around individually on their own which is super nice and then to get it to kind of explode like this you just take proportional editing so you just click that Circle button at the top right here and then any of those pieces you grab it will just have a falloff distance of um all those other smaller chunks so that's really nice to just kind of make it blow up a little bit and you can turn on effect only locations and scale it if you want and there's all sorts of fun stuff you can do but that's that's how I did that is you just it's just a basic cell fracture and then parented to a thing that you just move it around however you want and yeah so I'll just get rid of that for the demo but that's exactly the same thing I did here I just turned up the recursion a bit higher I think I think it was just two okay so that's that and then for the texture I think this is just there's a lot of nonsense and complexity going on here but basically what this is I took a rock texture from qixel and that's just the the default Rock texture is what's carrying most of the detail and again you could get that from ambient CG if you want that's free and that's just running into we just got the basic base color this is this is empty inclusion but it's not really doing that much so this whole chain here is the base color got the roughness normal and displacement so basic standard texture setup and then there's some other I put an ambient occlusion note in here I think for this in this case all it's doing is just making everything a bit darker ambient occlusion is a separate thing on its own that you doesn't just make it darker but in this case it's the way it's set up it's kind of just making it darker in my case so this whole chain here just think of this as the base color chain of doing some weird things like I'm increasing saturation I'm decreasing the brightness there's some weird stuff going on not really that important the basic idea is take a a regular Rock texture put it on and then you can stop there but what's actually happening in mine is I'm adding a bit of translucency so you can see if I just run this straight out without the translucent it's just a regular like rock texture type thing and you can see it's very solid looking if I add that translucent in which I'll explain in a second it just gives it a nice soft crystally salt type look whichever they like for this for this kind of stuff so the way you do that is it's just a so this is our basic texture running out of this one so we've just got base color roughness and normal and then that is just like it's like I showed you before that can run straight out but if you want that translucent you just take a translucent node run the base color that would normally would be running into your regular texture run that also into the translucent and then run the translucent into an ad Shader and add those two things together so you just add your regular texture to a translucent and then make the translucent color the same color as the the texture that's running into the principle Shader and then just run the ad Shader out and then there you go you just add you added translucency to it that's what you just did and then I've got just yeah that's that's it so it looks complicated but hopefully that explains it in a very simple way um there's all this extra stuff that you don't need to do but that's what I explained is is what's going on here for the most part so that's that um and that again just gives it a cool like crystally kind of look which is kind of fun sometimes and I think I'm doing that to the rest of this stuff too just it just softens out everything it makes it look kind of cool and just I don't know like like really soft Stone I guess so just you don't need to go for that look but just kind of I just thought it was cool in this one so yeah anyways whoops so yeah anyways looking around this scene now it should make a lot a lot more sense as to what is actually going on here because there's nothing really that complicated in terms of what is going on in the viewport here um I guess I'll talk about the water in a second but basically the the floor here is just I think I've got the same Rock texture that's on everything this one doesn't have the translucent so it's just a regular Rock texture and then that this floor here it's just got adaptive subdivision so you just uh make sure you're in experimental Cycles so you won't have this adaptive checkbox if you don't switch this feature set from supporting to experimental and then you just add a subdivision modifier switch it over to Adaptive right here and then there you go you could also just right click and subdivide it like 100 times and it would probably look the same because it's underwater here it's not really that important to have that on point is have some rocks at the bottom and then the water here I've done a video on creating realistic water so you can just go watch that if you've never done this before but that's the node setup if you want to just copy it so um the the different thing here that you probably haven't done before if you haven't seen this is these couple extra nodes the light path transparent and mix Shader so that just lets I don't I'm not exactly sure exactly why this works because it's has to do with um I don't know how the camera sees light raisin blender I guess which I'm not really that good at understanding but the point is if you do this it'll let a lot more light through the water versus if you just turn up the transmission normally so it's just that just makes it look a lot nicer and then if you want it to be kind of a bit murky and cloudy you just add a principled volume into the volume output of the same Shader and I'm I'm adding a volume absorption but it's not really doing anything so just add this and run it straight out and it'll look pretty much the same just make it whatever color you want and then yeah there you go again that I go more in depth into that into my uh I have another video about creating water so you can watch that if you want but just I'd recommend just copying this set up here and just run with that okay so that's the water so yeah let's talk about the lighting um as usual I keep it very very simple with the lighting so in my scene here I think this is a good example of a very simple setup it's just one Spotlight and pretty much nothing else there's you can see there's still light in here there is another area light at the bottom because I'm faking a bit of down sliding so like the light that would be reflecting off the ground here and Shining back up onto this model I'm kind of enhancing that a little bit by adding an area light in those areas that it makes sense for light to be in but for the most part 99 of the light is coming from this one Spotlight at the top like I could delete these extra lights and it would look pretty much the same but if I deleted this main Spotlight you can see there's almost no light left in the whole scene so let's look at what this is it's just a spotlight at the top of the scene shining through here um yeah whatever this number is however many watts that is it's turned up quite a bit the radius is pretty high at one meter so what that's doing is if we look at the Shadows here so pay attention to the shadow being casted by these Stones here if I turn it down to zero we're gonna get really harsh shadows and it almost looks like direct sunlight kind of and so if I turn that up the higher I turn that number the softer that the Shadows are going to be so that just means that like in this render I was kind of going for you know an underground type thing so if you imagine like if you were in an underground type cave what would the lighting look like if you were getting a bit of daylight for me I'm kind of picturing like um kind of like a cloudy day if there was a big opening at the top of this cave letting some light in that's kind of what I was going for so that's why the light size is turned up because I don't want it to look like direct sunlight I kind of wanted to look like um the light that you would see if you were at the bottom of a cave uh with just like the sky kind of reflecting in there or shining in there rather so you know if you're in a cave you probably wouldn't be getting direct sunlight you'd probably just be getting a bit of ambient light from the sky and that's kind of what I was trying to mimic here with this with the bigger radius it also just looks cool having a nice shot nice soft Shadows the color here is just a little bit blue so that's saturated at uh 0.17 so not anything crazy you could have it at zero and it would look almost the same but I like it a little cool and then yeah that's the lighting like really not that complicated so with this I didn't just add it here and then it was perfect straight away I had to move it around a few different times and try different angles and find a spot that will work best and this is what I came up with but so don't don't think that I just put it in here and it was done instantly but um just working with one light at a time means that it's going to be a lot easier to find the perfect spot for each light um versus like if you're struggling with the lighting it might be because you have too many lights in your scene and it's just too hard to deal with that many lights at once because you gotta you gotta really find like the right spot for each light and it's really hard to deal with that if there's a lot of lights so that's why it's if you just add one single light and perfect the location and intensity and softness of that one light then it's it's so much easier to deal with and a lot of times it looks a lot better too and then once you have one if you need another one you can add another one but most of the time like if I just add one there's like it's just one light that's doing all the heavy lifting in my scenes and that um that just makes it look so much better most of the time depending on what you're going for obviously uh let's talk about the volumetrics here so I've showed this pretty much every single video because I use this in almost every render it's just a cube over the whole scene I've set it to display as bounds so you go you just on this Cube here you go to this orange Square tab scroll down to viewport display and then there's this box right here display as so by default it's on textured so you can see it's just a regular Cube and then you just switch this over to bounds and that's how you get this bounding box so it's just out of the way but it's still activated and so what I've done is I just right click this thing right here and you just assign a shortcut to it and then that way I made it D on the keyboard so if I press D that menu comes up and I can just quickly switch to bounds right there super fast here's the settings for the volume just volume scatter density at 0.005 pretty low and then the anisotropy which is it just means how um the higher this number is the more intense the like the fog is going to be closer to the light source so if you turn it up way up high you'll still see here that like it gets really bright close to the light and it really dim the farther weight it gets from the light but if I turn it downwards more towards zero or negative it it's gonna get like um just less intense close to the light source and just more dispersed kind of and you can see what that's doing here so yeah that's that's the settings I was using for this one that that's my go-to setup is Spotlight and volumetrics and that looks good all the time not all the time like almost all the time that's gonna look good okay let's talk about the camera here because this is an important thing to think about when you're creating a render it's probably one of the most important things because it's how everyone else will actually see the thing that you've made so the camera here we've just set it to I have it on panoramic but it's not really doing that much so if I switch it to perspective there's the difference it made not a huge difference it's basically just at 28 millimeters so your default focal length which is the zoom or the number of millimeters that is going to be 50 millimeters so when you create a new scene in blender your cameras by default set to 50 millimeters um if you open up your phone camera like you're right like the regular back main camera on your phone that's going to be about 24 millimeters so we're at 28 here so it's just a little bit more zoomed in than what that would be if that gives you an idea of how zoomed in that is um so if you've never used a camera that should make more sense but if you have used the camera you'll you'll already know all that stuff but anyways that's what I'm doing here and then I did just switch it to panoramic and that's distorting it a little bit um I have a whole video on I keep saying that but I do have a whole video on using this fisheye lens here but basically you just switch this camera the switch it to panoramic and then switch the type here over to fisheye lens polynomial and then there's all these numbers here K1 is basically your focal length in and out and then K2 is basically the amount of distortion around the edge and then all the other numbers I usually don't touch so if you just want a tiny bit of distortion around the edge just to curve the edges a little bit that looks really nice sometimes and that's what I did here is just add a little bit of that so you can see again there's perspective perfectly straight panoramic just warps it a little bit just fun to do sometimes not necessary but just fun to do and I think that's everything like this this is not a very complicated scene it's all just basic stuff but the important thing is it's it's all laid out and placed in a way in a way that fits nicely together and really that's that was the challenge of this scene was just fitting all these simple elements together in a way that looked good and you know all I can say for that is it's just trial and error like it's just you just do this thing a ton of times and then you'll you'll figure out what looks good and what doesn't look good and it's so there's like the long-term trial and error but there's also just the trial and error of every single time I create a new render it's like I don't know exactly where things should be in the color and like how how bright the light should be and how far the camera should be like I have to figure it out every single time I start a new render so it's it's like that's just part of the process um so yeah there you go that's I think that's all you need to say for this one like there's not much else in here there's some weird stuff in the back that you can't even see but that's there uh yeah so hopefully that was useful and it gives you some ideas of some like cave type things you could do so go and try some like I don't know you could go and make these like intricate pillar things if you want or you could just use rocks only and not worry about that but hopefully I gives you some ideas of like some renders you could try from this and uh yeah if you want to go really in depth into my environment creation process and you want to see me make a bunch of environments from start to finish like zero percent start all the way through to 100 finished and you also want a bunch of models that I use to make my artwork there is a link in the description which will take you to a course page you can go check it out if you want if you don't want to spend money that's probably not for you but if you want to go really in depth go check it out so that's there and yeah hopefully this was useful and I will see you around in some other video and oh one other thing is I'm using a new mic here so sorry if there were some weird audio issues I'll try and get that worked out for the next couple of videos anyways that's it for this one I'll see you in I don't know some other video bye

Channel: Max Hay

Views: 28,550

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Id: Y2VyDGHmtM8

Length: 27min 34sec (1654 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 21 2023