Lighting, texturing and rendering tutorial for Blender!

what's up guys so in this video i'm going to show you how to do a composite for this piece that you see on the screen it's actually really easy people were freaking out about it thinking it was super cool i'm about to make your day this is the easiest thing to make i promise you does take some time but it's not hard so i do want to mention we're going to go over the lighting rendering texturing and post processing process i'm not going to cover the modeling in this video simply because this model is super basic as you'll see most of you can model something like this in you know 10 to 20 minutes it's really easy so most of the detail comes from both decals and post processing in photoshop so let's go ahead and get started also if this video helps you at all you might be interested in our patreon where you get a bunch of cool things like monthly decals art renders and critiques as well as exclusive monthly tutorials so if you're interested in that link in the description also if you want some more insight into the scene i've created a blog post which kind of goes into a bit more detail besides what this video has to offer so definitely give this a read on blunderbros.com blog so first let's take a look at the scene here and just kind of see what's going on as you can see right off the bat it's a super basic scene all we have for the background are these little like um diagonal planes going down all i did for these was i put in a plane dropped in some loop cuts and then i beveled the loop cuts and then just brought out the bottom edges and kind of pulled them out like that super easy and then of course i applied a bevel so that's what i did for these backdrops here super easy pieces okay for the actual model you can see it's relatively basic just a very simple low poly looking object so nothing crazy and some of these image planes that we have sitting here they're actually part of chip walters um steam pack i guess i don't have them loaded in right now we'll discuss it later but um it's basically these little steam pockets we have going out so we'll show you how to do that in a little bit anyways let's go ahead and just get started from scratch and i'll show you how to make this entire scene texturing all the good stuff so let me save this as a separate file here what i want to do is um not lose the progress on this one let me go to desktop okay so i'm going to delete everything out except this piece right here so we'll just get in and start from scratch all right so here's the scene here all i have is a basic plane obviously the model i created and by the way you don't have to have you can do this same exact type of aesthetic in the render with any of your models so if you want to basically take the information in this tutorial and apply it to one of your models you can literally do that same exact process okay so i'm in look dev mode now so you can kind of see how this looks so let me go ahead and just kind of cover everything so first of all this piece looks so detailed simply because i added decals into it so i'm going to do this on video i think i think it would help some people out so i'm going to go to my decals collection here you can see if i turn that off it's actually really basic so without decals and with the decals you can kind of see it pops a bit more so i'm going to do the decal creation part with you as well and for the floor we'll discuss how we did the grunge in a little bit um let's just first focus on as a matter of fact just to get this out of the way i'm going to get rid of that and we're only going to focus on the decals for now so this is what we have just a blank seam nothing exciting just the literal model with nothing else so modeling is the least to your concern that's the easy part getting this entire scene built up and looking good is the more complex part so from scratch let's say i just finished modeling right this is what i have so the first thing i do right before i apply decals is i get materials on my object so that way i have some variation right we can't really tell where to put decals in this state so what i'm going to do is just first kind of experiment a little bit and you know you could come in here with a principled bsdf and just add in a new material make it metallic make it like a you know darker color adjust the roughness you can do that in you know a few seconds but the real way to get good detail and to make the scene look nice and gloomy and just kind of beat down is to use grunge right metals in real life have grunge scratches dirt moss um what else you know all sorts of natural deterioration on the metals and same for really any material in the real world so instead of using a simple principled bsdf shader which is just a color with some you know specularity roughness things like that what we're going to do instead is add in some scratches and things like that so to get that type of grunge and scratches and things like that we're going to be using the definitely eevee material system now this add-on is made by chip walters you can get it on gumroad i'll link it in the description it is a paid add-on but in terms of quality and the ability to get these types of details in such little time you're not going to find anywhere else so if you want to go and fiddle with nodes and spend hours kind of connecting up textures you can do that but i'm just trying to show you the way i attack this scene and the most efficient way to get it done so i'll link in the description like i said but to do this what we're going to do is open up kit ops and you can use the kit ops free version for this you don't have to pay for kit ops for some reason i don't have it turned on there we go it was just because i was working on a vanilla tutorial so i turned it off so anyways you can use the kit ops free version you don't need anything else you just need the definitely eevee material system so what i do in here is i come in and there's all sorts of different grunge objects you can use so metals dirty stuff whatever you want i'm going to go with the cw dirty here and just choose something like i don't know dirty up we're going to select that and then control click to add the material and wait for that to load in so now you can see in one click we have this really nice grunge effect it kind of goes across the whole object and it starts dirty at the bottom that gets cleaner towards the top now i don't like the color i want to make the color more of like a grayish so what i'm going to do is pull up the note editor here go to shader editor and what we're going to do is simply adjust the color so i'm just going to zoom in here and we're going to get like a um more towards the white and then drop this down to more of a like dark gray color and i can see in like one second we have this really nice grunge on the surface so now not only do we have color and roughness and things like that we also have grunge applied to it now i would recommend making this metallic as well because well it's a metal and you can also adjust the roughness to your leg if you want to do that and there we go you can see we have a really nice clean and grungy material here clean not really clean but a very dirty material that is so i'm going to go to this one and do something similar but maybe instead of using a dirty material i'll use like a scratched metal or something so we'll just go here to cw metal and then we have all sorts of different metals in here you can use like aluminum uh silver steel things like that i'm gonna try the steel dirty material see how that looks let's just um select it and then control click on add material there we go not too bad maybe i'll try the aluminum as well let's try aluminum matte and see how that looks so control click not too bad but you know what i want to go with the steel dirty instead and by the way the nodes in here are already set up for you so you don't have to deal with any of that but if you want to change the color you just go in here and go to the color node and just make this like whatever color you want not this one where is it it was under hue saturation we need to go in here and adjust the value if you want to make it darker or brighter i'm going to do like point eight or point seven or something point seven point eight yeah somewhere around here so just adjust that mess with it see what you like and for the rgb curves you can kind of adjust the brightness of the metal so you could probably pull this up or pull it down get the type of effect that you want i'm just going to leave it at a static like linear pattern and then for the handles i'm going to do like um maybe the same material here so the cw dirt good thing is once you've added in the material it's in the scene forever so you just go in here and then choose it so in this case it's called cw dirt up and um actually we have two different ones don't we i forgot to remove the old materials from the scene anyways no big deal so i'm just going to go in here reapply that dirty one maybe for this cap right here i'll just share the cw steel dirty select that from the drop down and for these caps i once again use the cw dirt up like that so the rest of this is really easy the material process is not hard the best thing about this material system is not only do you get grunge and scratches and things like that you also don't have to deal with fiddling with the you know principled the sdf node dealing with materials roughness whatever you just drag and drop and you're basically good to go so now i can just go in here and then make this one the we'll do the dirt up again and the top one will make these steel dirty so let me find that we'll do this one to be i guess the dirty one again and the keypad will make the um where is it the steel dirty as well like that and for the keypad i don't want the whole entire keypad to have the same material i want the actual like uh buttons on it to have a different material so i'm gonna do on here is simply tab into edit mode we're going to go to face mode i'm going to select these guys here and then control plus on the numpad to expand the selection once and all i'm going to do is add in a new material make this one the steel dirty actually not the steel dirty the dirt up and then assign that so now we have a different material on there and yeah we're basically good to go so for the middle one we'll make this the dirt up and then for these little pipes here by the way if you want to know how i did this caging effect i feel like some people are going to ask so if you want to know how to get this type of design right here super easy all you do let me actually hide this one real quick all you do is you take a simple curve like this convert it to a mesh and you're going to have like a mesh like this all you need to do is duplicate it shift d isolate the view with forward slash on the numpad and you simply go in here you press the a key to select everything in edit mode go to f3 and search for poke poke the faces and then press alt j to convert everything back into quads you might need to increase the max shape angle to get everything and then all you have to do is press the i key to inset press i again to inset individual we're just going to kind of inset right to about here x and then delete faces like that and now you have this thing and all you have to do is simply go to add modifier and then add a solidify modifier like that and then you have this nice little caging effect around it so super easy effect i know some people are going to ask so i might as well just show it now anyways what i want to do is make these little caging effects a steel dirty so go in here make this the steel dirty same for this one still dirty and for the interior where the um where the pipes are i'm going to make this one a rubber so if we go in here to cw other we actually have a rubber material in here so we're going to go to rubber select that and then control click actually did that on the wrong one let me undo that select the pipe control click same for this one control click and there we go and that about covers the entire piece here i guess the last thing to do is do the floor so the floor is really easy i actually use more of a grimy material to kind of indicate it's like a nasty warehouse or something old and kind of deteriorated like a gloomy environment right so to do that we're going to go and select the floor and for the floor i'm going to go over to the is it under other i think it's under others so we'll go to the grime o3 and just control click and now we kind of have this thing here not too bad now i'm not a fan of the blue color so i'm going to go in here to the shader editor and adjust that so let's go over and change this to more of a like a grayish color in there and this looks a little bit better in my opinion we could also adjust the value here if we wanted to you know you could lift or raise that i might actually leave that at one i think it looks good at one and that's how i did the floor really easy process and this is basically the gist of it so now we need to do is apply some decals to this piece all right so decaling is really easy you just kind of go in and drop decals wherever you want them so what i'm going to do geez i can't find a good point let me zoom in on this so what i'm going to do is go to decal machine what we're going to do is oh goodness gracious this is what happens when um i suffer for you guys to make vanilla tutorials i have to reset everything but excuse me yeah i have to reset everything but i do it for you guys because a lot of people want vanilla tutorials so i try to balance both out so there we go okay decal machine we're gonna do hang on a second okay now we're looking good what we're gonna do now is simply add in decals now most of these packs i've accumulated just over months of using decal machine but you can get most of these packs for free some of them are paid i honestly don't remember where i got half of these just go on gumroad type in like decal machine decals you'll find something so i'm just going to go in here and find some decals i don't remember where i got this pack but it might be jro tools i'm not sure anyways i'm going to go in here drop in a text decal just kind of drop this in scale that down and then project it like that we'll go in with another one we'll go to o2 keep it consistent and then drop this in scale that down and then project it and we'll do one more we'll make this 103. scale this down and then grab it hold ctrl and project this one okay so we'll go to i don't know some different ones as well keep it nice and sci-fi looking really so go to i don't even know what i have here just kind of go in and find something that looks good so like this we'll scale this down and then grab it over here scale it down some more and then project it let's go ahead and take another one maybe this one instead where is it right here scale that down put it right about here scale that down some more i mean i'm kind of vocalizing literally everything i'm doing you get the point though you just kind of move things around and get it where you want it and then for the last one we'll do like i don't know one of these guys scale this down pull it in scale it down and project it and now we just need three more so maybe like one of these and then pull that in project it we'll do another one maybe let's go down see what we have maybe one of these scale this down some more project it and then another one so let's see go down and see what we have maybe this guy right here scale that down pull it in and then project it and there we go okay so i'm just going to take all these decals right here to shift click all of them i'm going to tab into edit mode select everything with the a key and duplicate them over if i mirror them then the text would be flipped so i'm not going to mirror it i'm just going to duplicate it and just put these right on the top here like that so now we have it on both sides like that so next thing we're going to do is make a decal right here in the middle in this little like cylinder whatever it is so i'm going to go into decal machine i have a few different ones i just kind of use what looks good so maybe this one right here this is from reuse decal pack so if you go to his gumroad store you can get it there i'm just going to scale this down and put it right about here and project it and also if the material doesn't match what you can actually do is go to the shader editor go to the principled bsdf here or the decal group whatever go to the material base color and then use the color picker tool and choose the piece that it's projected onto and as you can see we have a decal that pretty much matches the material it's on unfortunately there's no easy way to get the materials to transfer over to the decal if there is a way to do it in the future i'll let you know but as of now you're going to have to just deal with a um like an inconsistency you can see there's no detail here like there is here now i want to detail the top so i'm going to grab one of these decals right here this is one of reused decals you can get on his gumroad page if you want to so r zz 90 or negative 90. i'm gonna put this guy right here scale it down some more and then let's mirror it to the other side with um hard ops mirror to the other side like that and there we go next thing i'm going to do is hop into the top view and drop in one of our emissive decals now these emissive decals are on our gumroad store completely free you don't have to pay for it so if you want to grab those it's gumroad.com the blender rose super easy to remember then we'll just kind of take this down grab it and put it in here scale that down some more and move it up a bit so [Music] right around here and then we'll project it like that and then of course we'll mirror this to the other side so shift click and then mirror it to the other side like that and of course i'm just going to mirror with hard up so way quicker that way and what i want to do now is match the color to the material right here so i'm going to pull up the shader editor we're going to go to the color right here and just pick the base color from this like that now on these little handles right here i want to go into the side view and drop in a decal on the handle so maybe one of these or let's see i know there's a good one in here this one drop in one of these guys just kind of scale it down snap it here and then project it like that let's also match the material to the background so kind of scroll through we'll press d and then shift scroll like that find something that matches good like this keep scrolling through till you find it maybe this will do right here and then we can just take it and mirror it to the other side so just pull one of those and there we go they're on all the handles now next i want to add in some little bolts here on these tiny little pieces on the metal so easy solution let's go into the front view and we're simply going to add in just some sort of bolt i'm going to use one of these in here so not this one maybe this one here scale it down and then just kind of snap it onto the surface and then project it like that we'll mirror it to this side alt x in the mirror and we'll also mirror it across to the other side as well so to that side same idea for the front here we'll just go in and drop another one so take these guys scale it down put it right in the center scale it up some more project it and then we'll go ahead and mirror it so alt x and then mirror there we go and then maybe we'll do one more decal here on the top so go to the top view we'll just add in like a ventilation or something like this like this piece here scale it down and then just um put it in the middle and project it like that looking good and the only thing we're missing on the inside is that little red ring we had in the render i showed you so what we're going to do is tab into face mode i'm going to alt click this set of faces here if i can actually get it by selecting the right one i should be what in the world oh we're on the are we on the right side oh i see there's your actually faces in here anyway select the faces on the inside i'm going to go in here and assign a new emissive material so to scroll up and go to emission make this a nice red color and then click on assign and then if we go into look dev mode we can see it now we need to make the strength a bit higher like four or maybe higher like 13 that would be good and now we have a nice little red emission coming from here i also want to do a red omission on these little bolts on the keypad so i'm going to go in here and select these two faces press control plus on the numpad to expand the selection we'll go in here and assign that red material scroll down and go to it and then click on assign and there we go okay so the last material or material decal we need to add in is like a um you know how in generators and electronic pieces there's like those warning signs and decals on the side of it well we can add those in actually ryu has a really cool japanese decal pack that he has here a bunch of cool like um just warning signs basically he lives in japan so most of these are in japanese but they still look good so i'm going to go in here add in maybe one of these scale it down now we don't want this to be too big because we need to keep in mind the scale of a human character this is a keypad right so the human is going to be about this size so we need to make sure this piece kind of matches that scale we'll move this guy down here to the corner and scale it down and one trick you can actually put the metallic higher and make it less bright kind of dims it a little trick i guess and last one i'll add in is the caution hot symbol from the default decal pack so come in here put this around here somewhere scale it down and then project it like that and you know what let's add in one more just because we have um we have space so we'll go in here and maybe add in like one of these so perhaps this one scale it down put it right about here increase the metallic a bit and there we go so this should be enough in terms of decals i actually neglected to add in decals on this piece in the original render so my mistake might as well do them now though on this piece so maybe adding like a vent here an event there so i'm going to go in drop in one of these guys kind of scale it up put event right here it's not going to show up oh i guess it's like inside out or something so yeah we'll drop an event right here actually we just need to project it so project it what in the world is the problem here i don't know what the what's happening let's try a different one see if a different one will work so i know we just made a ventilation decal pack so let me find that so right here we actually just released this decal pack recently at some five bucks on gumroad if you want to support us you can grab it um like 40 or something decals in here a lot of them i'm gonna try this one and it's doing the same thing what in the world it'll snap here but it won't snap here i think it's because of like a manifold issue or something interesting i guess what we could do instead is try inverting the normal so we'll take this guy tab into edit mode and then press ctrl shift n recalculate those and see if that does anything there we go it was a normals issue so i guess that's the solution so instead of going back to that one i'm going to use let's see maybe this guy right here rotate it a bit and then put it over here somewhere scale that down project it and then actually before we project it we'll duplicate one and put it over here like that shift click both of them and then go ahead and project it like that actually scratch that idea i'm going to use these default vents instead i think they look better so i'm going to go to this one here and use this guy instead maybe not that one maybe this one here so rotate it 90 degrees and then project it so project and then we'll do another one on this side so go to that same decal grab it and then rotate it a bit and project it of course so project there we go so now it's like an exhaust system kind of coming through here which is pretty cool and i'm just going to go ahead and material match i'm going to go in here and go to match and then just kind of find um we'll press shift and then scroll until we find a good one maybe this one right here and there we go pretty cool so now we need to do is add in a backdrop to basically have a background for this object so the decaline is done the texturing is done now we need to actually create the scene this will be really easy so we're going to do is go into the top view and go into ortho i'm going to add in a simple plane and then rotate it 90 degrees over the y axis like that and then we're going to scale this guy up really big and make it fit this plane and then move it over here like that maybe a bit higher and then we're going to simply move it up a bit what i want to do is tab into edge mode and just add in a few loop cuts with a control r so drop these guys in and then we're going to do is escape to cancel control b to bevel again we're going to do a one segment bevel here like that really tiny one and then we're just going to go down to all these edges here so i guess every other edge will go to we're going to grab it on the x-axis and pull it out like that and now we have our wall pretty easy and right off the bat i'm going to go ahead and bevel it so drop a nice bevel on there and let's also give it the same grunge as the floor so the grime o3 just drop that on there just gotta find it here it is so grime03001 i don't know what the deal is but yeah just add that one in and then i'm going to take this guy and go into top view shift d to duplicate r z and then negative 90 or rz and then 90 and put this one over here somewhere like that and now we kind of have our backdrop we can pull it down a bit and actually these materials are not the same i need to make sure these are the same ones so let me find it grime this is the one i want just type it in there we go and actually just now off camera i went and added in a little more loop cuts and then redid the same thing i just kind of wanted to have more bars in the background i just wouldn't want to do it on camera again so i just added in more loop cuts instead and i had this so this is where you should be right now so now we need to set up the volume metrics and the lighting pretty cool this is going to be the fun part this is how we're going to get the nice gloomy effect the fogginess in the scene the nice lighting that kind of illuminates the piece here and it's going to look really good in just a few steps so let's go ahead and do that so make sure you're in cycles we're going to be rendering this final scene in cycles cycles looks way better than ev in my opinion takes a bit longer to render but it's worth it if you want to have a good scene so we're going to do is go to cycles rendering engine i'm going to go to the rendering viewport now so we're just going to wait for this to load give it a second and yeah it's pretty dark you're going to see that i have the abandoned slipway hdri from hdrihaven.com and i made the strength really low because like i don't want this to be super bright i want it to be a really small and kind of gloomy scene so something low like .16 is a good amount for the strength anyways what we want to do is add in the volumetric lighting which is um it basically provides fog in the scenes what we're going to do is go down here pull up the shader editor pull that up and whenever i'm using cycles i prefer to use a cube for the volumetrics i find that it actually performs better so what we're going to do is go here into the top view i'm going to add in a simple cube scale this guy up until it's about the size of the c and you don't have to be perfect with it but you know right around here or so like that and then what we're going to do is take this guy add a new material to it we'll just call it volumetric so we remember what it is and then i'm going to go to the object node settings here now i don't want the principled shader in here at all what i do want is a principled volume shader in here so i'm going to press shift a and go to shader we're going to add in a principled volume and then connect this up to the volume input here on the material output you're going to see by default it's really really dense we need to drop the density to like point zero two or something lower and now you're going to see it's kind of hard to tell let me pull this down now you're gonna see we have some nice fog in here it might be easier to see once we set up a camera so let's go ahead and do that so i'm going to go into solid view again i'm going to temporarily hide this cube right here let me just call it volumetric so i remember what it is so volume metrics and then we'll hide this real quick what i want to do is just find a good composition in here so maybe like at this angle then we're going to press shift a and add in a camera and then go to view align view align active camera to view and at this point all we really have to do is kind of you know move it back and kind of position this inside the camera wherever you think is good probably a bit too far but we're getting there so right around here should be okay like that and now if we turn our volumetrics back on and go into cycles you're gonna see we're gonna have a little bit of fog in the scene it's really hard to see right now and that's because we haven't added in our lighting so we need to do that next so lighting is really easy i like to start with a single light and kind of play with that and then see what else i need in addition to that one so let's add in some lights here now to kind of speed up the viewport and just overall preview of the scene we can actually do this in eevee and do the final rendering cycle so i'm going to go over to eevee just so that way the performance is a bit quicker and yeah so we're going to have this and let's go ahead hop into the top view i'm going to add in a symbol area lamp so we'll go to where is it light we'll go to area i'm going to make the first area lamp right here in the top and the front and we'll just kind of move this up a bit like that let's also scale it on the x-axis a little bit and rotate it towards this piece right here maybe pull it down a bit like that now the sliding is not very strong so what i'm going to do is make this like 75 or so make it a bit brighter let's also pull it back and then pull it up a bit if the light's too bright and overexposes one area you're automatically going to look at that really bright area and that's not good because if all the attention goes to the bright area you don't get to see everything else see uh this scene here is nice and balanced you kind of have a harsh uh exposed area here in the front but not so harsh as to remove view from everywhere else in the scene so yeah i hope that makes sense anyways we're going to do now is um add in some more lights really so i'm going to duplicate this one with shift d move it over on the y axis and then kind of rotate it a bit play with that and then um let's go into cycles and preview it just to see how it looks because we want to actually see the official result so give that a second and not too bad not too bad at all now we don't have enough light in the front or in the back so what i'm going to do is um hop into the top view again we can do this in solid let me temporarily hide this cube again i'm going to press shift a and add in another area lamp and put the area lamp over here somewhere in the back kind of move this up let's do like three of these or something so one here and i want these all to have the same amount of light so we're going to do alt d instead of d so that way if i change one all of the other ones will be changed as well we'll press alt d again and then move that over and what we're going to do is go back into cycles we're definitely going to need to increase the power because it's really low right now i wouldn't worry so much about numbers i would worry about how bright it looks in the scene so let me turn the volumetrics back on and what we're going to do make this like 150 or so and now we're looking good a lot better it's a bit too strong though isn't it let's try 125 something like that and this area here in the front is definitely not lit up enough let me go to this one and do like 125 on that lamp there and we might also need to take this piece and duplicate another one turn this off let me duplicate another one over here somewhere and then maybe put another one like in this area to kind of illuminate it a bit more and just really see how it looks now this is a lot better you can kind of see we have some light over here now this is a bit too strong you can kind of see all the attentions in that corner which i don't really want i'm going to move this up a bit on the x-axis move that away make this like 75 instead of a 125 let me also duplicate this one or maybe take this guy and increase the power to like 150 i want to have a good balance of brightness in all the areas in the scene here if one area is overexposed you need to do that for a one good specific reason if you don't have a good reason to do that make sure everything is nice and balanced but already you can kind of see how cycles has just like the best rendering settings you can see how clean everything is the grunge is really picking up the lighting's reflecting naturally and it looks good the issue here is i can barely see the front there's like no illumination there so i can't make out any detail so what i need to really do is find a good spot for these lights here and um just kind of experiment and play with it so i'm going to move this one over here move this one down that's definitely too high let's try one of these like that this is starting to get a bit too annoying with cycles so i'm going to go back into evie and just kind of see how the lightning is working in eevee instead give that a second to load okay so now we can really see which areas are not illuminated and which areas are illuminated so i'm going to go to this one and work with this guy maybe increase the strength to like 150. this one's going to be a bit tricky we can move it closer and then rotate it downwards like that that can kind of help things and then maybe this one we can kind of move down and closer just kind of play with that rotate it this way like that this one is going to be a game changer if we can get it right so move that down and rotate it a bit maybe we can move this light right here down just outside of the view of the camera like that and i don't know rotate it around the y and then around the z or something it's really just playing with it actually i don't like that so go back to here looks good everything else looks fine but this area in the front is just an issue right now i'm going to try using a point lamp instead let's change this to a point i'll move this down a bit we can increase the radius a little bit as well and just kind of mess with the power it's not too bad let's just um make it look more natural i suppose move the radius down and move this down let's try going back into cycles and see how that looks okay not too bad but still not really what i want so i'm going to just undo that or um as a matter of fact just change it back to an area move it up and we should be good to go so this right here was actually my raw render when i first did this composite and you can kind of see it wasn't all that bright to begin with so we don't have to worry too much about it most of that can be done in post what i'm worried about is the super dark areas won't be able to be picked up in post so we need to make sure they're at least somewhat illuminated or else it's going to be a big issue later on so we don't need to worry too much about this but we do need to make it look good so what i'm going to do is just keep playing with it really kind of get some light up around here maybe go back in here and just kind of rotate eventually we're going to get something that looks good we just need to keep experimenting and playing with it so let's do 150 for the power like that some of these lights seem to be moved up a bit more as well kind of um kind of harsh on the volumetrics in my opinion so i'm going to get in here in a solid view and take some of these lights let me turn this off real quick move some of these guys up a bit higher so that way they're not too bright and um preview this again yeah that's much better so yeah the only issue is still this darn front piece so what i'm going to try to do if we were to really get this up close how would it look i'm kind of curious as to how that would look let me zoom in get into perspective and just kind of play with this one i want to make sure it's not too overexposed though like i said so that is not too bad i think it's the angle we're looking at it from so yeah it's really the angle so we could position the camera in a different spot as well that would also be an option so let's go ahead and go to the camera maybe move it up a bit does that help at all a little bit not too much though okay i went back into eevee what we could also try is using a different material and see how that reflects the light because this one isn't so much the positioning but more so the way and the angle it's reflecting the light so i'm going to try adding in a different material for this one we'll go to kit ops and see what we have so i'm going to go to metal and we're going to try maybe this aluminum shiny see how that looks not too bad let's go ahead and zoom in and see how the actual texture looks kind of bright there's that one we could also try a regular steel instead it's not bad either let's go ahead and just keep experimenting we could try like a silver no silver mat that one does not match really let's stick with this aluminum matte or aluminum shiny one of the two a little aluminum mat looks good and aluminum shiny looks good as well let's go with the shiny one or actually you know what let's go with the matte one instead so aluminum matte we'll go ahead and add that in and let's go back into our rendered view we'll go into cycles and see if this helps at all sometimes you can just adjust the material and it'll help things out a lot more kind of like this this actually might work but what i do want to do is drop the value this is way too bright now we have the opposite situation way too bright so i'm just going to go in here and drop the value down make it darker so do like .5 that'll be good like that and now all we need to do is um let's see we need to put the red material back it looks like we lost that one so let me just uh tab into edit mode add that material back so the emissive one scroll down here it is and check this in cycles again i know this takes a while guys but i want to show you the full process and the way i kind of think about things and some of the things i have to do to fix a situation that's kind of complicated and you know i'm sure there's lighting experts out there you know people with physics degrees and stuff like that that'll just do immense calculations in their head and know exactly where to place it i'm not that smart okay so don't yell at me one other thing i guess we could do is i don't know if i did it in the original render not really but i think it would be cool if we added in a small point lamp over here outside of the view of the camera just to kind of pick up the light some more so that'll be super easy all we need to do is go into the top view we'll go into wireframe where's my volumetric cube oh here it is yeah we're going to wireframe add in a point lamp and put it over here somewhere increase the radius a bit and just kind of mess around with this and see how it looks it might look bad might look good i don't know yet we'll see maybe increase this to like 50 or so kind of drop it in this corner like that and now we have some nice highlights on these pipes here that actually looks pretty good wouldn't have been a bad idea for this render i mean we do have highlights on it but i mean it's better to have highlights over there as well in my opinion you can see in the original we have highlights on the top but not in the sides so might as well knock two words out one stone right so move this over a bit and just experiment and play with it yeah i like this this is a good location and what we're going to do now is something fun so first thing i'm going to make the hdri a bit higher like 0.2 or so make it a little bit brighter not too much just um a tad bit now we're going to do is go to these lights here and give them a very slight hint of cyan to make it more colorful we can also do that for the volumetrics if we click on the volumetrics cube here and go to the material settings under volume we can make the color a really slight hint of cyan and it'll kind of pick up in the scene now if you go too harsh it's going to be just terrible so don't do that but make it like a very very slight hint of cyan make it look cool like that you could also do the same thing for the lights give it a very slight hint of like a blue color kind of bring the scene out a bit more in my opinion it just looks better and makes the scene more exciting so now it's kind of um you see the nice cyan haze in the scene i really like that and this is basically the setup here i mean you could play with lights all day all night i would actually encourage you to do that i think i played with the lights on the scene today for like three hours or so i'm not kidding i just sat here fiddled with the lights got something to look good but you know why it's worth it because you're going to get a really cool result at the end like this i'd rather have a cool result in the end good for my portfolio than sit around and half-ass the entire set of work if i'm going to model the thing and do all this complex stuff i might as well invest time in the lighting as well so this is it i mean you can make whatever changes you want you can adjust the color the brightness of the hdri i mean if you go too high it's going to look awful but i mean you can play with it and see what you like you can do all sorts of stuff it's some basically unlimited amount of things you can do so mess around with it get creative to render this thing when we're rendering in cycles of volume metrics you want a much higher sample count usually in my videos we use around i don't know one or two hundred and that's because we're just using basic principled bsdf maps with no volumetrics on here we definitely want to use something a bit higher to make sure there's no noise you can see how noisy the scene is but if you have a good enough sample count it's gonna look like fog and not like noise and one thing i almost forgot to add was our fog the fog if we go back in here you can kind of see we have fog around here we have fog up here and on this side super easy this is another add-on it's called the steam pack from ian hubert i guess chip walters and ian work together to make this what i'm going to do is go into ev here just to make it quicker and preview it quicker so i'm going to go into ev wait for it to load and basically i'll link it in the description as well this steam pack is amazing i love it it's like the easiest thing to use um you basically come in here you add in the steam pack and you have this like big list of steam you can use it for anything and it looks realistic too so maybe we'll go with like this um angeled wispy one and kind of experiment with that so add this steam in here pull it up a bit let's rotate it and maybe pull it over here somewhere and kind of scale it up get some nice smoke in this corner we can add in another one and maybe do like a hmm like a steamy one or something and we'll put this guy right back here so maybe this um piece has like steam coming from it in the back so scale that up a bit very easy and then we'll go into maybe like one of the ones that kind of comes out from under a surface so the steady breeze would be a good one we'll add that in and then kind of pull it over here rotate it and just kind of move it you can do most of these manually so don't stress too much about it and then let's do one more for these pieces here because we kind of have like these exhaust pipes and vents and things like that so what we're going to do is add in maybe let's see what do we have let's try this one we could do low drift or meanders that would be a good one rotate this and then pull it over here rotate it some more kind of pull it in this direction yeah just like that maybe put it like inside so it's kind of behind the wall right kind of slow in the viewport but i mean that's what you're going to get when we have a lot of stuff in the scene so this looks really nice i like that we could pull it up a bit and then move it over a little bit like that and then maybe just a bit more fog right in front of the vents just to kind of indicate that the vents are blowing out steam or something so we could do this one here move it along the y along the x actually just kind of rotate this manually i'm not too worried about how sloppy this is it's steam right so it's mostly random anyways so we'll kind of move this over here rotate it a bit move it on the y like that and there we go so now we can preview this thing in cycles and actually get a good idea of how it's going to look and hopefully it looks good we'll see maybe we'll move this one over just a little bit more like that [Music] and yeah i like this this looks good maybe this one could go down a little bit on the z axis and then over a bit on the y i mean i could change this all day all night until i get happy with it but at the end of the day are we ever all truly satisfied a hundred percent i think we all reach like 99 but there's like one percent that is like i don't know what it is but i just can't put my head around it but 99 i will i will take that's good so yeah that's the steam steam is really easy once again i'll drop a link in the description i think it's like 20 bucks for the entire pack so uh not too bad anyway let's go ahead and render this thing so when you're using volume metrics generally you want way more samples than you usually use uh generally i can get away with like one or two hundred because i don't usually use volumetrics in my scenes but when i do you want to go higher on the sample count that way when you actually render out the scene in cycles it looks like fog and not like a bunch of grainy sand or something so make sure the sample count is a lot higher like 600 or so it might take longer to render but it'll be worth it so i don't want to go through every single setting for rendering i have a dedicated video on this if you want to watch that i'll put it in the description if i forget it's just called um the best settings for rendering or something you'll see it just go through my feed and yeah basically set those settings up it's very simple you add in like an hdri set up the compositor change a few of the light paths and adjust your performance that's about it once you've done that all we're going to do is just um render this thing out so once you've rendered it out you should have something like this not too bad really for a raw render but it does need cleaned up and it needs a lot more effects to make it look good so we're going to take this piece and turn it into this you can see the difference is like night and day and you can get this detail in like 5 to 10 minutes if you do it properly so let's go ahead hop into photoshop and get this guy done so once we're here in photoshop we need to duplicate this layer right off the bat to make sure we always have the raw render available to us just to kind of compare things so we're going to do is take this layer and press ctrl j to copy it and right off the bat we're going to go up here to filter and then camera raw filter first things first this guy is way too dim in my opinion let's bring the exposure up to like point i don't know 0.25 or 0.2 let's also bring up the highlights a bit bring the shadows out a bit as well and increase the blacks a bit so that way it's not so dark so right around here should be okay and now you're going to kind of see it makes it pop a bit more here's the before and here's the after so pretty quick fix now the next one is the most important thing in my opinion besides color what we're going to do is go up here to filter and then camera raw filter again we're going to go to the paint brush tool and this time we're gonna paint on some texture and clarity to kind of make it pop a bit more so we're gonna go to texture increase this guy pretty high go to clarity increase this guy pretty high as well and just kind of paint all the way around this piece until it gets more clear just kind of get in here and paint and check this out here's the before and here's the after really makes it pop let's go ahead and click on the ok button there we go see the before and the after a lot better and one more time i want to go in here and paint in a little bit more exposure so i'm going to go in here to the paint brush tool increase the exposure to around 0.1 or so and kind of paint just around the sky and make it pop a bit more very subtle effect but it is noticeable see the before and the after and the next one most of you are going to love now i use an add-on in photoshop i'll show you the way to do it in default photoshop without the add-on but if you want to get it it's called infinite color you basically go in here go to light and you just click on create and you can just kind of cycle through all sorts of different colors until you get one you like some of them like this are way too harsh but usually you want to get like a very very subtle effect like this one this almost looks realistic doesn't it this one's really nice as a matter of fact i'm going to press ctrl j and copy that i like it so much so let's go ahead and try another one this one's pretty nice nice um blue gloomy effect and you can click this as many times as you want until you get one that you like but i think i'm gonna go with let's see this one right here so once again let's check our before and our after before and after you can really see this is looking a lot cleaner now now one thing i don't like is how it's kind of bright up here in the top left i'll show you how i took care of that in a little bit pretty easy but uh for now i'm going to show you the alternate solution to the infinite color add-on so instead of what you can do is go to the layer 0 copy click on this button right here we're going to go to color lookup and basically you can just go through any of these defaults here you can try this one or you can try this one just kind of cycle through them see what you like you can also scroll up and scroll down this one looks good but really bright and just kind of experiment see what you like i'm just going to go through until i find one that i'm happy with let's try maybe this one here to strip you can cycle through so many different ones and just kind of see what you like there's literally an almost well not an infinite amount but enough to find one that you like so just go through them see what you like and just um pick one basically i'm gonna go with the two strip or the three strip now we'll go with the two strip here i like that one and then after you do that what you can do is go up here to the adjustments panel or actually we could also try like a um where is it we could try a selective color and mess with that just kind of mess with some of the you know magenta mess with the cyan to be completely honest if i ever use this manually i just go in and just go in here and mess with the different colors and see what i like usually you can go to neutrals though and adjust the whole scene that way i would recommend doing that instead don't bother with the specific colors in general go right to neutrals and then kind of mess with that you can also mess with the blacks if you want to kind of bring that out a bit more or you can go to the whites and bring those out a bit more just kind of depends what you're going for i'm gonna go with the neutrals and um bring the cyan a little bit like that and then to make this more of a cyan color in general the best one you can probably add in is the color balance node so go in here i'll go to mid tones and kind of drop the mid tones a bit for more cyan like that you can go to highlights and mess with that as well drop that a bit maybe bring up the blues as well really just kind of experimentation until you're happy with the result like that and yeah this isn't too bad and there's not too much left to do really you could go in here and mess with some curves and kind of you know introduce some contrast and more brightness whatever bring it up and down a bit really just experimenting and seeing what you like personally so i'm gonna go with one up here and then one kind of below the curve down here so yeah not too bad very subtle difference but i like it and after this we're going to go ahead and add some text in so let me go in here just go to the text panel and you can download sci-fi fonts off the internet just type in sci-fi fonts and find one you like i'm just going to go down here and type in goomba v8 that's what i named this guy and just make this like a white color like that move it over here somewhere and then what we can do is drop the opacity a bit like that and then we can do another one up here in the top corner so control and v to paste it copy paste and then just name this one what did i name it solar refinement unit i think yeah that's what i named it so yeah just go in here and kind of move it over a bit press ctrl t to scale it down and put it right about here same for this one ctrl t and then scale it down like this and the last thing to do is to add in a vignette a vignette's that nice little dark border you see around images looks really good i'm going to go do that i'm going to select the layer 0 copy combine everything else into one complete layer so shift click up to the top press ctrl alt shift and e actually we need to just do it for um the ones that are enabled so ctrl alt shift e we're going to have this layer right here i'm going to delete out these old ones as a matter of fact so this new layer we're going to do is go up here to filter camera raw filter go down to the effects and then drop the vignette a bit like that and you can also increase the film grain a little bit introduced some film grain not too much but just a bit to kind of give that film-like effect to it so finally we could introduce some lens flare just for fun so what i'm going to do is go to filter render go to lens flare what we can do is move the lens flare like right in the middle do like 105 millimeters click ok that's way too bright let's try dropping the opacity of that guy so just a very slight hint of a lens flare like that and i mean you can mess with that all you want it's just a small little effect you can add in sometimes i mean it's nothing crazy let's go ahead and just kind of see the difference here's the before after before after just a really small lens flare kind of makes it pop a bit more so finally here is the raw render and here is the final result much much better so i hope this video helped you out provided you with some insight i know these renders aren't identical but i mean they're close right it's um just a matter of dealing with colors and changing things like that so i hope the video helped hope you learned a lot once again everything i used in the process of lighting rendering texturing i'll link it in the description if you want to grab that this is the process and it's not too bad like i said you just have to know what you're doing so thanks for watching guys if you want more stuff like this and want more exclusive tutorials once again join us on our patreon we have lots of cool stuff on there for as little as two dollars a month i'll link it in the description so hope the video helped and i'll see you in the next one

Channel: Josh Gambrell

Views: 28,735

Rating: 4.9039998 out of 5

Keywords: blender, 2.8, 2.9, 2.83, 2.90, gloomy, scifi, scene, tutorial, hard, surface, modeling, lighting, texturing, rendering, post, processing, photoshop, josh, gambrell, 3d, definitely, eevee, materials, system, smoke, kit, ops, boxcutter, masterxeon1001, beginner

Id: FQiJvDzqsTE

Length: 59min 42sec (3582 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 08 2020