Is this the CHEAT CODE for Blender? FULL Tutorial on the HDRI shortcuts to realistic renders.

when I first found out about Hasty arise I thought I'd unlock some sort of cheat code to blender instant realistic lighting and backgrounds for my models amazing but then I run into all sorts of problems models floating midair no realistic shadows and no way to get a realistic ground since then I've solved all of these issues and today we'll look at the quickest and easiest ways to get around them so you can produce even more realistic Enders first we'll be adding a ground Shadow to a car and then we'll look at an easy way to make a HD half D let's get [Music] started so here we are back in blender the first thing we're going to do is just swap our render engine to Cycles uh make sure it's set to GPU computer if you've got that option change the number of samples in the viewport to 32 and 64 in the render mode and make sure D noise is checked for both okay first thing we're going to do let's add a hdri now if you don't know how to do this if you click on the world settings here and set the surface where it says color instead of color click on this little yellow circle and change it to environment texture now we're going to open up an environment texture now I've already downloaded one from poly Haven uh it's this one here it's called St Peter Square Knight just go on poly Haven and search for for it and actually you can get a nice preview in poly Haven by clicking on this uh 3D icon here and it actually shows you a nice sort of 3D representation of what the hdri is going to look like uh now you can actually set your resolution that you want to download it uh I've set mine to 8K because I want it to be quite detailed uh for the render you can set it to 4K or even 2K if you computer's really slow then just click download back in blender we're going to where we've just set this to environment texture we're going to actually open that now so Peter square at the top there press open image now in your rendered view you should see hdri appear fine so the next thing I'm going to do um let's add in a car so I'm using blender kit here now blender kit is free to download uh blender kit is free to download they have a ton of free stuff built into it but if also if you pay for the full plan you can kind of get lots of extra stuff as well uh so I'm going to go for the full plan here cuz I I actually pay for it and I'm actually going to use this Rolls-Royce model here for this it's pretty nice right so let's add in the rollsroyce so if I click on blender kit click the little eyeball I'll type in rollsroyce probably rolls might be near enough no there it is we're just going to click and drag this into place here okay once it's it's loaded like this um basically you can actually see let me just zoom in a little bit here switch off the overlays for a minute you can actually see the rollsroyce already has picked up the lighting and shadows and everything of the hdri it looks great apart from the fact that it floats now the problem with the hdri is that it certainly looks good in some angles uh B in other angles obviously doesn't work at all because basically the hdri is basically an image projected just onto a huge giant sphere um kind of infinitely big and um it's great for lighting um and mixed with physical objects but sometimes it doesn't work for every scene so what we're going to do here we're going to kind of cheat we're going to actually add in let's just delete the default light let me just show you that uh I'm going to delete the default light we'll leave the default camera for now um so we're going to f basically line up our camera I'm going to press control alt0 to line up the camera just here let's zoom in a little bit here with the camera and you'll see when I zoom in that actually hdri doesn't actually move at all just the car moves so we're going to rotate the car so I'm going to click on the car press R to rotate Zed to rotate 180° um and obviously this looks kind of nice but there's kind of a crucial part missing and it's the the shadow of the car there's a really easy way to fix this in blender we're going to press shift a and we're going to add in a plane going to press s to scale and we're going to scale up the plane now you'll see straight away even though the the plane doesn't have material yet it's already catching the shadow so all we need to do we don't need to add a material we can just click on here where it says object properties and invisibility we can actually set this to be a shadow catcher and now you can see the shadow of the car is perfectly in place it looks as though it's um you know basically actually in the scene now so if we render this let me just move the camera just maybe tweak a little bit more um maybe come down a little bit perhaps have a slightly wider lens let's go for 35 mm lens get some of that background in and press F12 to render and as you can see that makes a pretty nice shot pretty realistic and looks good really all around um so what are the problems with this method so some of the problems are things like this so if I want to move the camera back backwards or forwards uh the H doesn't actually move just the camera moves and the Rolls-Royce moves but the actual hdri doesn't move so you can't ever have a sense of movement within the hdri you can sort of pan and tilt all around um and you know you can this works for quite a few situations but if you want to actually add any movement or you want to take a picture in a different part of the hdri you just can't do it so let's uh let's find a way to kind of solve those those problems and come up with another solution so starting with a fresh SC in blender uh what we're going to do is press a to select everything X to delete everything shift a we're going to add in a mesh UV sphere we're going to press s to scale and 50 to scale it up 50 times we're also going to right click and just shoose shade Auto smooth now if we press tab to go into edit mode you can see all these vertices that make up the the cube and let's just press let's just click into viewport shading so we can see all of these vertices now if you press one on your number pad uh and let's select all of these vertices at the bottom half of the cube right we're going to press s to scale Zed to scale just on the Zed axis and then zero and that basically flattens them all out so they're all on the Zero plane pressing n on your keyboard um you can actually see under the item transform we're going to set this to zero so basically it gives us a half dome an excellent Half Dome there so if you just press alt and click on this sort of second ring here and press G twice we just going to slide those in a little bit there now Al and click on the outer ring and we're going to press control and B to Bevel and we're just going to Bevel it little bit and roll your mouse wheel to get a few extra bevels in this is basically just to smooth off this corner of the curve so back in viewport shading we've kind of see we've got this nice Dome with kind of just rounded off corner here just back into any mode the last thing we need to do is press a to select all um it's alt and N to get to the normals menu and we're going to flip the normals now basically blender when you make an object in blender blender usually expects the outside of the object to be the part that you see but this time we're actually going to be inside of the object so we want the texture to make sure it wraps on the inside of the uh half dome instead of on the outside so that's why we have to flip the normals so Tab out of edit mode the next thing we're going to do is actually add the texture to this Dome back at Poly Haven I've downloaded this HD called Outdoor Theater uh it's quite a nice one it's we've got lots of space in the middle to put a car and we've got got this nice Courtyard with some sunlight so what we're going to do we're going to actually add a material this time let's call it uh Dome and if you pop into the shading tab we can see all the parts of the uh all the parts of the Shader here click on the principle psdf and press X to delete it uh we're going to add in uh two types of shaders one is an emission Shader and one so shift a and you can search for a diffuse Shader right and the next thing we need to do is add a mixt Shader so what we're going to do we're going to connect the mix Shader to the surface and the emission Shader in the top slot and the diffuse Shader in the bottom slot now basically what this is doing is giving us half of an emission Shader which is a light Shader and half of it is a diffuse Shader so now if we add in an environment texture and we connect that to the color and that to the color there we open this uh the hdri that we've just downloaded you can see we've got it mapped on the uh the Dome and actually from the inside of the Dome it already looks as though it's kind of halfway there so we've got a problem with the floor sort of the mapping on the floor is not quite right so the easiest way to get around this is to select the old Outdoor Theater press contrl and T and that giv us if you've got node Wrangler installed which I assume you have if you haven't it's some dtic preference is menu built into built into blender it's called node Wrangler uh but this gives you a nice mapping um setup already so it's the mapping node and the texture coordinate node swap the generated coordinate there to the object coordinate and then what you can do uh is by moving the Zed you can actually move the hdri within the sphere now I find this move is a little bit too much so if you hold down the shift key you can move it a bit slower so we're just going to move it until we get you see the bottom of this wall here we're just going to move it just as so it just stops curving so basically we want the curve of the hdri just to be in this crease here okay brilliant so one more thing we can do actually cuz if you see when I zoom out here you can see the outside we're actually going to add in another Shader here so we can basically see through the outside of the cube so if you press a a shift a we're going to add in a mix Shader it's going to go here and we're going to add in a transparent Shader that's going to go at the bottom here hook it up there and now we're going to add in a geometry node as a a sort of factor so basically anything that is back facing just zoom in so you can see that back facing is the factor so now if you pop into rendered view nothing happens and that is because I've forgotten to set our render engine to Cycles GPU compute and let's just do the same as before where we just reduce the number of samples a bit okay so now we can actually see we're looking at the inside of our Dome and we can't see the outside at all so it just makes it work a bit easier for us okay so now we need to add a car so let's hop into blender get again this time I'm going to search for a catam cerum which is a kind of quite a famous uh British sports car we're going to drag oh not working quite yet let's just zoom in a little bit get inside the hdri just going to drag it and we're going to drop it in the middle and now you can see straight away we can actually zoom in and out of the hdri and you can actually see the floor moving in a sensible way now basically because we've mixed the let me go back into the shading tab because we've mixed the emission Shader that gives us the light for the hdri let's just uh take the World Lighting down and also we've got the diffused color and that is what's going to enable us to have shadows and things sort of basic basically you know making contact with the hdri now the shadow effect isn't that strong so what we're going to do we're going to add in a sunlight to basically mimic the sunlight that is already existing in this image so press shift and a we're going to add in the Sun a light the sunlight g z let's grab it up a little bit a nice little trick I like to use cuz we want to basically have this sunlight aligning with the real light that's in the the Dome so if you zoom out a bit you can see where the sun is in the sky so I'm going to basically just try and get the Rotator around the Dome until I can get the sun right on the side and then I can see it just there and I'm going to press R I'm just going to rotate the sun lamp in our image just so kind of points perpendicular to where the sun's coming from and this should match up the Shadows pretty good now the only problem is if I zoom into here we go again let's zoom into the car you can see actually we still can't see the Shadows from the Sun now the reason for this is the Dome of the HD is actually blocking the sunlight from getting inside this um the Dome so what we need to do is just click on object properties with the the Dome selected and where it says um visibility just scroll down and click on Shadow uncheck The Shadow and you can see straight away we can just start to see the shadow appearing so to make the shadow more prominent um let's click on the sun again and we're going to increase the strength of the sun to about we could go to maybe 10 something like that and what we're trying to do is actually match if you look at the shadows in the existing image we're trying to match the darkness of The Shadow shadows in the existing image so it kind of matches better if you don't want this to light up too much you can just click on the the sphere again and just increase the roughness of the bsdf so it doesn't reflect some much sunline sunlight away from it great now the last thing we need to do let's go back into layout mode uh is add a camera so shift a add a camera control alt Z to put the camera in the viewport um what we could do let's go for a bit more of a zoomed in look on this one uh if you go to walk animation so that's under view navigation walk navigation you can actually use your mouse to aim the camera and the as asdw Keys just to move in and out let's just get this nicely sort of positioned over here um try and get some of that nice background in and what we're going to do we're going to actually add some depth the field because now we have sort of a physical representation of the hdri we can actually get realistic depth of field in so I'm going to write click on the headlight with shift to move the uh 3D cursor to there I'm going to press shift and a and we're going to add in an empty there this is going to be our Focus point for our camera so now with the camera selected up here I've just selected the camera again um you can click on the depth of field and the focus object we can choose the empty and now if we go into camera mode by pressing zero we can actually alter the aperture to increase the amount of depth of field that we want to get on the image I think in this case probably something around 1.2 is quite nice uh let's save that press F12 to render it's looking pretty nice we've just got a few little glitches of uh sort of light reflecting off we going to fix that quite easily let's just go into our render settings and where it says light paths and clamping just increase the direct light to 10 that should clamp some of those little fireflies we're getting press F12 again and that gets rid of them all perfectly so there you go this is a really fun and easy way to get great results from your hdri and an object in blender [Music] a

Channel: MediaWay

Views: 10,979

Keywords: blender, cycles, hdri, tutorial

Id: aJy_KZSyDlY

Length: 17min 38sec (1058 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 15 2024