Make a Volcano Scene With Procedural Shaders (and smoke) - Blender Tutorial

hello and welcome to another exciting blender tutorial what we're going to take a look at is how to make a volcano using procedural shaders let's get started okay so the idea today is to talk about how to use uvs to manipulate procedural shaders so you can create cool effects and today's effect we're going to create is some streams of lava flowing out of a volcano and uh we'll create a complete image uh using that technique and uh yeah do some cool stuff so hope you're excited let's jump straight into it okay so first thing i'm gonna do is go ahead and delete everything out of my scene and i'm gonna start off by creating a plane so i'm gonna shift a plane now i'm going to go into edit mode with this plane and i'm going to type f3 and type in subdivide and i'm going to turn up subdivisions all the way to 10 in fact i might go all the way up to like i don't know 50. like let's really crank it up and i'll come out of edit mode i'll scale this up a little bit further this is going to be the basis of our volcano now i'll just grab a vertex somewhere in the center right about here ish that is the exact center uh yep and so then i'm gonna turn on these uh proportional editing and i'm gonna hit g to grab and z to move on the z plane and i'll just drag up and then i'll roll my mouse wheel to get this circle bigger bigger if for some reason you drag up and like your whole thing moves in a weird way that might mean your circle's bigger than your screen so you just need to roll your mouse wheel down so i'm just going to kind of bring this up to create a bit of a volcano landmass something like something like this there we go now uh i'm gonna grab the uh actually i'm gonna keep that top one selected and i'm going to hit g to grab and this i'm gonna roll my mouse wheel down hit zed to lock it on the z plane and then i'll just kind of pull this down like that just to create the opening of my my volcano looks pretty good i'm going to right click shade smooth and this is where we're going to start now i want to probably add a little bit more detail so i'll just grab a few bits and just kind of sculpt some nothing too much we're going to we're going to use a um a displacement modifier in a minute to really add in detail but just to break it up some initially so it's not so perfect um it would be good so let's do that real quick there we go so i've brought down one side of my volcano opening and i've lifted up the other to kind of give it a side opening section like this i might bring this in a touch as well all right great now we're going to break this up even further with a displacement modifier so i'm going to come over to my wrench and i'm going to click add modifier and first i'm going to throw down a subdivision surface to give myself some more geometry i'll hit 2 on that to subdivide it even further and then i'll come down here and i'll click displace and i'll click new on the displacement tab to create a new texture and then i can click this little button which will show me drop jump me to the texture tab so it's the same as clicking here you can do either one and with this one i'm going to switch it from type image or movie i'm going to select clouds and that'll create this noise pattern i might crank the size up a bit oh i don't know maybe keep it whatever it doesn't really matter just yet go over here we'll bring the strength down and you can see what it does is it's just going to break things up a little bit i'm holding down the shift key and drag my mouse that will allow me to move in smaller increments and that gives me a nice really nice look i might drop my subdivision surface down actually now it looks pretty good like that i think that's great excellent all right cool now what i might do as well is i'm going to grab the outer edge by holding down alt and selecting these and i'm just going to hit e to extrude and scale this out turn off subdivision surface scale this out just give myself a little bit more room and then i'll grab my i'll take control r to get my um loop cut tool and roll my mouse wheel just to create a bunch of loop cuts and i'll click just so there's some mesh all through this like so now we've got this nice landscape excellent all right let's go ahead and set up a camera so we can kind of work towards a certain angle i find that's really helpful uh so i'm gonna hit shift a create a new camera and i'll hit zero on my number pad and i'll open up my side panel with the in key or you can just click on the tiny little arrow that lives right there come to the view tab and we're going to click camera to viewport so lock camera click on lock camera to view port now a great tip is if you right click on this and click right here add to quick favorites if you hit q in your viewport you can get your quick favorites menu anything you put there is is ready to go so i like to keep my lock camera to view in my my quick favorites all right let's pick our angle here and i'll go ahead and click on the camera tab viewport display and let's turn passport2 all the way up to dark in the outside help us focus on our image and let's take the focal length down to something like 24 so it's a bit of a wider angle lens i'll get a nice low angle look uh and just pick a cool cool spot here for our camera looks pretty good i might um take my camera and actually i'll go up to my uh printer icon here to change the dimensions of my my frame i'm going to make this cinematic i'm going to go for a 2 3 5 ratio which is the the ratio for cinema screens so to do that i'm going to type in my height which is 1080 and then i'll multiply that by 2.35 and that gives me 2538 which is the width that it needs to be to be the two three five ratio if that makes sense all right i'll just readjust my camera a little bit somewhere like this that's pretty good and great i'm gonna go ahead and untick like camera to view and then i can zoom in a little bit to expand my view and i might go back into edit mode and now that i've got all this stuff i might just select a couple of these vertices on this outer rim here and turn proportional editing back on and hit grab zed and just drag them up a bit just to get a nice frame another good thing to do is if you click up here you can hide everything and still control what's going on so that's a nice nice way to work even grab vertices that you're not able to see um and just sculpt things out a bit okay so i've got my volcano or my rock spout thing that i'm going to use now let's start thinking about the environment and the materials and we can start breaking things down i'm going to go ahead and take this i'll rename this by double clipping clicking it and type volcano and i'm going to add in some environment to my volcano but first i'm going to switch over to rendered view so i'm going to go to indy eevee i'll turn on ambient occlusion bloom and screen space reflections and i'll turn on rendering there now we don't have anything yet because there's no lights in our scene but i'm going to add an hdri now great place to get hdris is at hdri haven rebounded is polyhaven if you go check that out they've got a ton of amazing stuff over here one of my favorite parts of the hdris we can find really cool ones here they're all free to use and you can join their patreon to help support what they're doing so i really recommend it go check it out i want to get something that's like a sunrise sunset hdri and i'm going to get something like maybe this one or uh this one's quite nice just something with a bit of sunset colors um let's see what do i want i'll go for i'll go for this one i think this looks quite nice because i'm getting lots of nice that's a nice color in the sky so i'm going to click on that and we don't need anything too big actually we just need to get um something that's you know really only 1k is all we need there's lots of options here but one case all we're going to need for this let me go ahead and download that now in blender i'm going to come over here and i'm going to switch to my shader editor and i'll switch from object to world mode and i will come here and i'll go shift a and i'm going to search for an environment texture and i will open and navigate to that environment texture that i just downloaded i'll just select the environment texture that i just downloaded and then i'll plug the color into the color and also make sure that the color space is set to linear there's a lot of different ways we could go like i said this is a filmic log um and didn't turn my strength down but that's not gonna look good on you now i'm gonna turn my strength down right down just so it's like barely going i want it to kind of be like a bit of a night scene almost and i'm gonna hit shift a and type in texture coordinate node to get the texture coordinate node and i'll just plug the generated in which is the default vector that's always being used by blender to place the texture so that's why nothing changed and then i'm going to shift a and type in mapping and i'll drop a mapping node down and this will allow me just to rotate this around to get a really nice angle and something looks good that looks pretty nice now i'm going to come back to my camera i'm just going to tilt up a little bit on my angle just to frame just the top the mouth of that volcano a bit better okay cool now i'm going to take my volcano and i'm going to create a new material and i'll call this uh volcano as well and i'll switch from my world to my object shader here we go now um first thing i want to do is actually i'm going to kind of flesh out the scene a little bit because i want to see how all of this material is going to play out across lots of different objects and i have this one material on everything okay let's start off by making a bit of a rock material all right so i'm going to come over here and i'm going to go shift a and we're going to use a musgrave texture and i'll drop this here we're also going to use a um a veroni texture and i'm going to go to color ramp and i'll drop it here and let's take a look at these now the musgrave i'll plug this straight into the emission which will allow us just to see it purely as it is i'll drop the scale down a little bit i'll turn my detail up we don't see anything happen yet but when you drop the dimension you start to get a lot of rocky looking detail we can refine that looks pretty good actually and then let's plug in the varroni texture into the emission as well and let's drop down to instead of f1 let's go to in sphere radius and drop radius into the emission so look at that it's going to give us these nice kind of like plates uh let's try distance to edge plug that into the emission perfect now we get these nice cracks this is actually going to look quite nice now these cracks are all a little bit too regular so i want to kind of break them up a little bit so i'm going to do something special to this one i'm going to come over here and i'm going to get a texture coordinate node and i'm going to get a mix rgb shader node or not shader mix rgb node and then i'm going to grab a noise texture and i will take the generated which is what it's already using by default i'll plug it into the color and i'll take the factor or the color doesn't matter from the noise texture and plug it into the second one i'll turn this right down so it's just in fact i'll turn it off to zero so it's not doing anything yet and i'll take the color and i'll plug it into the vector and the reason why color can go into vector is because vector's asking for three numbers which represent the x y and z coordinate color gives three values the red green and blue values so that's why they're kind of interchangeable it can interpret colors as coordinates so that's how we can do some cool stuff now if i turn this up a little bit you'll start to see that my cracks distort based on the shape of this noise so i can turn this right up right the higher this goes the crazier these are going to get so we get these nice kind of crazy patterns i'll just find a nice nice point where they're you know pretty irregular i'm gonna take my color app and i'm gonna drop this in right here and uh what i'm gonna do is actually drag the white really close to the black so we get this nice uh definitive edge and i might even take the uh detail up on this so this noise so we get like really fine cracks going on maybe even turn the roughness up a bit there we go now i want to mix these two together because i want this one to be mixing with this one so i'm going to take another color ramp to plug this one in i'll drag this back out so it's pure gray it's a nice even gradient and then what i want to do is just make a little bit more room i'm going to mix these two together with a mix rgb node this time i'm going to set it to multiply and i will bring these together i don't think it really matters which one they're in i'm gonna turn this all the way up and now what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna take this one and i'll bring it off black a little bit i'll bring up to kind of a gray color and i'll leave this one at black so this is the one that's gonna be the darkest and that multiply will really push those darks into a really dark spot right there wherever they get close to those cracks so there we go that's kind of a cool cool look okay now let's drive all this into a bump node so let's go here and type in bump and let's plug this color into the height and it's going to use this as a height map and i'll plug this into the normal and let's go and unplug the emission [Music] now i'm going to take the roughness down on my rock to make it a little more reflective so it'll actually pick up some of that color from the sky and i'll turn my specular up as well you can see it's really starting to catch that light in a really really nice way i want to go too far with the roughness all right great now we might use this as well to drive some color so i'll grab another color ramp and this is going to be the color of our rock so i'll take this system plug it in here and i'll take this and i'll plug it into base color now this will accentuate things even more because it's just straight up taking this and plugging it in here to the visual values but now i can do is i can take this black and i can make it a little more of a light gray and kind of pick maybe a touch more like a reddish color i can start playing with what this looks like aesthetically now i might stick a light in the scene as well just so we can have a little bit more of something i'll do a sun lamp and i'll just rotate it around and find maybe a nice angle that's behind it and i might take the color and kind of match the orange of the sunset so i've got a little bit more a little bit more going on i can expand the angle to get the light to wrap a little bit and i might even turn it down some you can find just a nice point we might rotate that around a little bit more later but we can even shift d duplicate it rotate on z and bring it around again to have a secondary one off to the side and maybe make this one a bit more of a blue to kind of match the blue tones there in the sky and then we can turn this one right down so it's a very subtle color hit which looks quite nice okay so we've made some rock um now let's make some lava how are we going to do that well there's a couple of things we need to do we need to create a rivulet kind of shader with these like you know rivers of lava that are streaming down and we also need to have a way of masking it a bit so they kind of dissipate as we get further away from the mouth of the volcano i also want to put a bit of a focal point in this volcano so i'm going to stick a light up inside there so i'm going to just do that now go into edit mode and i will just select these vertexes up here shift s cursor to selected that'll put the cursor right up there in between all of those vertexes now i can leave edit mode and shift a and create a point light and i can turn that back off now that point light is going to be right up inside the mouth of the volcano and i can turn this up a bit and give it maybe like a deep red color like that something that's going to be like our a lava i'm going to turn it way up let's go up to a thousand and just sit it right in there that looks quite nice okay now let's get this other shader going now this whole system is working really well for us we don't really want to mess this up but we're actually going to create this lava system all within the same shader so we're actually going to be plugging it all into the same principled bsdf so what we're going to do is we're going to take all of these guys and we'll actually just take this whole group right here we're going to disconnect it from the material output i'm just going to drag it down here off to the side and i'm going to create a new principled bsdf and this is just so i can focus now on the second part of my material all right so we're going to start off with a i think we're going to musgrave as well creates a nice broken up pattern so i'll plug the height into the emission just like we did before and let's turn the detail up and the dimension down and the scale um i might bring the scale just a little bit to like 1.8 or two something like that now we wanna stretch this thing out along the whole surface right of the object and we're gonna do that by using the uvs so i'm gonna come over to my uv editor and if i enter edit mode and hit a to select all i'll select all the faces on this object and they'll appear all the corresponding uvs will appear here you can see this is all laid out just like we originally modeled it which was just as a flat plane but i want to leave this out a little bit differently right because what i want to do is i want to be able to stretch and move the uvs so that i can change the shape of this noise so if i hit a to select all and then like s to scale and y um you can see actually first nothing's going to happen right so we're not actually doing anything with these uvs so we need to start using the uv as the vector to tell blender how to place this texture i'm going to shift a texture coordinate and i'll take the uv and plug it into the vector all right so now what's going on here we can see that this is mapping correctly but all this is really stretched out well that's because we extruded all these vertices at the end after we created the plane so it didn't actually create new uvs for this so we need to unwrap this whole system again okay so to get the stretching that we want um we're gonna need to do is first pop into the top view so i'm gonna jump over the top of you by hitting the 7 on my number keypad and then what i'm going to do is i'm going to go into edit mode make sure i can turn on my uh overlays and i'll hit a to select all and then on uv i'm going to click uv and project from view and that's going to project a view of my uh of my uvs straight down matching the exact layout everything looking from above okay and we did that just because we did those extra extruded bits on the side so those stretch the uvs and it wasn't quite even so now we've got that now what i want to do is i want to come right here and i'm going to select uh actually i'll just try and find make sure you get transparent if you want i'll select that the single vertex is at the base of my um the pit of my volcano and another control plus to expand my selection up until i've got this interior bit right up in here now what i'm going to do with this is i'm going to jump into my camera view actually i'll come out of my camera i'll look up a little bit so i can see it all turn up transparent view and turn off show overlays so i can really see this noise pattern play out on my object and i'm going to turn on proportional editing and you can see that i've got the uv selected that are for the inside of my volcano and i'm just going to hit s to scale and i'm going to roll my mouse wheel and just get it to the point where i'm stretching just the mountain uvs such that i'm getting these like trails so you can see i've got these nice kind of like flowing flowing trails of uh of of of color now i can really push this right i could go super extreme with it roll my mouse wheel out and start to get some very interesting shapes um playing out across my object and i'm just going to do this until i can find something that looks cool i'm basically going to just continue to play with the scale and the size of my size of my proportional editing until i get something that feels like a real flow and now i might grab some other bits and i'm still in edit mode even though i've got my overlays turned off so i can hit c to go into brush selection and you can see down here that i'm getting uv selected i've got this mode turned on as well the two arrows that allows that basically syncs up the selection mode between the two so if i select something here it'll select it here if i select something here it'll select it on my model as well so i can see how things correspond now i'm just going to select some bits and do the same thing with proportional editing scale them around and just kind of get some cool looking cool looking shapes um i will leave i'll turn off my overlays so i can actually see how this is behaving all right cool so you can see by doing that i can create some really interesting shapes uh with the uvs now these are going to serve as the flow of my lava so now that i've got this basic white pattern i can also go in and add a little bit of detail and dimension to it to break it up even further but i want to not break it up too much because i want to have these like nice thick kind of rivers of lava so i'm going to find a nice kind of in between point something like this i think also check the scale and get different looks with different scales i'll go for something like this all right the next thing i need to do is i need to kind of mask it off so i want it to fade away as we leave the top of the volcano and travel down to that i need to use a gradient texture so let's have a look at the gradient texture i'll take the color and plug it into the emission and i will take a texture coordinate node drop it here and let's actually pop out of our camera and have a look what's going on you can see that we've got a gradient from this side to this side black to white now i want it to be top down i don't want it to be going like this so what i'm going to do is i'm going to take the object coordinate and i'm going to pipe it into a separate xy instead into the vector and i'll take the z and i'll pipe it in and what this is going to do is this is going to basically allow the gradient to function where it's bright up high on the z plane and it gets darker the lower it goes so you can see we're getting this like highlight for all the elevated areas now i can affect this further with a color ramp so i can drop a color amp in here and this will allow me to change where that fall off point happens so i'm going to bring it down just a little bit and i'll end it kind of right about there i think now let's break it up let's make this an irregular mask as well so i need to introduce some noise into this vector for this gradient texture just like we did before so i'll grab some noise i'll grab a mix rgb and i'll drop it here and i'll take my factor into the second one here and i will drag this right down until we get just a little bit and then i'll take my scale up you can see it starts to break up everything i'm going to turn my detail up and my roughness up as well um i'll bring my scale down i think and then i'll raise up the dark point so that it's a bit higher as you can see as we mix this in it's going to kind of push it downwards into the scene which is okay that's going to be cool as well but this will give us just a little bit more of a interesting pattern all right now let's use this white and black gradient we've created to mask out these rivulets that we've made the i'm going to grab all this and bring it over to here so i'm going to grab a mix rgb drop it here and we will use multiply and i'll put the height into here again it doesn't matter if it's the top or the bottom and i'll combine them and now you can see what's going on is that this is actually now masking out now i can also change this from linear to ease that will make it even softer uh transition all right now we're going to use this to now drive something else we're going to drive some emission which is going to be glow but i also want to use this to kind of clean a few things up actually let's just go ahead and switch so i'm going to get rid of this principle bsdf now we're going to start introducing this into our main one so i'm going to plug this one back into my material output now i'm going to create a color ramp and this is going to be the color of our lava i'll keep the base it black because i want the emission to be black nothing i want it to be shining wherever we we have black in this system that we've just made wherever we have white in this system though i want to use a bright red or maybe a little bit of an orange this will be our lava color so i'll plug that into the factor and i'll take this color and stick it into the emission and now you can see we're getting this bright glowy red stuff flowing down there not going to turn my strength up as well and with bloom turned on i'm going to get a bit of bloom on that that looks really nice now what we can do is we can use these these systems now to kind of affect the way this lava looks so i can pull back now one thing that might look cool is actually to use the musgrave texture that we've created for the rivulets and actually use this to be the noise for breaking up our gradient it might actually stretch out a bit better so let's try it i'm gonna yeah that actually works a bit better because now it's pulling out in streaks which is what we want it looks a bit better than just pulling out in straight up noise so i'll just find a nice little sweet spot maybe where i get a few glints of the stuff and that looks really really strong okay now i can get a really nice final effect by just pushing this gradient right up with this color amp so it's right up at the top and then increasing the mix factor of this noise that we're bringing in and that will allow me to get these really nice streaks that kind of break away and fall off down the sides of the volcano i think that looks really really cool all right let's go ahead and finish this project out with some smoke because you got to have smoke and a volcano right so i'm just like my point lamp which is right up there inside my volcano and i'm going to hit shift s cursor to selected i'm gonna go ahead and hit shift a and create a uv sphere and i'll just scale it up a little bit and stick it down right inside the volcano just make sure it's not peeking out the sides it's gonna fill up the mouth of the volcano there and then i'm going to select object quick effects quick smoke and then i'm going to take my domain here and i'm going to scale it and grab it up and expand it a little bit so it fills up the space a little bit more and i'm going to come over here to my physics tab and i'll just scroll down i'll turn on noise i might turn up my divisions up a little bit to let's say 64. i'll just double it and i'm going to turn my cache from replay onto all this is a much more stable way of previewing your smoke and i'll click bakel now it's rising a little bit slow so i'll come over to my uh sphere and i'll set my initial temperature to two and i will go back to my smoke domain and i'll three alt and bake now after i've run that simulation i'm just gonna move my domain up because once you've baked it you can actually change its position and scale and such so i'm just going to position it a bit better in my scene make sure it is kind of really coming out of the volcano that looks pretty good jump back into my camera um and now i want to make sure i've got a few things set on i'm gonna make sure my tile size under volume metrics and my render settings is set to two that gives me some really good resolution then i'm going to turn on volumetric shadows and that's going to help create some nice shadowing in our smoke now we're not getting a lot here and that's mostly because of not having enough light in the scene so i can actually move this light around until i get it in front of the smoke now you can start seeing some of that definition playing out so i can find a better spot for this you can also click on the domain and go to the material that's been created for it and this will give us a chance to play around with the density we can increase it or lower it increase the anisotropy which allows it to kind of catch the light a bit more so i've just taken my smoke domain and just scaled it up a little bit so it's actually overlapping my mesh thumb and you get these nice kind of streamers kind of coming off the sides which looks really kind of cool um now i can also uh like duplicate my smoke domain and move it around and put in like a bunch of these you know because that's cool little geysers i'm going to click the plus sign on this other smaller one right here i'm going to click on the little double paper icon on this smaller one over here just so i can make it a little bit different i'm going to pull out the ansytropy a little bit on it so the light kind of catches a bit more on it and might make it a little bit less dense i can have a couple little geyser things i'm also going to take my volcano and i'm going to shift d to duplicate it and i'm going to rotate this around scale it down and i'm going to position a few of these in my scene like this and i'm also going to take their material and i'm going to click the double paper icon and i'm going to just unplug the emission from these so these are just going to be rock objects but they're going to have a similar kind of you know shape and what you can do is you can like scale these in all kinds of crazy ways to get interesting interesting shapes that you can use to flesh out your composition just make sure that they're you know rotated and turned enough that they um uh don't match anymore [Music] and there we have it the finished image now as you can see um i've just placed the same volcano object just in the scene and just scaled them up and changed different sizes scaled it on the zed squashed some of them down spreads them out rotated them around on the zip and just kind of you know positioned them in the scene so that i get this nicer uh composition that could be a little bit nicer there's some bits that aren't great about it but overall i think it looks pretty good i'll pop out so you can see the whole thing but yeah following this idea you can actually create some really interesting stuff now does this have some limitations by twisting and pulling the uvs like that you can't get consistent motion out of this noise so some bits are going to look like they're going up some look they're going down depending on how you've played with that uv but you could always start again if you really want to see this animate and go back to warping those uvs and make sure you do it in a way where they're not going to overlap as long as they don't overlap you don't end up with that weird backward forward motion so if you wanted to have an animated shot um that would be the way to do it you could play with that a little bit more using your proportional editing modifier i hope you found this tutorial really helpful and you really enjoyed it please don't forget to hit that like button and subscribe to the channel to catch all the videos that are coming your way i've got more tutorials coming every week so stay tuned ring that bell to get notifications as well and i can't wait to see in the next one check out our discord and don't forget to have a look at the patreon i've got hours of extra content over there along with project files and all kinds of exciting stuff i can get this project file if you sign up to patreon this month or next month so go check that out they cycle through every two months thanks again for watching i'll catch you in the next episode see you later bye [Music] oh

Channel: CBaileyFilm

Views: 27,727

Keywords: blender, blender turorial, blender beginner tutorial, scifi, create a short film, create a fan film

Id: EQwdHSr4Qgk

Length: 33min 11sec (1991 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 04 2021