How to make the Interstellar Infinite Bookshelf in Blender!

hello everyone and welcome to today's blender tutorial on how to make the infinite bookshelf effect from interstellar here you'll learn how to make the bookshelves and how to make it loop seamlessly as you see here so without further ado let's get started first of all let's go and clear the scene and the baked lighting that will become important later and add in a new plane this plane will be the basis for the entire effect so let's add in a new material and add in our image texture now for the image texture i chose it was just a random bookshelf image from google so if we look at it it's just this simple enough and what i did next was i rotated this by 90 degrees there we go and put it over one meter just about that now let's scale this down and start extruding the sides of this so that we get the kind of stretched effect like in the movie so to do that let's just select a side and extrude it on the x-axis let's just move that over there and the y-axis let's move that over there as well and what we want to do next is extrude the top axis right here but we're going to extrude it by 0.5 meters so we want it to be halfway to the middle of this cube right here so to do that let's just move it up and we can eyeball it we could fix it later just about right there because we want this to be twice as wide as it is tall and then what we want to do is take these edges and bring them to the center right here you don't have to be too accurate accurate with it because what we're going to do next is mirror this so let's add in a mirror modifier right there set it on the x and y axes and bisect it but as we can see we're only getting it mirrored like this that's because we need to mirror it on a 45 degree angle so to do that we're going to make an empty right here now the mirror object be that empty there we go if we rotate this empty by 45 degrees we can see that we're getting the mirror effect just like that pretty simple now that we have this we can start the infinity process or making it arrayed a ton of times but we could go one step further and just copy this face and put it on the tops and the bottoms let's see rotate this and put it down just so that we get the bookshelf on the bottom as well there we go and let's copy this for the top as well that seems pretty good all right now that we have this set up we could finally go and make this uh bookshelf infinite or close to it so let's add an array modifier there we go we want to set this from relative offset to constant offset that's so that if we change the bounds of this the offset won't change just to keep the consistency going and that'll help us loop it later and we want to offset it by 2 meters and set the count to something like 10. now as we could see we're getting some clipping right here but to fix that just bring in your uh bookshelf in by a little bit now as we can see there is no clipping going on perfect all right so next up we want to copy this array modifier using shift d and set this from the x-axis to the y-axis so there we go now we have a hundred cubes all right like this but we're not quite done we want to multiply this again by copying the array modifier so right now we have two going and for this last one we want this to be on the z axis by one meter or actually we may need to squish this cube a little bit more so let's scale this on the z axis just so that these two parts meet let's see something like that should be good i think yeah that's working quite well as we can see we're getting this kind of pattern right here that we can zoom in into infinity so we'll get to the lighting soon to make it look all pretty and stuff like that but now let's make this loop so to do this let's add in a new camera let's see camera right here let's go into the viewport oh it is oriented completely wrong because that's wrong camera if you ever need to add in a new camera to your scene go and press ctrl b so it becomes the active camera once it's selected and now as we can see i'm at the new camera and i need to position it correctly now there we go something like this that seems pretty good there we go i think that's positioned pretty well then what we want to do is set the focal length to something like 25 that just makes it a lot look a lot more trippy when you zoom in on it there we go i think that might be a bit too wide because we're seeing the bottom right here and we don't want to see that we just want to see the top part of it there we go and now we could start with the looping process so to do that we're going to set a keyframe while selecting the main object oh one thing to note uh parent your mirror empty to the parent to the bookshelf object that's so that you can move this without anything tripping up okay so now let's keyframe this bookshelf on its default frame in its default position and then at the end of your animation let me make this a little bit bigger but we want to move this over by one cube so as we know this is about 2 meters wide in each axis besides the z-axis so let's move this over by 2 meters by 2 meters we could check that in the settings right here and then we want to move this one box down and we know that each box is one meter tall so let's do that there we go as we can see this is now looping but the interpolation is wrong to fix that just set this to the interpolation to linear using the t hotkey set to linear and now we can see boom that's now uh looping pretty much perfectly even though i need to check the uh the camera bounds right now the pass brow says that oh if something's outside the camera just turn it black so as we can see there is a little bit of weird stuff going on when it loops because the it doesn't go down but we could fix that fairly easily by just uh either moving the camera up by one meter and i think i'll do that move it up by one meter there we go there we go now there's no visible looping whatsoever okay now let's get into the lighting which is the last stage of this process so this you could play around with this do whatever you want you could add in like lights to your scene or something like that but i found that making the bookshelves glow a little bit looks very good and i'll show you how i did that let's go and set the uh bookshelf texture into the principle bscf node as we can see nothing much is happening because the world is black except in the viewport thing and in here it's not looking too great i found what works very well is to make a color ramp coming out from the bookshelf and then we constrain it so that only these parts are glowing but these parts are also a little bit orange in color let's set this to ease and put it into the emission right there and now we can see that these are now going a little bit but if we set the emission strength to something like seven or six i think that's pretty good let's head to a bit more orange yeah something like that now that we have this we can go and bake the lighting as you probably saw in the beginning i deleted the lighting the baked lighting so to do that what we want to do is add in an irradiance volume there we go a radiance volume right there let's see where to go not entirely sure oh it might have been in the wrong collection so let's add in a light probe radiance volume there we go what this does in eevee if you're in cycles you don't have to worry about this i'll demonstrate that real quick if you're in cycles the lighting already works pretty much perfectly as you can see here and you could just render this out do whatever you want with it but in eevee we need to bake the lighting so let's go and make this radiance volume very very big uh just like that and we could keep it somewhat in the middle there we go and now if we go and bake the indirect lighting i'm just going to turn this a little more orange because in cycles it was looking a little bit rough so if we make the indirect lighting we can see that now if we go into the render view oh that's looking actually pretty good that now it is you know orange tinted and all that and yeah that's pretty much the entire effects we could do a little bit of editing like it's looking a little i think that's looking pretty good and yeah that's basically it if you want to customize your bookshelf a little bit we could always go and like scale parts of it so that looks more like that i don't know that's looking very very good right now that's basically the entire effect again if you want this to look like it's moving down i just rotated the camera like that so that looks like we're traveling down into the i don't know tesseract you could also add modifiers to the the kind of loop room before that uh in one of them i had a solidify modifier so that the walls had a little bit of thickness just like that but yeah that's basically it if you enjoyed this tutorial be sure to like and subscribe all that good stuff check out my twitter account where you would see uh previews of what i'm working on next my gumroad account has plenty of free and paid products they're useful for beginners and intermediates alike so yeah thank you for watching and i will see you in the next tutorial

Channel: Cartesian Caramel

Views: 14,890

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Id: ONvT5NzK6Go

Length: 10min 1sec (601 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 02 2022