How to make Space Scenes in Blender 3d ➡ Make Planets Fast: Easy Workflow!

this video is brought to you by City Builder 3D the ultimate citybuilding asset add-on for blunder available for download on blunder [Music] market.com all right guys so making planets in blender comes down to three steps texturing the planet adding a Cloud's layer over top the planet and then finally adding a layer of atmosphere or volumetrics if you follow these three steps and add a bit of compositing you should be able to get some unique results let's get started first I'll delete everything in blender except from my camera and add a sphere to act as my planet in the scene I'll increase these segments and Rings subdividing the sphere to 50 and 36 respectively and also shade the sphere smooth so that we don't see any hard angles on the edges now we'll go to the shading Tab and start texturing our planet I'll add a new material for our planet in this case I'll use this Mars planet texture I found online but for this step you'll want to choose a texture for the type of planet that you want choose this wisely as some Planet textures look better up close at certain scales than others I'll drag this texture into the material Shader for the sphere and connect its color value into the base color input of the principled bsdf Shader I'll switch the projection type from Flat to sphere to make sure the texture spreads out over the sphere better you'll notice when I do this I get this weird seam here to deal with this I'll press shift a and add a texture coordinate node we'll then connect the generated output to the vector input of our Mars texture and now as you can see here our planet image should be mapped correctly for the diffused material now I'll switch to the Cycles rendering engine in our render settings tab for more precise lighting I'll go to the environment Tab and add a new background with a slightly lighter gray color just to see what we're looking like so far now for a realistic lighting base we want to use an hdri environment so I'll select the environment texture option for the color of our world in this case I'll use this hdri of a field at night with the stars above for the the environment texture in our scene I'll select open in the environment tab find this texture and select it now in this case I want a pretty contrasty and Moody Planet shot so I'll decrease the strength of this hdri environment to around 2 now we'll just have some basic ambient and Reflections now in this case we don't want to see the actual hdri so I'll go to the render settings tab and under film select the transparent option now our hdri background should be visibly gone but is still lighting our planet now for this planet shot and for a lot of others you will usually want some basic single Source Lighting in addition to your hdri I'll add a sun source to our scene and put it off in the distance to act as a side side light on our planet we can adjust this later to dial in the lighting but this is the main source I'm going to use to light the scene to add a bit of depth and contrast now I'll grab our camera in the scene and position it as I like for this shot to make the planet seem bigger than it looks in our 3D viewport here I'll place the camera up close to the planet at a creative Dutch angle on a focal length of 115 mm this is my attempt at recreating a perspective of an astronaut looking out the window at the earth now our planet is looking way too smooth and perfect so let's work on its material to add a bit more detail in the Shader tab I'll add some specularity to our planet by connecting the color output of our planet texture to the roughness input on the principled bsdf Shader to have a bit more control I'll add a color ramp and adjust the sliders to get the right amount of roughness moving the white slider over will create more roughness on the bright areas and bringing the black slider over will create more smoothness in the darker areas adjust according to your own taste now as you can see here we have some specularity on our planet that goes along with our diffused Planet texture which looks pretty cool now we'll go one step further I'll press shift a and add a bump node then I'll connect the color output of our planet texture to the height input of this node and connect the normal output of the bump node into the input of the principled bsdf Shader as you can see we get that added illusion of bumps on our planet but it's way too much right now so we'll dial down the strength of the bump Shader until we get something more subtle that we like I'll adjust my camera here again and experiment some more but now the planet texture itself is looking pretty good now it's time to add some clouds on top of our planet for good organization practice I will label our planet in the scene overview on the top right now I'll press shift d to duplicate our planet and scale up this new sphere slightly we'll label the sphere clouds go to the shading Tab and remove the original Planet material from the sphere and add a new material for this object we'll call this material as you may guess clouds now for this material we'll use this clouds map that we grabbed online I'll drag the texture into the material node setup and once again connect the color output to the base color input of this material and then add a texture coordinate node connecting the generated output to the vector input of our new texture and finally I'll switch the projection type to sphere to make the black part of the texture transparent we'll connect the color output into the alpha Channel input on the principled bsdf Shader and we'll have something like this one more layer of detail and a step closer to a great looking Planet I'll go into camera view and scale these clouds way down so that they are just above the ground level of our planet to give that next bit of detail I'll also rotate the clouds around until I get something that I like finally finally let's create a layer of atmosphere on the outer edge of our planet to do this we'll duplicate our planet sphere and once again scale it up slightly we'll label this one atmosphere and create a new material for it in the shading tab for this material we'll use a principled volume Shader going into the volume input of our material output node as you can see this creates a layer of thick volumetric atmosphere around our planet this is the right effect but we can make it more subtle by dialing back the density on our principled volume Shader we can also adjust the color of our volumetrics to something a bit brighter so it's less like smoke we'll scale the sphere acting as the atmosphere to just above the Cloud's layer so that we have three layers of detail on our planet and I'll adjust the lighting a bit to Light Up the Volume more consistently and create more mood this part is really up to your creativity but I like a strong Edge light like you see here you can also change the color of your atmosphere material to something slightly cooler as well and dial in the density for your artistic taste the final steps in creating this planet are in the compositing process to do this effectively I'll create a new view layer for each of the elements that we have created one view layer for rendering just the planet one for just the clouds and one for the atmosphere if this is confusing and you want to learn more about this process I'll put a link on how to learn about view layers in the description below it's an incredibly powerful technique that can give you a lot more control in the compositing process as you'll see here in a minute finally I'll do a test render so I'll go to render and render image as you can see here we have three different view layers that we can use in our compositing process so I'll open up the compositor and get started by clicking on use nodes first I'll add a viewer node so that we can see what our composite is going to look like right now we're only utilizing our Planet view layer so I'll add two more Alpha over nodes to Overlay our clouds and atmosphere layers I'll then duplicate our main render layers node and select the clouds layer for the first one and I'll drag the output of this node into the first Alpha over node to Overlay these clouds I'll duplicate the render layers node once more but this time select the atmosphere in the dropdown menu and connect the output of this node into the second Alpha over node to make the atmosphere look more natural I'll press shift a and add a blur node before it's overlaid on our composite this will make the atmosphere have a more realistic looking fallof in this case I've set the X and Y blur values to 200 pixels each I'll also add a curves node and increase the amount of blue on the atmosphere as well one thing that can take your planet renders to the next level is adding a little bit of glow and glare to your shot as if it were shot with a real camera I'll add some streaks and fog glow with medium quality to introduce some imperfections in the bright spots of the image I'll also duplicate the fog glow node and add it to the atmosphere element to add a hazier look now we're getting there now I'll bring down the brightness levels to bring them into our background further and also increase the brightness of the clouds a bit to give a bit more large scale detail finally I'll add one more Alpha over node before our glare nodes to make the sky background of our scene black you can also choose a starry background but I found that this works pretty well finally after a bit of tweaking and some test renders I was happy with my Planet I added the space asset from the city Builder 3D add-on added some basic color correction to the entire shot added a simple lens flare overlay and got this final result anyways guys that's it for this video I hope it was helpful as always feel free to leave a comment if you have any questions or suggestions in the comment section below let us know what You' like to see next on the channel and I'll see you next [Music] [Music] time

Channel: LightArchitect

Views: 10,056

Keywords: how to make planets in blender, make planets in blender fast, blender 3d space scene tutorial, filmmaking with blender 3d, trending viral 3d blender videos, lazy tutorials, how to learn visual effects in blender 3d, cgi in blender, planets in blender 3d, filmmaking with blender

Id: 6Pg4VT77RIE

Length: 8min 27sec (507 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 09 2023