Make an epic space scene in Blender

hey this is daniel grove thanks for checking out this video in this tutorial i'm going to show you how to make this beautiful space scene now earlier this year i released a video called how to make planets in blender and it was a huge hit and in that video i did say i'd make a part two so i started practicing for one of the objects i would teach you how to make and it turned out to be a bigger and better scene than i expected so i think this scene deserves its own standalone video so here it is and if there's anything i know about the blender community it's that you guys love when people get straight to the point so let's get to it let's start with the basics shift a mesh and go to sphere this is going to be our planet right in the middle of our scene if you want to you can increase the segments and rings maybe 80 and 40. s to size it up four enter and if you want to make things a little bit more advanced we are going to make a atmosphere layer so i'm going to press shift d enter to duplicate that and size it up just a little bit so press s for scale hold shift and then drag your mouse ever so slightly away from your center point so there's the atmosphere and there's a planet and let's name them like good blender users planet and planement and planet atmo it'll be right after it next let's make the ring so shift a make a circle and let's turn these vertices up to 200 enter now we can't see it because it's small and it's inside the sphere so s to scale it up and the circle is not actually a mesh it's just vertices in a circle so to make it a mesh tab in edit mode and press f for fill so all those vertices get filled and voila now we actually have a circle mesh press i for inset and drag it down unless it's up to you if you want to make a really thick green a really thin ring you want to be close or far away from the planet that's really up to your taste but i'm going to go right about on the halfway point right here and click to confirm go to face mode keep select this middle face and delete get rid of that face okay now this mesh is actually going to be replaced with a bunch of random asteroids so we need some rings to help the faces be present in order to populate things evenly so ctrl r and put your mouse in the middle see that circle before you click and confirm let's hit the plus button or or you can use the wheel on your mouse to increase the loop cuts i'm going to go to what is this like 10 of them enter and then enter again all right cool so the faces are roughly evenly you know spread and they're not quite squares but they're close enough all right so that is our ring so let's name that ring all right now i'm going to use one add-on in this video but it is a free add-on and it's a really great add-on it's the rock generator so shift a mesh rock generator okay cool so we have a lot of options here and one of my favorites is the fact that it allows you to make multiple rocks at once and they're all different in random which is a big time saver so i'm just going to make 10 and let's put the roughness at i don't know 4 and that's good enough for now if you find these rocks are not detailed enough you can always come back regenerate more detailed rocks and replace them later it's very easy we're going to use geometry nodes to distribute these random rock meshes around the ring and over here we've got all of our rocks nicely named and numbered and our outliner that's great by the way if your eyeliner doesn't look like this click on this little multi you know image icon and go to view layers in my opinion that's the best way to view it and i also turn on i'll go to your filter and i turn on render viewport visibility and even the selection arrow sometimes i use that too so we have lots of options here and now with these rocks still selected which they are selected in the viewport you just can't see them because again they're inside the planet if i press the period key watch this it'll zoom all the way in so we are inside the planet and these are all the rocks overlapped on top of each other that's okay keep them selected type the letter m for move and then new collection and name it rocks there we go and enter right keeping things nice and organized even and simple now uh we want to move these rocks uh kind of outside the planet so we can better see them so g move them by the way i hit number numpad 7 to get a flat above you i'm going to zoom into these guys and i am going to separate them just so i can see what they each look like so select one of them g let's do this over and over grab that g grab that g and these look nice they uh they use displacement maps and subdivision and i just get a lot of great variety and random shapes which is awesome for asteroids okay cool now i'm going to tab into edit mode and make a few of these small and a few of them large so tab shrink it down tab shrink it down tap and you could even you know distort these a little bit scale it on the x or y just add some variety you don't want all the uh asteroids and meteors to sorry these are not meteors i know they're asteroids they're in orbit around the planet you know what the model looks the same so variety is your friend there we go cool if you zoom in they look nice and bumpy now if you give it a little dirty texture it'll look even better or you can be fancy and give them an ice texture with subsurface scattering and they look awesome like this version of the render that i did let's give them a material and just name it rocks a rock and this first one has rock on it so let's grab all these others and then shift click this last one that has the rock texture and control l to link and go down to link materials now they all have that same material now later we can do a little noise or dirt on that rock texture if we want and they'll all have that instantly and yay time saved all right so we got our rocks made let's select our ring let's get to geometry now as this might intimidate you or scare you but you know i just get over it because geology knows are the future and they're awesome so i did do this with hairs at first the hair system um and it worked but there were some things lacking that really bothered me so um we're moving on into the future and using geometry nodes uh in case you missed what i did there i split my screen let's go back to how it was you put your mouse right in that top corner the inside corner turns into a crosshair click and drag down gives us a new view change that view to geometry nodes right there there we go and uh make sure your ring is selected and let's name this asteroids boom okay other really it's probably ice chunks around the gas chain but you know semantics uh so let's give ourselves some rooms grab the output over here grab the input move it over here now this setup is only going to use five nodes that's right only five so first one shift a search and type in transform go plug that into that guy right there next is point distribute shift a point oh typo point distribute right i'm going to distribute the objects that we will assign to it around uh the faces next is the attribute randomize which as you may have guessed randomizes a specific attribute that you decide and we're going to use another one of these so just shift d drag it over there and the last one is point instance which is what we're going to assign the collection as the instance it's going to put it all along the points so let's start over here with the transform you don't need to change anything there for now you can later if you want to tweak stuff in the point distribute node this controls the density so let's put this up at 10 enter and the seed you can get new randomizations if you don't like how the rocks turn out you can just hit c and it'll give you a whole new you know random assortment of them okay now this attribute let's select scale you can also type it in there if you didn't have options that drop down you may be using 2.92 i think it is or 2.91 and they don't have this built in i'm using actually 3.0 alpha which definitely has it but you will need to update if you want those automatically i think you can just type it in it'll work but i can't quite guarantee that so type in scale for the first one and let's do a minimum of 0.01 we may tweak this later and then the maximum 1.05 so that we set a minimum size and a maximum size for the scale it's going to randomize it next one is going to be used to rotate them so in this attribute type in rotation there it is point rotation awesome and this number you can do i'm guessing it's degrees so let's just do like negative 360 to positive 360. lots of variety there and over here in collections let's select the rocks and look at that we already have groups of rocks distributed randomly but we wanted to do not the whole collection at once but individual object inside the collection so now look at this we got cool little moon system going on nothing fancy we definitely need to up our density but before we do that let's go to our ring object and make sure you apply your scale because this is one thing i messed up when i first did my scene and then later on down the road i realized oh my my ring was actually scaled up this ring was scaled up really large and that will affect your density so my look at my scale over here it's almost at 20. so i'm going to press with the ring selected even though it's invisible it is selected because the the rocks have replaced it press ctrl a and apply scale and now whoa be careful and now i've got uh 8 000 objects in my scene you know almost all those are of course these guys so let's turn our density down maybe five and i'll just to keep things simple all in the final render you may want to really increase that now if you go to a side view you can see all these asteroids are perfectly along this ring you may not want that you may want more variety to make it more you know realistic and to make your scene look more aesthetic so to do that is a really easy trick we're just going to mess up our ring we're going to make it vertically distorted so tab in edit mode you can go to i don't think it matters what mode you're in but press a for select all and then choose subdivide and down here we're actually going to increase fractal look at this did you know about this if you increase fractal it just shoots things all over the place it just really messes stuff up so let's just do it a little bit and then press you know i guess enter or get out of that and now you can scale it on the z axis to really exaggerate that so s z and i am in um individual origins right now s z as you can tell it's moving the the vertices all over the place which is gonna make your rocks generated at different heights so that's what you want that's how you get it now at a side view look at that ah that's good we got a more random distribution and there's more 3d if you if you shoot your camera through here look at that looks sweet it's cool um put my density back to 10. let's see what that looks like yeah that looks nice and if your computer is more powerful you can of course go to higher densities and have more detailed um you know asteroids just be careful you might freeze your computer i need to smooth out these these planet spheres so i'm going to select the atmosphere one and uh spacebar type in smooth where is it shade smooth there it is and then the one underneath it spacebar shade smooth okay now let's make the starry sky behind there now i do have a product that's super duper cheap on my gumroad account which gives you procedural starry skies with lots of cool controls and tweaking and also nebula stardust which you can add and color and tweak but i'll show you how to make the very basic starry night sky here go to your shader editor change this from object to world now this is our world settings i have this weird little setup so that i can give an environment for hdr lighting but it won't actually render it's hidden in the render but it still affects everything and i can actually choose what is visible in the render which i might want it to be something different if you like that you can just copy this little guy so let's put this into rendered mode so we can see what's going on let's turn off our grid by turning off the extras and um we can hide our uh ring just to make things render a little bit quicker here okay so in our world shader also i'm going to delete these guys don't really need this for this scene let's make a voronoi texture so shift a search vor is this is what's going to give us random little dot circles which we're going to tweak into stars all right let's make the skill really high let's start at 200 we may go up from there keep it euclidean shift a at a color ramp after that also we need texture coordinates so click on this guy if you have the node wrangler add-on enabled which is a great time saver you can press ctrl t and it'll automatically give you these texture coordinates into a mapping into the varonoi and then of course plug in the distance into the color ramp and we're going to stretch this color about really big so we can really uh fine-tune things there we go and we're going to drag the black up a little bit to about there and the white over here so we're kind of flip-flopping it okay now plug the color into a background so search background this over here and plug it all in together look at that starry night sky all procedural never ending never tiling and it's doubly controlled you can control the size of the stars i mean as you can see if you go up here they're just dots right but because they are kind of gradient dots like they're you know they're i don't know uh their gradients you can cut them down to that and if you increase this number you get more star so let's go to 600 yeah and you got to bring this up a little bit to show them there we go lots of stars cool i'm going to go back to 200. that's our procedural stars go back to material view let's make our planet here in the center oh i turn on my extras again i'm going to turn off my grid because i don't need a grid for this so i'm going to hide my atmosphere sphere that's always fun to say so now i just have my planets here okay make this down here change my shader to object make a new material call it planet shift a add an image texture now i have a collection of planet textures that i've built up over the years you can find these easily online most of them for free i'm going to use an image of venus actually which is obviously easy to find now if i can only find it where is it venus okay there it is and voila we have a planet you might want to use something more gassy or custom-made or you know grab a texture from jupiter or saturn but change the hue just so it's alien and different looking than our planets now because this image is already basically an unwrapped panorama into a two by one ratio rectangle image it perfectly wraps around a sphere just automatically the uvs of these spheres when you create them um is already set up for receiving that type of image so it looks perfect right because it wraps all the way around now if you want to make the atmosphere sphere you don't have to but i'm going to use volumetrics or a principled volume shader for this so if you don't want to tax your computer with this minor minor detail you skip over this but here's how you do it real quick let's make a material for it call it atmo delete this principle bsdf we're not using that we're going to make a principled volume right here plug this into volume make sure you don't go into surface out of that that has confused me a few times already i've screwed that up before make a color ramp plug it in here move the white to about over here point three something now here's where the magic comes in search for gradient and choose spherical so this is a three-dimensional gradient starting from the in the center of the sphere object and going outwards and we're using a color ramp to modify the falloff of that curve and then that's going to control the density plug color into density there and you need to have a textures coordinate for this so let's select the gradient texture control t and choose object so the location is based on the object and it's going outwards from the center so if i go into rendered view let's see if we can see if we can see i'm going to play with my my uh yeah there it is i already see it right there see the edge zooming in pretty close let's make the color of the um volume like a you know orangey jupiter color you don't need to change any of these things but you can if you really want to let me add a little bit of emissions there to add a little bit of extra light that might mess things up if you have shadows on the planet i'm not sure yet so there you go quick and dirty way to make a actual volume-based atmosphere around a planet and uh play with this guy right here maybe with some math notes to make it denser or less dense okay so moving on let's get to one of my favorite parts of the scene which is the um illusion of depth with this ring when i made my scene i basically had this and i kept doing different renders with the camera like you know over here in the in the uh the field of rocks and just wasn't giving me the illusion of like size and grandeur that i really wanted and i was thinking what can i do or add or change to make my scene look better and it was basically atmosphere which is normally something you use on planetary scenes right on a planet you've got atmosphere you've got you know gases inside of a planet that give distance with buildings and fog and things like that you don't have that in space but you kind of do there are gases and there are particles in space in certain areas such as floating around a planet that give the illusion of distance and if you want to add a little bit more fantasy to a scene which i definitely kind of and crank that up it can make it seem like really beautiful and interesting instead of just a bunch of rocks going around the planet right so here's how i did that i tried using volume i tried doing all kinds of stuff with noise and stuff and it just was not working so i realized i just had to fake it sometimes you got to fake it till you make it this is one of those instances where you got to use a weird trick to get the right uh result and it looked amazing and also sped things up ridiculously fast because i was not using volume with my solution so here's my solution shift a we're going to make a plane so i set up pretty dang big let's get on the x rotate along the y 90 oh sorry rotate on the x 90 degrees and enter let's go back to material view we don't need all that samples going on and put it way back here and what this is going to be is basically going to give us um kind of an illusion of dust from this distant part of the ring we're going to add another one up close to the camera to give us another kind of foggy foggy hazy area over here i'm going to hide my atmosphere here by the way just to speed things up because it keeps kind of calculating that over there it's annoying hide that guy um okay so here's how i made this totally procedural atmosphere plane let's make a new uh material call this haze back because we are going to make a front one that will be slightly different scale and just just ever so slightly different all right now what we're going to do is we're going to mix a bar gradient with procedural noise and we're going to give it transparency so that you can actually see the stars through it and it's going to fade off on the top and fade out from the bottom so let's start off with the basic part which is the gradient node make sure you got linear i'm going to press ctrl t keep that it generated and everything right here is the same next we're going to make a color ramp move the white to dot five in the middle click plus to make a new color handle move it over here and make it pure black put that one at dot eight and then the other one at dot two so they're evenly kind of bunched up against the middle point right all right now we're going to make a curves to further control the falloff of this i found this curve to work pretty good in my original scene plug that into there and here's where the mixing happens we're going to make a mix rgb which is a magical node that allows us to mix all kinds of things and put this in the first input so this is the original signal is this bar gradient you can plug it into here to really see what it looks like there we go it's actually going the wrong direction i can rotate it over here if i need to let's try x 90 degrees nope let's try y 90 degrees nope i'll just do it the cheating way i'm going to rotate the whole plane r y 90 degrees and then shrink it down on the z shrink it out on the x like i said fake it till you make it now we got this really nice smooth fade off bar which is perfect now we need to enable transparency and every video i do this i have to complain about this because we're still having to go to eevee to use transparency and then we have to go back to cycles so in the render tab change to evie go to your material go to the bottom where it says settings and blend mode i i like to use alpha blend but you can try the other ones if you get to get slightly different results now that we got that set let's go back and change our render engine back to cycles which is ridiculous i shouldn't have to do that every time but uh it is what it is splendor 3.0 better fix that and if it doesn't then i'm out i'm outta here i'm going to 3ds max i'm just kidding i would totally use c4d instead okay so we're going to plug in this whole thing actually into alpha not color so put it into the alpha channel let's give this emissions a light blue sky blue color and turn up the strength to two right now we need to mix something with this bar what are we going to mix some noise to break it up so it's not just a solid chunk of light it's going to have some you know disturbances in it some some uh some turbulence shift a moose grave of course is my go-to for that plug it right into the second spot and change your mix mode to multiply which is going to take the dark pixels of your must grave and it's going to use it to darken the bar which is good we don't want a perfect you know bar of light watch this oh it's going to break it up so let's tweak our musgrave real quick let's change it to scale of dot one detail sixteen dimension dot i don't know two five and then latin arity let's do 2.3 okay oh we need to apply our scale so apply scale and let's add a texture coordinates to this guy and let's use the object coordinates right there look at that looks like the edge of a galaxy if you have it from the right view now we are we need to set our camera up so we can really see what this is looking like so let's uh we have a camera already in our scene and it is by default of course the active camera so if you press 0 on the numpad it goes to the camera view which is a super boring view i'm gonna get out of that by pressing 0 again i'm going to use my 3d viewport to get the view that i want so i'm going to move around you can hold shift and alt to kind of pan scroll wheel and your mouse to zoom in and out it's very sensitive okay once i get roughly view i like i'm going to press ctrl alt 0 to set the active camera to my current view so now i have my camera here g z z to zoom out get to the edge of the rock field g to move it down um do some little wonky rotation here if you want to pivot your camera around the center point put your 3d cursor in the middle by pressing shift c go to 3d cursor go back to your camera view by pressing zero and if you press r look at this you can rotate around the 3d cursor right so now we can choose if we want to be above the start the field or below it the middle of it a little something you know kind of get a good spot like i don't like that i don't want to rock right in front of me i want kind of an open hole to see the see the planet through cool and i might even shrink my planet down a little bit so i'm gonna select my planet and my atmosphere just shrink it down there we go i don't i don't really want planets being cut off by the camera view unless it's a like a ginormous planet i want it to be in view okay so we have our background um you know haze layer if you will let's do another one up close to the camera so 7 for above you shift d y let's move this one up here pretty close to the camera actually you might want to put it i don't know let's try right there now let's go to the material and click this double page button to make it a new um unique material so this will be haze front you can rename it so it has everything that it had before but now we can change this and it won't ruin the back one so for this front one let's press zero and see what this looks like it looks pretty crazy right now it'll look cooler later um we can actually make this a little bit more transparent altogether by dropping the white point on the curves which is right here so solid white is completely opaque right in the alpha if we're talking about alpha which is transparency black is transparent white is opaque or visible so if we change our white to a gray it makes it half transparent we can see through it more let's actually drop this down pretty low because we want it to be a very subtle and see-through layer just in front of the camera right there and let's change our noise to be a little bit not so grainy you can you know raise our dimension there and we can uh make the noise even larger by making a smaller number here so dot o2 let's just try that i don't know how what it's going to look like yet but um yeah you can also if you want more randomization go to 4d and you can just play with your w factor to give you kind of a randomized noise so there we go a little cloud i just was holding shift and dragging the w so i'm going to render this and see what it looks like it might look terrible but hey that's the only way to find out what it's going to look like is hit the f12 button okay and here it is it doesn't look amazing yet but we'll get there so some few things that i noticed is the background you know the haze is a little too um gritty and the front haze is not gritty enough it's a little too blurry and blobby i am going to add a light blue color to these rocks so that they kind of fit in with this haze and i'm adding as if this haze is actually you know smaller ice particles that are just kind of just using the sunlight around this planet and i don't really like this planet texture obviously it's pretty low res i can see the pixels but i thought it was i thought this is what i used originally but it does not look anything like a gas giant i definitely want a gas giant look for something that's large enough to have a ring of debris like this i looked at my original scene and i found that i actually used the atmosphere image of venus not the surface so whoops so let's do those few things and go from there okay first let's fix our planet texture click on planet open i'm just gonna type in atmo there it is venus atmosphere oh yeah it's nice and cloudy and hazy also in the render if you look i was correct the atmosphere with the emissions turned up does glow on its own even if it's in the shadow so let's turn that off so we get a little bit more real realistic atmosphere um look so click on planet atmo and let's put our emission strength back to zero go and if you want to speed up your render just turn it off altogether it's not completely necessary but it just adds a nice little halo around the planet okay let's grab our background plane which is the haze in the background let's make it a little less gritty and i'm going to do this i'm going to turn the mix factor down a little bit so it's not completely destroying that gradient but it's just kind of complementing it adding disruption um let's turn the dimension up to 1.3 there you go.5 looks nice and let's add some more grit and scale to this front one so this is the plane right in front of the well not right in front of camera close to the camera and play with my scale a little bit more noise and i'm definitely going to turn this mix factory down so we can still see this bar of haze there we go we're going to add a little bit more details to that one nice okay let's click on one of these rocks and go to this rock texture let's add a little bit of a let's actually let's add some texture to it so i'll show you a quick and easy trick to get some texture to a rock i'm gonna give it uh that kind of icy desaturated blue color there or like a a pale blue now to break up this boring blue color we're gonna use some noise on top of this to make things interesting so shift a must grave there it is plug it into color two let's um wait for it to load there we go let's add it a little bit so turn up your factor i want to turn the scale down put the detail all the way up dimension down pretty low below one and latin area just kind of changes the feel of that now we don't want it to be like black on blue like it's just kind of too too harsh so turn this down to pretty low like you know between dot one and dot four so it's a slight touch you can add a little bit more detail by using a bump so bump node plug it into normals plug in the uh noise into that height input and keep these kind of low because things will get really really noisy so maybe dot 2 and dot 2 or you can go up a little bit more with the strength that looks pretty nice right there it looks like a nice rock all procedural my favorite all right now another thing to make your scene more interesting is the camera uh focal length and position so two things first we're going to make this a wide angle lens so we can bring this from 50 millimeters down to 20 or maybe 30. i'm going to go to 25 now this is a wide angle lens now so we need to zoom in so g z z i hold shift also to do a little bit slower more carefully looks pretty sweet as you fly through these it looks so cool with a wide angle lens that um will be more exaggerated and interesting so that's why i like wide angle lenses especially in space for something like this if there's foreground it looks great um okay now the other thing to make this more interesting is the positioning so we're going to use what's called a rule of thirds which is where you divide your visual whatever it is whether it's a photograph or a graphic design or a 3d planet into nine squares and we're going to place our point of interest which is the planet and the top left intersection um you can pick any of these intersections or lines to use but i'm just going to use the top left so we need to move this over here we need to rotate this back up to get the asteroids back in there move it in a little bit closer let me go to 30 millimeter there we go and i still like that um crooked thing going on so i'm going to go back to individual origins and just rotate the camera yeah that looks way more interesting retarget my planet there we go now if we want to rotate around and get a better position we can go back to 3d cursor and the 3d cursor is still in the middle of the planet so r z like this i'm just rotating the camera around the planet to find a better you know aesthetically pleasing arrangement of asteroids so in the foreground some in the background that looks good to me now in my scene i grabbed a few asteroids and made them on their own just not not geometry notes but just free floating and i position them around the camera strategically to better frame the scene to make it more interesting just grab a few of these rocks i'll do four of these shift d and put them right in front of the camera go to camera view and they're really big so let's shrink them down we got four of them to play with so let's put this one up here this one down here make sure they don't look like any other asteroids nearby you can rotate them oops go to individual origin you can rotate them away from the camera so they don't look like these three guys because they are all just you know siblings of each other um there and we'll put one really close to the camera so seven for above view zoom in here there we go and don't put them all in the same plane you give them some distance there we go cool now if we do some depth of field we can have this one a little bit blurry if you want to go for that look all right it's already more aesthetically pleasing right it looks cooler one last thing before i hit render again is i noticed the stars are a little bit sparse in my render earlier so i'm going to go back to world and increase my scale to let's do 500 there we go and we drop this down just a little bit okay your light source should be set to sun which means they are um directional lighting that is more like a laser rather than a pinpoint or a light bulb the light will always go in a straight line not away from the light source but all in a straight uh direction so i also put your angle down to a low number like one so it's a harsh sunlight and you can put your max bounces down to like eight i think that makes the render a little bit quicker let's turn our sun up to six power for the strength and um maybe a little bit of color a little bit of a warmer sun there we go cool and let's hit render now and see what this looks like all right definitely looks better there's some things i can work on i like that the planet is disappearing because that planet is far away like super far away right this is how things work in space so i like that it's obscured this front level of haze is a little too noisy now it's kind of distracting i'm going to make it a little bit weaker and maybe move it closer to the camera because if you look some of these um asteroids are obscured by the fog and some are not that's okay because the farther away something gets the more um you know uh refraction and obscuring there is to it if there's atmosphere in the way but it's sort of uh a little too far back so i'm going to move it forwards so let's zoom out here here's our scene grab that front level of haze let's move it about twice as close as it was so right about there and let's um just do it the cheating way and just shrink it down on the z-axis so it's a little bit thinner and i'm going to drag my white point lower to make it more transparent so go to object in your shader window you can click on this white point right here and you can adjust your x and y so instead of dot 2 3 let's try dot 2 and the middle point here break that down a little bit too maybe a little bit lower on the white point there we go cool and it's a little too noisy so let's put our detail back to like eight maybe ten we had it eight before and it was too blurry also my atmosphere i did enlarge it earlier to see what it looked like and it just didn't look great so i'm going to size it back down and okay another thing to improve renders like this is uh some compositing just add a little bit of glare and a little bit of glow to your final render so let me show you how i do that in the compositor window turn on use nodes and here i already have my preset compositor set up already here it just makes two copies of your rendered image one copy has a curves and a color balance applied in case i want to do any color grading or you know like give it a moody color scheme i can do that right here right now they're not doing anything so they're basically not even needed um but the cool thing about this setup is that i can control how much glare there is with a fader instead of the threshold which is kind of gimmicky sometimes and you know you get it set to where you want it and then you can really play with the settings over here using the factor mix so the image gets copied goes into a glare node make sure this is fog glow which in your threshold you know not maybe not all the way down but maybe like dot one or dot two and your mix needs to be all the way positive one which means the output of this glare is no longer including any of the original render but only the glaring whatever whatever the glare node is generating is all that's coming out of this image output which is good so we have the original image basically up here and only glare down here now we can add it on top of the you know we can add the glare to the original using this mix factor so i don't use screen mode it gives you a similar artifacts for some reason i think it might be a bug but use the add and let's hit render and then i'll show you what it looks like to turn up or down this fader and it's pretty awesome so i'm going to hit render again because earlier when i rendered use nodes was not checked so i have to render again now that it is enabled all right so here's my render with no glare i'm going to turn up the um add mix factor 2.5 do that got some cool glow on the planet on the asteroids and of course in that hazy belt and let's turn it up all the way to number one so full mix that looks cool it's a very subtle touch you can even layer them to make it even stronger or you can drop your threshold to dot one down to zero and now kind of everything has a glow which you know you may want you may not want try not to let that happen i try to let the glare be a little bit more intentional so i'm going to try dot o five kind of in the middle there we go cool and if you turn your size up to nine it's just a larger glare well that's as far as i'm going to go with it in this video there's a lot of things you can do to improve this scene of course change your color scheme you can add really fine pieces of dirt you can add impact craters you know um cracked apart pieces use the cell fracture to crack some of these apart into little tiny pieces and make it look like they're drifting you know away from each other in space um so yeah be creative with it have fun and most of all send me your darn renders do something cool with it make it your own add a spaceship add an astronaut just drifting through there you know calmly on on vacation uh his final vacation and send me that render to my email daniel danielgrovephoto.com because i love seeing all's renders maybe i'll even do a video of y'alls renders or post them um on my youtube channel that'll be cool so anyway thanks for watching subscribe to the channel like the video and comment down below let me know what you thought of this one thanks for watching and have a great week blending

Channel: Daniel Grove Photo

Views: 1,259

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: blender, space, space scene, space render, planet, ice, blender planet, scifi, blender scifi, scifi art

Id: 3WuQYKIpxGs

Length: 36min 49sec (2209 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 29 2021