Illenium Spotify Visuals Breakdown

okay in this video I'm going to do a breakdown of this render right here so what this is is uh one of the Spotify Loops for elenium which I did a few weeks ago so basically like when you go on Spotify and you listen to a song sometimes you'll see a still picture and then sometimes you'll see a short looping video that's this this is like the short looking video for I did a bunch of the stuff for his album but it's just one of the ones that I'll break down here so this um before I started this I really wanted to stay kind of true to that uh to me like this this is like the classic illenium style is um it's actually by this guy right here stuzor so this dude right here worked on the Awake album cover this one so here's some of his other renders um you can see it's actually this this album cover is based off of this render he did here which is just awesome so I wanted to include like that type of vibe so you know like reflective floor lots of volumetrics that deep orange circle um and then you know like dark environment and also like the lighting here is split he does this pretty often where it's split between that like really deep orange and then also there's like a balance of like pure white somewhere so I wanted to have that um here's some of his other stuff so yeah this dude I'll link his page below um yeah big inspiration for this one he's helped me out a ton and yeah let's let's talk about what's going on here so here's the blend file it's pretty much the exact same as that video except it's just a little bit less saturated here I did do some post work nothing crazy just like boosted I think saturation contrasts maybe some other small things but it's pretty much just this so I think the first thing I want to talk about is yeah that Main thing the big moon thing in the middle here so let's go over this and the lighting and all that and then I'll talk about the rest of the environment after but this is kind of the core Center thing here so let's look at what is going on here a lot of people have asked about this style of lighting where it's like this uh Rim light type thing around like a circular object I've done that a few other times so if I hide this here's what's going on um so there's a there's a few things going on here it looks kind of complicated but I'll just show you it's it's very simple um if I just kind of break this down piece by piece so the main thing that's lighting everything up is if I just bring this back is this thing right here so if I move this around you can see it's just this ring this emissive ring uh so we're in Cycles so emission textures are going to be lighting up everything and so if I look at this uh what what's going on here it's just regular principal Trader so like the default Shader let's just bring this down the only thing is I just turn on the emission to Orange that like illenium orange right around there ish and then the emission strength is just cranked way up and then I'm also using a noise texture to run into the alpha and if you noticed in the video there's kind of this um a little bit of just like pulsating and like variation in where things light up and some like bright and darker spots that are kind of moving around as it gets animated that's just this right here which is just a noise texture the W uh AKA like the seed value is just being animated or just like two keyframes one at the beginning one at the end and then that's how you get this like noisy weirdness going on so that's just kind of going through like this and then that's how we're getting like some of it's just getting brighter and darker in certain areas and then when that gets you know run through the volumetrics and like I don't know if it's a glare node but there might be that's how you get that kind of pulsating natural uh whatever that is and then yeah that's just going through color ramp just to really crank the uh contrast with that noise and then that's just running into the alpha I could run it to the emission strength and do the same thing and then just use a math node and multiply the strength but this works fine all the other settings here are default it's just very very basic Shader let's get out of here uh and you can see if I move that away uh just kind of hide it there is some other stuff going on here but the main thing that's like lighting up all that orange stuff is that ring right there but let's look at what else is going on here um that's also it also has an effect so I'll just actually hide that thing I just showed you and let's look at these other pieces here that are doing whatever this outline is so this glow this is not like a technique I do very often but it just I don't know I was messing around and it looked cool here so I just went with it this is from a pack of ring lights of like kind of bokeh type I don't even know what like lens flare type things let me find the pattern I'll just kind of show you so yeah I found this random pack on Etsy a while ago I don't go in Etsy very often but for some reason I was on there and I just saw this pack and got it it was pretty cheap but it was just cool like circular bokeh shapes like this and sometimes I just throw that on top of like random renders but in this case I actually used it inside the render like normally I'll put it on in post in Photoshop or whatever but in here I'm using it like in blender um so I just took a couple of those put them onto an image plane so if I actually look at just one of these um so you can see it's just a circular mesh by just adding adding like a if you want to get this shape you just add a circle or or a cylinder just delete the other faces but Circle fill it with a face inset and then just delete that interface and then there you go so that's just on there you could also just use a plane because we're running it through the alpha as well so it's uh the black parts of the image will just get removed anyway so you don't need you don't really need it to be a circle anyways so anyways that is just slapped right on there and then that's what's giving it this kind of like uh emissive glow around the outside so it's just you know we're getting the glow from like one of these like glowing things and that's just what's giving it that nice outline so it's not a um like it's this is kind of a weird technique like normally you'd probably do this with just a like that emission material I showed earlier on an actual mesh and then use that and maybe just use like a glare node or just add some kind of glowing in post but in this case I just did it like kind of faked it right on here so here's the settings it's that picture uh just this right here running through a color ramp through curves I don't know why this is here this color is doing nothing uh or I guess it's doing something whatever that's doing it's just making some of it a bit darker I guess um and then oh I guess it's just set to ease instead of constant yeah or instead of a linear so it's just yeah making that a little bit softer running it through the curves to make just the overall thing a little darker you know I could have done that in the color ramp too but whatever and then that's just running into Alpha so that's very important run that picture into the alpha basically and then make the admission like whatever you know color you want I can make it blue if I wanted to the point is glowing thing on a plane into the alpha and then set the emission to whatever you want turn up the strength and there you go you've got something like this and I just did that a couple more times and like layered them on top of each other so you can see if I just kind of bring this through here it's just like that thing but just a few times layered over itself and you know to get like a full complete circle I didn't like this like how you can see kind of the bokeh down here but as soon as you bring in uh this other Circle that kind of goes away so it's totally fine and that's you know that's that right there so if I hide all this bokeh stuff from here it's not that different than if I just had that original emissive ring around it it's just kind of adding a nice kind of glow around the outside and I thought it looked cool so it's in there let's talk about this Moon thing in the middle um this is something I've been doing in a lot of renders recently just having like a 3D Moon so what this is uh if I just isolate this let's go to material preview actually so it looks good from the front but as soon as I rotate to the side you'll see this thing is not actually um like a good quality like model or anything it's literally it's actually just a picture of the moon and that is projected from view from like the camera's view onto the entire just front side of the sphere as you can see as I rotate it it just you're gonna get that stretching because that is like from the angle we projected to that it's like totally on the side the thing is it doesn't matter in this case because the camera isn't moving I wasn't planning for it to move and you're just seeing it from one side so this works completely fine here because you're not going to see any of that um but so this is just a regular image from unsplash the way I got all this you know the normal map in here to get all this extra texture on top of that is this free add-on right here I've talked about this before deep bump so I would use this in um I did a video on using mid journey to generate textures and also height maps and normal apps and blender basically you just download this free add-on here deep bump and then you can just press this button like click on the image you want so in this case like this one right here and then you just click this button generate normal map it'll do some AI thing and then create an entire normal map out of just any picture so I was usually I was using that in combination with my journey before but in this case I just needed a normal map of this picture of the moon so that worked really like super well uh just came in super handy just to get a quick you know just to add quick amount of like bump and detail to this and there you go instant normal map for free so that's that um so yeah this works you know most of the time when you have a moon in your render you're probably not going to be like rotating 360 Degrees around the moon so you can get away with this technique a lot but if you need like a if you're going to be rotating the camera like fully around it obviously you'll have to find another way to do this and get like a proper texture and like unwrap it properly but in this case this is like totally fine uh yeah there's no other settings it's just that like this thing here running into the color roughness is kind of default a little bit higher that doesn't really matter and then no other settings change except for just that normal map one thing with this is when you generate this normal map make sure you save this uh so what I do is I just hit image save as and then it actually defaults to just the project you're in so I just save it straight away there and then if you don't do that it might disappear and like glitch out so just save the image and it'll stay in the project if you don't save it it might It'll like disappear as soon as you press the add-on again okay let's talk about the rest of this environment um preview what is going on here these I'm not really sure what's happening with this it's just kind of this model from qixel it's just um what's actually going on here yeah some random like landscape thing from quicksil I don't know um in a lot of those old like Stu's or Millennium artworks there was like lots of uh maybe not the millennial ones but definitely in the in the stoozer just his own work he does a lot of these like Rocky landscape things that are kind of intersecting with a reflective floor like this so I wanted to have a little bit of that it's kind of hard to tell what's going on in the final thing so I'm not gonna go too in depth into this but it's just you know um I got it from quicksil Mega scan so you just browse around find some rock or some landscape or just any or the type model slap it in nothing crazy it's just intersecting with the floor um speaking of the floor let's talk about this this is the like classic like render floor where it's just like roughness map onto on a dark material um for some reason a lot of people have like struggled with this type of thing right here this is actually very simple though it's just a roughness wrap I'll show you where to get this in a second but just any roughness map like this running into I'd like to run it through a color wrap to just dial in the exact range of roughness I want and then that's running into the roughness input on the principal generator no other settings change except for the color is just dark so that's there that's off and you'll notice with this it's actually not metallic it's not you know this is not up um in this case it's not you know it doesn't make that big of a difference it's so dark that you can't even really see if I make a metallic uh but you know if you have it like any brighter and then you turn that up you could get like a similar result I just like to do it this way where this is off and then this is dark um it's not it's not a big deal like just try messing around with it and see what works best for you but that's the settings I use I usually don't make a metallic even though it does look like it is metallic it's just dark and the roughness is low as all so I got this roughness map from quixel bridge I'll quickly open this up and show you but inside of Crystal Bridge there's a whole section of just roughness Maps or just um like they call it imperfections so if I just go to the surface imperfections section so if you make or if you're into making like this type of art where there's that reflective floor is like a big part of it this is like a dream come true here because there's just a bunch of these Textures in here which you can download just all sorts of grungy surfaces where you can just take it's just a roughness map you just take slap onto a plane like this and then there you go 4K uh and then instantly done so that's actually sweet and you know this is a very easy technique but it's also just that core like um illenium Stu's or Vibes that I really wanted to have in this one so that worked out really nicely and then you know when you have something emissive over that um that just looks it's just so much fun doing that it's just all it's always going to look good having an emissive glowing object with that floor underneath it just yeah this uh is very important too volumetrics so if I just hide this that makes a huge difference here um you can see like that's a big part of this type of style is very you know quite thick volumetrics um and it just you know it just makes it look good it's always it always looks good so here's how you do this I show this a lot on my channel but it's just you take a cube um scale it up over the entire thing like your whole scene is now underneath this Cube go to this orange Square tab scroll down to viewport display and then hear what it says display as if you can see that display as change that from textured over to bounds and now you'll just get a bounding box of that Cube and then all you do is you throw on a volume scatter or a principled volume Shader onto that Cube so here's the settings I'm using these settings as I always say will be different in every scene you work with depending on how big it is how bright the lights are where things are placed what just happens to look good so don't try and copy these exact numbers but what I generally do is turn the density way down to 0.0 something and then turn the anastogger period up a little bit this anisotropy just means the higher you turn it up the closer the glow of the fog will be to the light source so if I turn it way way up it's going to get really bright really close to those lights and everything else will be kind of like a bit less thicker volumetrics so you can see if it turns way way up that looks kind of cool actually that glow will be like more centered around where the light originates from versus if I turn it way down it's kind of just spread everywhere so I have it up a little bit not too crazy it actually looks kind of cool having that up higher I almost wish I did that but that's what it was at for this uh color is just whatever default and then in this case 0.02 for the density it looked good but again that's going to change depending on what you're making so just play around with different values sometimes I go as low as like point zero zero something like another zero in there sometimes it's a bit higher uh just mess around and see what works best and let's talk about these particles in here so if I look at this there are moving like spark or like dust type particles going on here um this is probably smarter to do in post and like just take a video layer of moving particles and throw it on in After Effects in this case I just did it in blender because I had this particle system already set up from other projects and it was really easy to just take that duplicate it in here and then it was just already set up so the particles in the scene are actually moving around as a particle system in blender like I said you don't I wouldn't recommend doing it this way most of the time unless you already have it set up for some reason but it's just regular emitter particle system a few thousand particles uh there's a turbulence force field so I don't know where it's oh here it is this thing yeah turbulence force field you just hit shift a uh force field turbulence and then it'll automatically affect the particles the strength is at two the flow is up a little bit the flow just means it'll kind of how do I explain this kind of like adds a bit of stickiness or uh like just kind of dampens it out a little bit you'll see what that does when you mess with it so that's up a little bit and then yeah that automatically affects the particles and then you just turn off gravity so in the particle settings here scroll down to field weights and then you'll see here Gravity so by default they'll just fall with gravity if you just turn that to zero it'll just be weightless and then the turbulence will just take care of all the movement for you so very simple just to recap a mineral particle system set the object to just anything so in this case it's just a emissive spear or something I don't even know you could use a cube if you want turn off gravity add a force field a turbulence force field change it to like around two ish and then that'll take care of all the movement for you and you just kind of slap that in wherever it looks good so in this case it's a plane emitting it just kind of everywhere I don't know just just for some extra movement and stuff going on this also works really nicely for just um if you have like uh what is it like not Sparks but like just other random dust particles so in this in that case I would do the exact same thing except change the emitter object to be just a maybe a translucent or white sphere or something and that way it'll look just kind of like nice dust magic particles or something whatever you want uh yeah that's oh let's talk about these here so these archways um I don't know why I keep using this exact model in all these Millennium artworks but that's in there again this is from my fantasy asset pack if you want to get that there's just a link in the description which will just take you to a page it's like 150 at this point course that comes with a bunch of like asset packs a bunch of models a full course a bunch of other stuff if you want to check that out you can go and do that you don't have to though if you don't want to spend any money like don't click that that's not for you but if that is something you're interested in and you want to get these exact models that I'm using and a bunch of other stuff um that is there if you want and yeah so these are just models I made a long time ago threw them in here they look good on the side just filled it out nice and then this Spotlight at the top here in my last video I posted uh at least I don't know if it's actually at the time of recording it's not posted yet but I think it will be out by the time this video is so somewhere on my channel I did another video on using spotlights and lighting like this this is just uh you know there's what it's doing in the scene if I take it out so it's just really nice to have kind of a balance between like this orange here is very intense and it's almost too much like the entire scene is just pure Orange so it's really nice to balance that out with just some Pure White in my opinion so and you know this guy here stuzer has done that a lot in his own work like um balancing out that that intense orange with that like nice white just pure white nothing fancy always looks really nice balanced out with that orange um so I did that here where it's just a regular spotlight uh this is just set to you know whatever this is 22 000 Watts not insanely bright like I've had in my other scenes I've shown like using like 2 million or uh you know crazy amounts like that but in this case I just wanted it to be just a little bit there like not anything crazy radius is pretty high so it's you know fairly soft that's how uh you know if I turn this way down in the blend way down you're gonna get this cone from the light that looks horrible so the radius is up and that'll just soften that out a little bit and then also the blend is up that'll soften it out even more um so that's that's the settings there again just pure white saturation zero and then there we go placed right over the the moon there just to get that nice uh whatever that lighting setup is and then yeah that's just running through volumetrics again that makes a big difference and I think that's it I don't think there's anything else in here it's a pretty it's a pretty simple scene like if you want to do this illenium Stu Source type style it's not like there's nothing that complicated about it it's just like keep it clean and organize things in a way that looks cool and like yeah oh one last thing here is uh this guy in the middle this is a photo scan of me sitting down so I don't know that's kind of cool but I'm literally digitized and then put into like this illenium render uh but you can just use whatever you model you want so again like in in these old Millennium ones there's like this dude sitting here like in this meditative pose why not have myself doing that in there I think that's awesome and yeah I think there's nothing else in here it's just like some basic models a floor with like a basic texture um you know keep the lighting nice and clean and then there you go the world setting is really fully black like there's nothing in here even so if I take out those two lights like the orange emission and the spotlight it would be Pitch Black um what about the camera I'm using the panoramic lens but you know it's not crazy wide so if I had it on perspective it wouldn't look that different but that's there uh depth of field does not matter so yeah that's pretty much it in the compositing there's like a bit of glare node a bit of lens Distortion not anything crazy and that's it you know this was for the Spotify canvas again so I had to render it out 1080 by 1920 vertical anyways hopefully that was insightful hopefully that was interesting to see behind the scenes of this kind of thing of uh you know client stuff go and watch this video right here if you want hopefully that was useful and I will see you in some other video

Channel: Max Hay

Views: 18,332

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Id: my3q6Clm_U8

Length: 23min 11sec (1391 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 17 2023