How to Make Mars in Blender - Part 1 of 2

Elon Musk wants to put a man on Mars by 2025 but I think we could do it in a little under two hours if of course you can you know let the CG part slide hello my name is Andrew price and welcome to another blender guru tutorial don't mind the sound that is my cat in this video we're going to be making Mars as you can see right here so it's a very in-depth tutorial this might be my most in-depth tutorial I almost didn't do a tutorial on it because I was so not up to recording two hours worth of stuff but here we are so in the video we're going to learn all about creating large-scale environments and yeah it's very long so I've given I'm going to give you some chapter marks right now so this is part one and it of a two-part series so part one covers the we're going to start with a basic scene lay out the material and lighting next then we're going to be adding in some rocks and then creating the dirt shader so that's all for part one feel free to click any of these links here by the way and that'll jump you through to that chapter mark part two which is the next video is we're going to then start with placing some larger rocks into the scene adding some broken rocks around it to make it look more realistic using a special trick called the AO ground trick to make it look like sweeping dirt is a crowding around each Rock which is kind of cool then we're going to be creating the backdrop right simply really and then finally doing some final compositing adding in the dust atmospheric haze color grading that kind of stuff so there's a lot of stuff here that's why I've given you all these little chapter marks here so that you can jump to those spots now a quick note we are going to be using the rock essentials so the rock essentials is a product put out by us blender guru and we designed it basically for scenes exactly like this so you can create realistic outdoor environments so if you haven't seen the rock essentials you can click here and that'll actually take you to the video so you can check the rock essentials if if that you think so yeah it's you know it's a pack a rock it's got brushes in it it's got cliffs it's got a whole bunch of different stuff you can check it out there now I do understand some people aren't on a big fan of tutorials where it uses a product which you have to pay you have to pay for I totally get that it's I yeah I know you want free stuff who doesn't like free stuff but look we've made this product so that we can keep blending guru running and I like making tutorials where things actually move pretty quickly so that's why we use pre-made asset packs like this so that you can um yeah make nice-looking scenery so yeah check it out there otherwise let's begin alright so here we are brand new scene open up in blender the most daunting task of all which is uh yes starting with nothing so go ahead and delete the default cube and we're just going to start laying out the basic scene so I'm just going to add in a plain position the camera front and center on that plane and yeah as I mentioned just want to start positioning the camera and positioning the ground and everything yeah just sort of layout the scene because otherwise you start getting into the detail and things get messed up so at this stage what I like to do is add in something of scale as a reference so that I know that what I'm working with because this is completely foreign to us this could be one meter or it could be a hundred so you could either add in a cube which is by its default height it's about if you switch to metric units which you should you it's 2 meters 2 meters high which is about roughly the size of a of a human so I usually just sort of make him about that sort of look and this is the size of a human so now looking at the scene I can sort of get a feel for what I'm looking at so if this is an astronaut standing here this is you know the size of that so this ground here you can see is 25 meters across so I'll just scale it up just slightly bigger than what's there now I already know what I want in this scene but if you don't you just want to sort of play with ideas that's totally fine as well you don't want to have a completely flat plane for any ground at all every you know ground surface in life is all sort of its bumpy all over so what we're going to do is just subdivide this a hundred times 100 times and then if you go and you hit the O key on your keyboard then you can start using proportional fall-off with the scroll wheel and start making slopes like that so what I'll do I'll just position this here I'll go into rule of thirds mode for the camera so that I've got something to to work off of so this is about where I want my my astronaut to be standing so he's just a little little block there right now hmm okay I'm just trying to think okay because I want him to be standing on top of the hill so all right let's just do that let's just make a little hill so I'll just bring that up to be about there I want there to be sort of a maybe another sort of slight hill around this sort of corner so something sort of like that and then I want there to be like a little ditch like a pool sort of down there you can see that this there's a grid floor there which is showing up when I pull that down so I'll just turn that off just so that it's easier to work with here okay pull that down okay there we go so as you can see like honestly you don't want to get paralyzed with this sort of thing because that you when you're starting something like this is so easy like I don't know if I'm going to do the right thing yet you know what if this isn't right maybe there's going to be there and you you start to procrastinate that's when you end up on Facebook and read it and doing stuff other than what you actually love to do really which is to make art so just keep it flexible like play-doh and yeah just try and just until you see some interesting shapes that you like so there we go so I'll have my astronaut just sort of standing up on there and that's fine now what I'm going to do is I'm going to create another plane so I'll just add one right here underneath that one and I'm going to scale it up and I'm going to move it out and this is going to be the background so this is my foreground here right in front of the camera and then sort of up where near the astronaut that's what you call the middle ground and then over here this is going to be the background now why don't we just scale up this plane here well the thing is is that things in the foreground need more detail than things in the background so we're going to be adding a little bit of detail to the plane here later maybe in which case if we wanted to have that detail that we have to make the same amount of detail for the stuff in the background which is just a waste so by having a separate plane way in the background that doesn't need as much detail we can save render time basically I know it looks awkward from the top-down view it looks ugly but nobody ever sees it from the top so it doesn't matter if you look at like all the best artists yeah you'll see that their scenes are all just hacked together just pieces on other pieces and doesn't make any sense but the render looks lovely now you'll see that in the camera view you can't see that plane there and that's because by default blenders default camera clips out at 100 meters or 100 to plenty units so what I'm going to do is I'm going to change this to 1 kilometer 1000 and now you can see it there in the background so I could increase the height of that a little bit but really I guess what I need to do is just because but I'm just thinking about the scene here so if this isn't making sense to you what I'm doing or why I'm doing it I'm just thinking about the end result and I know that I want there to be a little alien artifact there somewhere in the background so I might maybe just tilt that camera down there a little bit and which point maybe I would decrease this this slope there or this slope over here actually that looks kind of cool having a little sort of a ditch the other thing that could look compositionally cool is like having having clear depth so like a foreground a middle ground and a background so like the middle like you want there to be like a clear separator so if you add like a ditch sort of between it it's sort of like it's it's a layered sort of scene maybe I'll make that one sort of slope like that try and get sort of a flowing sort of feel so it's like the camera you start on the right-hand side you follow up the slope to the left and then you go down to the artifact over there on the right-hand side so you know honestly I don't know what I'm doing now this could look terrible I've made this scene now Phi times three times to practice for this tutorial one of them I was recording the tutorial and I realize afterward I didn't have my microphone turned on after five years of doing blending or I still make stupid mistakes like that anyway it is what it is okay okay that looks yeah looks fine to me so yeah okay if I actually I wanted to I wanna make this thing look really big I'll scale this out so that it's like hitting the end of our camera clipping value there of one kilometer which might be cool you know the grandiose the scene looks the more I don't know pro you look as if you can pull it off like yeah it's just like small scenes uh you know what it they're easier to make and it takes a lot more work to make a large screen a large sort of scale scene work anyway alright now now we've got this basic sort of layout here now I want to get the basic lighting so I'm going to add in a Sun lamp right here and I'll just rotate this so that it's shining across now the reason I want to go like rather than just straight down is that you know straight down lighting like that makes everything look flat if you go if you make the the sunlight more angular what happens is that it highlights more of the geometry like you see more of the shape of the objects like you can see the difference if I make it point completely down like that you can see the plane becomes completely completely white whereas if you rotate it you can see you start to see more of the forms now this might not seem like much now but when we have rocks on it shadows are going to be a big part of it so again we can change all this later but just getting the basic feel for it right now I'll also add in the sky which I know looking off of my reference photos let me bring in those reference photos it's always this default yellow color in every Mars photo that I've seen actually some of them have this like blue color which is why some of them sort of look like Earth but anyway most of them it's usually this yellowy mustard color so I'll just go with that making a yellowy mustard color here at this stage I tend to think progress is better than details like the faster you can move in this initial setting up stage the better off I think you'll be overall let me turn that down a little bit I'll turn up the sunlight let's go ten on that okay cool now the ground looks pretty white but we'll get into the materials now yeah let's do the materials now okay so obviously we want there to be some texture to the ground so for that I am going to use Chikara I'm going to use polygon polygon comm this is obviously my website it's uh yeah it's like like a texture website but it has all the maps provided like the normal maps the specular Maps overlays patents and things like that it's something that we're working on it's the future future so I'm going to type in ground let's just see the textures that we have here okay cool there's a little bug at the moment where it doesn't automatically load the rest there we go okay cool so looking at these I've honestly like when you first start a scene like it's just a matter of experimentation I've tried big rocks like these I've tried sand and you just find things that you like I tried crack surfaces ones that I that I actually thought work pretty well for this scene was I tried this one last but I might actually go with this one let's try this one ground clay now this the way this site works it's got all the different maps edited so the displacements are the normal maps all that kind of thing and you can download them all with one click but I usually just download the maps that I actually need so in this case I'm just going to start with the albedo which is the same as the diffuse map but with the shadows removed and I'll just download the 3k version of that you want to try and go with the smallest smallest size that you actually need because if you just like a lot of artists just go straight for like the maximum resolution but that actually costs you in rendering because it uses up more RAM so if you find that your graphics card is always crashing when it goes to rendering it's because you're using too high textures and honestly at this scale like this is just on the surface it's going to be like it's scaled down down down anyway you wouldn't probably even see 1k I'm just going with three out of habit I guess anyways cool so I've downloaded those two textures so I'm going to load these in right now let's go new material make sure I've got the ground selected yes I do and let's just load these in so I'll make this go to the left-hand side what is that oh that's right okay when it's in full-screen mode it doesn't let you but yeah I like to drag it over from chrome just in there like that and then drag over the normal map as well just easier than hunting through all the different different things in the file browser in blender so I'll connect this up to there now you'll see that although it's change color the texture there's no actual texture and that is because it hasn't been UV unwrapped yet so what I'll do is I'll split the view here and in edit mode I'm just going to select you project from view bounds and the reason I say bounds is just so that it automatically fits it to the to the floor otherwise it sort of makes it a small thing and you have to scale it up but anyways that's the quickest and easiest way to UV unwrap a ground surface so there we go now the scale of that obviously looks horrible look looks like looking at a bread loaf up close with a microscope so what I'll do is I'll add in a texture coordinate node here and then a mapping node and then connect UV to there and then from the mapping to the image texture and we'll set this to 35 again I'm just going off base what I know of like generally here is a little tip for you generally when you're working with a an image texture especially for like ground surfaces we tend to scale them like not enough like most tiles would go like 10 or you know maybe 15 or something like that I try to think like like go one more than what you would have so it's like I stopped it like 30 but yeah I think we're just bad at guessing the scale of things generally and textures are generally like a small section of Earth so in order to make them scale over a surface like this you to really scale it up so anyway I'm going 35 and that looks pretty good we want to give it some bump of course it will connect up our normal map here with any normal map want to make sure that you're using non color data or else it will not work I repeat it will not work connect that to the normal map node and then connect that to the diffuse you'll need to make sure that you use the same scale as the color map and there we go so that's the basic ground covered there now here's a little tip the color of the ground here if you're working in a live scene with a lot of objects which is what we're doing it helps if you can go off a sort of a reference like try and get everything down to its real raw color and real soil is actually very dark now you can actually get these values online if you type in I found this so it's called the physically based rendering encyclopedia or just type in PVR encyclopedia and it is the first one that comes up it's on the poly count forum here and then it's like yeah it's there but anyways way down here at the bottom it's got these these color chars like these reference charts which are put together by a few different companies production companies and yeah down here you can see when it says bare soil and the base color intensity for that is generally around about 0.1 3 which is crazy so like if you would have a look at this like that would mean that the color of the soil should be around about here which is so super dark which is crazy now you don't have to be locked into that but just know that that's sort of what the soil color generally should be so I think generally what you should be doing is increasing your Sun lamp so that you can actually see the soil properly there anyway so I'll connect in the color here and actually you know what looking at this texture there's very little color variation across it it's mostly bumps and that's really what this is doing for us we've already got a normal map which is the bumps so you know what I'm going to do I'm just going to delete this color map and just use this color right here and all the texture is just going to come from the bump yeah let's do that that looks pretty cool actually I like it now so for the color of the soil I okay so here's the thing first time I made the scenes I went specifically off the reference photos now here's the thing Mars if you actually look at real reference photos the soil isn't that red like all these photos here like these could be taken on earth it just looks like yellow ish soil in fact some of them look like they have been taken on earth actually like the lighting is quite clear like all this stuff like that's just there's nothing really unique about that soil there so I went and followed you know the colors that you can see here just went with a sort of a grayish yellow in color and then at the end of it it didn't actually look like Mars because in our head when we think of Mars we think of red dirt and I think the primary reason for that is because of this photo here which was from 2005 I think which shows very very red soil and maybe this one here now I do believe that the earth that the Mars soil is slightly red but I don't think is that red I think is possibly some color balance issues here like it wasn't maybe the white balance wasn't set possibly I don't know I'm not calling NASA out but the other the rest of their photos look yellow anyway all this is to say this is where you have to use your creative license and go with what you think feels right I want the end result to actually look like Mars so I'm going to paint the picture that people imagined in their head even though the real Mars is probably more like that I'm going to go with more like this a little bit reddish color so there we go okay cool so we've got the soil done now what we're going to do I see first of all I'll just do the exact same thing well let's just go here subdivide our background you project from view bounds and then just give it the exact same material okay there we go so we've got our basic scene up now good go ahead and save it whilst you can all right well done you've now completed the most boring part of any large-scale environment which is yeah laying it out and then setting up the ground material so now that's done we can get into some fun stuff which in the case of Mars is rocks so I'm going to go to a new layer over here and I'm going to start using the rock essentials so I'm going to go to file append and I will find the rock essentials file right here so the rock essentials if you don't know just a quick overview this is what it looks like on the product page it's it's a group of assets and tools and things for creating rocky type environments so there's brushes there's ground textures but the biggest and most important one of all is the individual rocks so there's 267 of them included and they're separated into different categories right here so the one that we're going to use for Mars is in the mountain collection and inside the mountain ones you've got two types you've got large and we've got medium we're actually going to use both I'm going to start with the medium I'm going to go to group and then just select that one group there and then hit append so this is what the rocks look like and actually we should probably move the Sun lamp to its own layer just so that we can start looking at how the rocks look with the actual scene lighting there we go now they look pretty low res but as anybody who has the rock essentials knows you can tweak it by turning up the you can turn on high resolution mode which basically enables an extra subsurf modifier with extra displacement as well making it look a lot more high-res but in our case we're actually going to leave it off so the reason for that is that we're going to use these rocks here across use it as a particle system across this plane here so with the with the plane selected I'm going to go to particle mode select new hair and then select advanced and then down here the most important one we're going to use under is underneath render so we're going to change it from hair obviously to group and then here we can just select the one group which in the scene which is the mountain medium rocks okay so there we go we've got them cast across the plane here now one thing you might note if you zoom right in is that the rocks are at a funny angle in fact they're rotated at 90 degrees to the camera which is kind of odd now you can enable rotation but that doesn't seem to fix it now there are rotation settings right here you can go to normal mode you can try all these different ones none of them seem to flip them the correct way it's it's very odd you can use like global Y but then what happens is that on a slope surface it doesn't rotate them according to the surface that it's on so they still come out like at a funny angle and then if you want to use the the other thing is you want to be able to make each one individually rotate it to the others otherwise they all you can start to see them lining up so anyways this is what you have to and this is actually posted this question on Twitter asking if there was any other solution other than this but this is what everybody does and if you ask me it is completely stupid and I can't wait until it is fixed one day but basically you want to set it to normal like that and then over here with the rocks you want to rotate them 90 degrees don't know why but we do and then when you've done that you'll see that they are now all on the plane the correct way again as I said I really don't like that but that's just the way it is now you can use this rotation value here and they will be each individually rotated to the other so they should you shouldn't see like you shouldn't be able to see the same rock twice at least not easily and if you can you can sort of change the seed value settings there but anyway so I'll change a few more things of the particle settings so I'm going to go to random mode which although it doesn't look like anything's changed if you use a lot of particles like we went with a hundred thousand of these rocks that is a lot maybe maybe ten thousand if you're in jittered mode you can see they actually that like there's a pattern it's like it's following a grid pattern so random just breaks it up and makes it random hey go figure so the other one I want to change is II underneath render no not on these render underneath velocity no physics where is that value oh there it is yeah it's underneath physics random sighs turn that all the way up now it's good point nine there we go that gives a little bit more randomness and then the actual size of them themselves you can sort of tweak them down to be you know something like that the trouble is is like I don't know I want there to be some big ones so I'm going to try something normally I just have to particle settings but I'll try this I'm going to use a children particle like this I'll set it to interpolated actually and then for the length of them let's set that to 0.5 but I'll set a threshold at 0.1 which means that some of them should be big actually let's go smaller point two there we go so some of the rocks are now big and then 20 what 10% of them are remaining their original size so yeah okay so we've now got a lot more rocks than we had possibly intended although actually no that does actually look like the right amount it's just really slow on the viewport so I'm going to set this to 10% here which if that happens it's you know it's a 9 20 percent come on I don't know why blender doesn't fix itself come on why does it do it's supposed to be showing 50 percent of the particles in their original places but evidently that's difficult use modifier stack mmm come on all right well what I'll do instead is I'll set the display number to be 1 and I'll set this to be 100 all right now I mean I got the basic sort of effect it's just annoying that doesn't work ok so let's give this a render now I think I might be able to do it on my GPU depending on how much memory those rocks have used all right let's have a look set the tile size to 256 make sure you save and then let's give it a render okay so there we go that is looking pretty cool so far so yeah in the background you could see that the scale of the rocks really looks nice it's sort of yeah it definitely looks like a real rocky environment towards the front though some of the rocks looks a little bit bare like there should be pebbles basically everywhere in the foreground especially and yeah I'm not too happy with the control like that that little hack that I decided to do just to see if it would work I'm not too happy with these children because it doesn't give you as much control over the little ones so what I'll do is like to make two particle systems so this one will make the small rocks and I'll set the size of those to be where is the size again there we go down here I'll set that to be about point one and I'll just make sure them the smaller size it can be is about half otherwise they sort of disappear into almost nothingness okay so these ones will be called the small rocks I'm going to duplicate that select it again and click the two next to it and these will be the medium rocks okay and make sure that I'm using a different seed value I am the seed Bay that otherwise you have them over the top of each other which is not good and so the thing I'm going to change for this is just increase the size of these ones so that we want less of these so I don't know if that's not enough too many right and I want more of the tiny rocks across the surface so more tiny rocks some medium rocks in there yeah okay let's see how this looks now okay so the rendering is coming through now and I think it okay so I've got I've got more control of it now I can decide how many medium or small ones I want but the small ones are hmm how could I say it I don't mean they actually kind of looked too detailed even to be small ones so what I'll do is I'll use a separate type of rock for these these small ones down here which is what I actually did for my final one but I wanted to try and conserve memory for this tutorial but yeah it seems like basically yet the these the scale of these rocks here basically they've got a lot of detail a lot of tiny crevices and things like that and although you can tweak the scale a little bit it's just too detailed for something of this this scale so they start to look a little bit too detailed down there so what I'll do instead is I'm going to create a separate separate particle group so I'll add these in here I'm going to go to file append and the ones that we're going to use are the volcanic type down here now these are a specific small type of rock right here load them in I'll show you what they look like then to do so they look like that so they're a lot smoother and I think they suit more of a sort of pebble ish sized sort of rock so those are the ones that we will go with so just like the medium rocks we have to rotate them by 90 degrees make sure I'm not selecting the Sun as well there we go I'll go back to my Mars landscape here select the ground surface and I'm just going to switch out the the small rocks with that new particle system sorry with the new group sorry new volcanic group there we go now they're a little tinier so I'll have to increase the size here there we go okay that looks pretty good now if you were worried about the density of it like this there's too many pebbles way in the background perhaps and there's not enough towards the foreground you can use a trick that I've done in some other tutorials which is to basically all no I hit shift said well I can exit ah good which is to do this so if you go first of all add a new vertex group right here and then hit ctrl tab this puts you in white paint mode then you can take a white gradient and use that which scions do that again okay so something sort of like that and then if you go back to your particles over here let's bring in these particles so this is what it looks like currently so they're all distributed evenly but if you use that weight gradient now underneath vertex groups if you use that you should get more in the foreground and less towards the background there so a slight effect but I think generally I just need to increase the number of these because I just overall I don't think there are enough for this mile scene just doesn't quite look suitable enough but that that's a lot I think that should actually look pretty good now okay ah yeah let's bring in the medium rocks things start to go very slow alright let's make the this the side okay so I'm increasing the random size for these medium rocks try to make them a little bit and get some smaller ones in there as well and I'll just increase the size of them just very slightly give it a save and let's see how this looks now all right there we go that looks a lot nicer a lot of rocks and it really is starting to look like a real scene just because of the sheer volume of the rocks here now there is one glaring problem with this which I'm sure you have spotted and that is that the rocks do not look like they're a part of the scene they have a completely different color to the ground so for that we need to do something that but yeah I had to basically learn for this specific scene and that is we're going to basically add a we're going to alt the material alter the material for the rock so that it looks as though where the rock meets the ground it has like a gradient effect where it's like it's almost the color of the ground and then it goes up and you start to see the real color of the rock which is basically what you see when you have a look at real photos from Mars you can see this rock here like it's it's a it's a gradient effect going up there and that's just caused by you know years and years of sand and dust and things brushing against it the tip is going to be the last thing to get buried in it so yeah you can see it really cool there so that is what we're going to do and that is going to really really lift and improve the overall scene drastically it's actually almost like yeah it's pretty it's pretty stunning when you see the difference so let's do that now let's do that right now so um so let's go to the layer with our rocks on it and just so that we can focus I'll just pick one rock okay I feel like I'm in like an upside-down world here shout out to the stranger things great show okay so I'm just going to move this to its own layer and I'm just going to make this one rotated the right way up so that I don't feel tripped out okay so just focusing on this rock here yeah we're going to make it so it looks like the dust is sort of starting at the bottom and working its way up so jumping over to the node editor here so this is the you know this is inside raucous anjaii mean it's just all the maps the color maps the normal maps that kind of thing feeding into this one shader here so right here between there and there is where we can add in our dust shader so what I'm going to do is start by adding in a mixed shader let me drop this in and just so that we can see what's going on just go there okay so what I'll do is underneath here add in a diffuse shader and it's diffused because it is dirt and dirt generally doesn't have that much of a reflection even though we talked about in the PBR tutorial that everything has reflection just for the sake of simplicity we're making a diffuse and so this basically here so this controls whether we're looking at the completely raw rock shader and this controls whether we're looking at the dirt so what we can do is we can add in a something here to control which parts of it a dirt which parts of it are going to be the rock so for that we're going to use a gradient texture right here so if we have a look at just this you can see the effect that it's doing it's a gradient texture now by default it does it from left to right or right to left whichever way you look at it so we're going to change that by adding in first of all a texture coordinate node and then a mapping node just like what you do if you were changing the scale of a texture now I'm going to take the generated output not the UV because yeah I'll show you in a second and then we'll drag this into the gradient texture input right there now here this is going to allow us to adjust the rotation of it in relation to the yet the generated objects are not the UV so this yeah the object itself all right so if we set this to 90 you'll see what it's doing so now it's it's completely 90 degrees sideways so white up there and and dark down there now it should actually be flipped now you'd think that if you just make this the opposite it doesn't do that for whatever reason I don't know maybe it's a mathematical equation that's actually controlling this rotation but to me I always find it really difficult to understand how to actually tweak these things it just seems so unartistic friendly I never know how to do it but anyways so instead of that we're just going to cheat and we're going to add in an invert node which does the exact same thing so now it's black at the top and white at the bottom so the white is going to be the dust okay the dirt dust whatever you call it I guess on Mars is all dirt right because dust means like old skin particles I don't know anyways so if we just have a look at this now let's yeah if we power this so drag that and put that into the factor input of the mix shader' let's make this a bright pink color so we can actually see the effect as it's happening you can see what's going on right there let's just have a look is that accurate okay so it's a little weird so what I'll do is I'll add in I was going to do this anyway a math node in here and set this to power and if we turn this up increase it it'll sort of turn that value down I don't know power is it's all like one of my new things that I've learned it's like I don't know it can adjust gray scales a lot better than color ramps and other things can I don't know how it particularly works I asked my dad on the weekend what does the power mathematical equation means and I got a very long-winded answer and I have to be honest I sort of tuned out a bit bit into it but anyways so you can see okay now you can see it a lot better okay so at the top it's showing mostly just the raw texture and then down here it's this pink which means of course when we change this to be the actual Mars soil it'll make a and make a lot of sense now one thing as well is like if you have a look at reference photos of the dust if I bring those up it's not just you know along the bottom like a gradient it's also getting caught in the crevices of the of the rock so like inside their little tiny crevices and whatever else that's not the best photo but you you get that you get the idea so we're going to have some fun with that as well so let's let's try and make it so that the dust goes inside inside the crevices so this is going to be the gradient sort of effect and went on top of that we're going to add in that that crevice effect so to do that let's add another node up here and this one's going to be the geometry node and all these little ones here we're going to use the bottom one which is point Innes which is a relatively new feature for blender and it highlights like you know looking at an object like this the part that are pointy so again if we just steal our little power value here you can see the effect as it's happening quite well there okay now we want the white to collect inside the crevice area so it's currently we want the opposite of what the point in this is so we're going to add in another I'll just duplicate this one another invert node so now it's collecting in there so if we turn up this power value you can see that it's now just collecting inside wherever the crevices are on our rocky oh and by the way this doesn't look like much in this resolution but if we turn up the subsurf off of the rock which I guess I should have done at the start you can see the effect a lot better so it's actually physically collecting inside the the crevices there which is nice great so what we'll do is basically just drop it take this and combine it down here with a mix RGB note so we're just mixing the current black and white value here with this black and white value so I'll take that put that into the top input there and put in the bottom input I'll set this to screen let's have a look at that and now we can control how much of that we actually want to to show through like that now the other thing is like it's like slightly gray all over all over which is actually good we don't want it to be solid black anywhere because we do want the rocks to look as though at least every single part of it has at least some form of tiny amount of dirt on it so that's what this gray is going to it's going to do so we have a look at this you can see the effect that again it's hot pink but you can get the idea now one one other thing as well just going to add this so in between okay this is looking very confusing I'll just move this around a little bit so it's a little bit easier to understand but in between so basically right here like this gradient value it's a little bit too hot like it's a little bit too clean and perfect so to give it a little bit more variation I'm going to add a noise texture take the object output look at this okay and I'll basically just take the dark values of that and combine it over the top of these so I'll add a mix RGB node in here now that was supposed to be oh come on add two there come on the bottom input so take the factor yeah the difference between the color for a noise texture and the factor underneath it is that color is color factor is just black and white yeah a little random piece of useless information I'll set this to multiply and there we go so now it's taking the dark value and applying it over the top of the white value so if I turn that all the way up you can see that it's now cutting into it more and more and if you increase this you would have more of the effect or you could go the opposite way it's really up to you but that looks pretty good so then when you combine that with that we have that and then we have that so what I'm going to do is take all of this and all of this and our little fuse down there and just make one group out of it like that okay and this we shall call we shall call it dirt just dirt and the color will tweak this later on I'm sure to sort of get it so that it matches the dirt correctly or I guess we could actually just do it right now couldn't we well let's do that let's load in the ground wahoo whoa Nellie alright turn off both particle systems where is it there it is okay so if that's positioned right there essentially we just want to look at it and try and get the trigger that dirt way so they match essentially so let's try that mm-hmm so turn down the value significantly I guess mmm you know what I'll probably have to do I think I'm going to have to increase the brightness of our diffused dirt here basically making that whole point I did about you know the true value of materials pretty pointless but you know we got a we got to get through this tutorial so yeah okay sort of like that okay there we go right cool so it's starting to look okay that looks pretty embedded into the into the soil I mean Polly will do something else later on which will make it look even more so but that is pretty good alright so let me move this back to its original layer which I believe was that one was it no it was the next one 50-50 chance wasn't it alright and actually okay so here's the thing we've done it to this one rock here the annoying thing about well it's just it's one of the inevitable things is that each one of these rocks is unique and it has its own unique texture and unique which means that if you want this dirt effect you have to manually add it to each Rock like that so I can actually just delete this one because it's just a duplicate of that one down there but now what we have to do with each one of these is add in this dirt node group so I'll do a time lapse of this as well and we'll do the same thing for the other rocks and the last one gotta all right so let's to check that this actually looks correct I'm just going to do a quick preview now and look at that right on the bottom normal color on the top and then let's load in these other guys right on the bottom normal ish on the top yay okay cool so now let's have a look hopefully all things done correctly the render should come out a lot nicer now let's see how it goes all right there we are so this is the before and then this is the after now we change the you know base dirt color as well but I think you'd agree that it does look a little bit more embedded into it however it's not quite enough especially these smaller stones down here because and it's one of the downsides I guess is that these smaller stones are you know technically if you're if you've got a small stone next to this big stone you can see the gradients halfway up the big stone and really this this smaller stone down here should be completely covered so that's you know I was hoping we wouldn't have to do it I just thought maybe the effect would work itself but we can fix that very quickly with the by adding another shader on top of these small ones but as well as that I want to add in just an like more and more exaggeration on that crevice effect because it's kind of hard to see any dirt on top so like I mentioned you do want it to look as the so every part of the rock has got some amount of dirt on it so let's just focus on what's interesting one this one okay so inside this node group here the good thing is is that because it's a shared node group you only have to do this once and it should reflect on all of the others as well and it's actually hard to see let's move it to its own layer okay and then let's have a look at it with the Sun lamp okay because I want to have a look with this on there alright I guess I should make it more like that so we can see it better okay there we go so having a look at that let's turn the which one of these is it gradient this one the pointyness let's turn that down there we go turning it down has a more of an exaggerated effect okay so it just makes like the dirt spread out a little bit more essentially okay so something like that I think that should look a little bit more a part of the actual scene okay so take that guy let's rotate him back to where he was and I do another render with this we might have to tweak those small stones after it again anyway but let's just take a look with that much better okay so this is what we started with before then we add in the gradient effect and then this is with the exaggerated crevice effect and I think you can see it's starting to look a little bit like Mars yeah cool so we have made this tutorial long enough as it is so we're going to jump into part two next where you will learn how to create how to make the the rocks look even more embedded into the soil by making the the ground sort of pool around each individual Rock which is a really cool trick we're going to be placing these individual huge rocks to create something up on the hill around our little astronaut and then as well as that we're going to be working on the back and then doing the final composite as well to finish off so join me now in part two by clicking on your screen now

Channel: Blender Guru

Views: 277,655

Keywords: blender, mars, tutorial, rock essentials

Id: EesfCLQD8jY

Length: 48min 36sec (2916 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 21 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/Xolonomy]

Watched both of them, super informative for everything you go through. Don't worry about video length really, for an in depth video it only makes us think about how long it is if you mention it. Awesome video though, makes me want to upgrade my computer too

[u/Conflig]

For all of you who is upset that you need rock essential.. YOU DONT NEED IT! You not supposed to copy this tutorial but you supposed to LEARN techniques..

Like.. this is going forever.. what is a point of copying someone's else work? that is waste of time becouse you cant put it in your portfolio or say its made by you..

[u/Dekanuva]

This approach is much better than earlier. It felt much less like an infomercial and more like something to learn from.

[u/goffley3]

Thanks for the tutorial!