Make Cinematic Nebulae Using This Trick | Blender + IFS

what's up everybody welcome back to the channel so I've covered how to make several different space scenes on this channel like creating black holes gas giants and photorealistic planets but nebulas are an entirely different Beast they require tons of light sources and super detailed volumetrics which is probably the most costly combination you could have in a 3D scene this kind of sucks because nepas are often the backbone of sci-fi backgrounds from small Indie art to Major media Productions but in this tutorial I'm going to show you a creative way to render awesome scenes like these in seconds and 360° hdris for your 3D work so now with all that said let's jump into the tutorial now I know all my tutorials up till now have been about using blender and we are going to use blender later but one of the secret tricks we're going to use for this method is we're going to use a software called ifs renderer it is totally free it's open source and you can find it at the link in the description or you can just go to IFS renderer deson we're using the meteoric pack you can download that here and this is what we'll be using to actually color our nebulas at least initially now once you've got ifs installed just like you would any other program you can just come down here search it up and we're going to open a new project file so just before we start one thing I want to point out is that ifs is actually a fractal rendering system and so it essentially generates giant Point clouds and combines fractals to create visualizations and one really cool way to experience this is to just click this random button up here that the creator of this program actually made and this will just generate a totally random combination of fractals for you to look at most of these are not visually very pleasing but it's an easy way to sort of get a feel for what this software can do outside of just what we're doing in this tutorial it's super versatile and I highly recommend and exploring its capabilities so now the first thing we're going to do is we're going to sort of set up our render settings so if you look over here you have two tabs labeled exploration and final and you can sort of think of these as like your viewport and render resolution that you'd have in blender so let's hop over to final and you can see this here is set to HD 1920 x 1080 and if I hit lock aspect ratio I can then come in and just double this to 2160 and now I'll be rendering 4K if you're on a really slow machine you might want to leave this at HD at least for now just so that it's easier to play around with when we come back now if we come down here you can see we have this thing labeled Target iteration level this is sort of like your number of samples that you would have in blender the only difference is that in ifs this is just an arbitrary point where you stop you can export really at any point and so 15 is honestly fine for anything that we're doing but sometimes you might want to raise it up to 20 and if you're getting really deep into something or if you notice some weird glitches just consider sliding that over now of course we also have this option for noise reduction if you notice a lot of noise just click it on the default settings are totally fine I'm just going to leave it off for now though now these two settings are really important your centropy and your warmup these will sort of affect the actual appear appearance of your scene and so I'm going to set my centropy to 700 and I'm going to set my warmup to 200 there's really no reason to have to change these again I encourage you to play around with them but honestly I've never had to deviate from these settings now I'm just going to go ahead and save my file now I'm just going to go ahead and good practice save my file and some basic controls so I really like to control this brightness you really have to for the work that we're doing here this will just make your scene more intense there is this gamma value which you can use to great effect to alter how the scene actually looks I actually usually set this a lot lower than the default you've also got this fog effect which is sort of just compositing a depth mask onto your scene actively and then you've got this field of view which is just the degrees that you can actually see it's a bit unintuitive at first but easy to catch on with and if you want to move around around it's just left click to sort of Point your viewing angle and then it's just W ASD to move around if you scroll down you will then move a little bit slower if you scroll forward you will move a lot faster if you want to roll your camera it's just the U and the O keys and so it's a bit difficult to learn the navigation especially if you're just used to using blender but I found that you get used to it decently quickly another cool option I just want to let you know about even though we won't use it here is that you can set the aperture so if you set this very large for example and then you adjust your focus distance you can get that awesome looking depth of field this honestly is something I want to experiment with a lot more for any sort of like Quantum scale renders anything sort of abstract like that but for now we are going to just turn this off because nebulas of course there is no depth of field because of how massive and far far away they are I'm also going to click back to exploration over here on my settings this will just have me render at a lower resolution for now and keep things a little bit faster now to actually create our nebula we're going to come up here and we're going to click on the editor so you can see we have sort of our randomly generated combination and it's a little bit difficult to work with but in the software's defense it was literally built by like one guy as part of his thesis project so it's pretty awesome that we just get this thing even as is now I'm going to come in and I'm actually just going to delete all of these there we go and now I'm going to build a very basic structure so ifs works on the concept of Loops because that way I can iterate through the loop to sort of generate all the detail we see so you can see if I just put in a fine fractal in which we're going to use at the moment then I don't get anything but if I combine this with a spherical now we've actually got something occurring though it doesn't look very visually appealing if you want to get rid of a single connection you're just going to want to click on this line and set the weight to zero and then what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to add another spherical and I'm going to add another aun and we're just going to build this out sort of into a square for these guys I'm going to connect them like that connect these guys as so and let's get rid of this here now we still don't really have anything cool looking so that's unfortunate but if we just turn off all but this this original of fine and then we come in here and I'm just going to use some values I already know so that we can get some nice looking results and we're just going to play with our translation and our rotation then we're going to come down here to our other aine and we're going to play with this as well and you can see we're actually we're getting something over here so we can fly over I'll adjust my scale for this one as well and rotate it then I'm going to come over to my sphericals and I'm going to set the offset to just something different do something like that and something like this and you can see now we clearly have some sort of fractal getting rendered it's actually visually pleasing to look at now finally and I'm going to lower I'm going to adjust my brightness just a bit let's go and let's lower this radius still something like A7 and unfortunately it doesn't normalize the image for you so if you get further out there's just going to be more light and you kind of have to manually adjust your brightness but it's not too too difficult to worry about the other thing you can do is that if you come up here to the base weight values you can adjust these and you can see how that affects the fractal I'm going to raise the impact of both of these just a little bit now another thing you can do and I'm going to do that with this refined here is that you can connect them to themselves and this gives us a whole another layer of distortion and so I think now you can see much more clearly how this can look like a nebula and so if I adjust my field of view and then adjust my brightness you can see how we're starting to get that sort of Nebula look now the next thing I want to do before I add more detail to my nebula is I want to add stars because there's a really really cool way to add them in here there's actually multiple ways but this is the one that I prefer which is that we're going to click on this and add a gosh and blur then we're going to set our base weight to a point 005 and we're going to adjust our radius to a 0.1 and now you can see we have added Our Stars they vary in of course size and deformation I just I really like how this kind of looks it looks like it's got volumetric interaction and you can see that even with just this incredibly simple setup we've already got a pretty cool looking scene and now one thing I do want to point out at this point and this is sort of a downside to using this method is that unlike with blender noise textures there's no random seed value for any of these you can't just like slide a w slider or adjust the coordinates or anything so unfortunately you kind of just have to manually adjust these translations in order to get different looks which will actually affect the overall look of your scene though one thing I'll also point out is if you just incre decrease your field of view so that you're zoomed in pretty far up your brightness like crazy you don't have to be quite that zoomed in but something like that you can just pan and look at different parts of the screen and it's essentially like you're generating different nebulas and then on top of that of course you can just move around because this is in reality just a 3D Point cloud and so that really is the best way I found especially if you find a structure that you like like I really like the way this looks right here that looks awesome to me and so if you find something you can just zoom in and sort of move around it it to create the effect of creating a new nebula now the next thing so we added those random nebulas before and it generated a random color map for us here but you know I'm looking at this the red looks kind of cool I could totally see that as a stylistic choice but maybe I want a different color or maybe I want you know some variation in how it actually looks so what I'm going to do is I'm going to click this button up here while I I've got this visible a fine selected and I'm going to go to wherever I put that gradient file that we downloaded I'm going to double click on this and now I can go through and I can just select whatever I like so I think I'm going to go with this Fire in the Sky I like stuff that has very bright colors and not a lot of dark colors cuz you know in real life it's essentially the same as everything being emissive you don't really emit a dark purple and so an easy way to get some realism is to just try to use those more intense colors but now I can just slide this or I can just manually drag the color index and that will alter just the color off of the gradient that it picks but I can also adjust this color speed which will adjust how much it changes as it goes deeper into the fractal and so you can get some really nice combinations this way I do like to keep them relatively two-toned and not try to add too much visual detail this way or not to rely on it at least but by sliding these you can get some really awesome color palettes it's really fun just to play around with this I might punch up the brightness here and I can shrink this down and just like before it wasn't really quite as visible but you can use this sort of fog effect to give that nice sort of depth compositing sort of look it's a nice option to have and I think for certain scenes especially it be a good way to either add Randomness or just to give the effect that you're looking for remember also you can adjust your gamma and so I usually have this set pretty low just cuz I like that sort of Punchy contrast and honestly I'm quite happy with this scene and so I'm going to come into this editor and before we render out a final image from ifs I want to show you guys just make sure that you play around with these cuz if I add say a Julia NYX look at that I get that sort of wavy sort of look and I can adjust this weight and that gives this really nice almost stylized like Marvel background that I really like I know it's not perfectly photo realistic or anything but honestly at a certain point you can just go for stylized and it's just a lot of fun to kind of play around with the different options that this software provides so with that more or less completed I'm going to go ahead and find a sort of an angle that I really like might just look around here in case there is anything I missed which of course you can see there's a whole bunch of cool looking shots but I'm going to keep this one I might go ahead and try to shrink down my stars just a little bit again turn this one into a05 here that that'll do the trick and now with that done we can click over to our final and that is something you want to remember to do I have on many occasions left it on exploration before I export and then had to sit and look as my low resolution image that was super beautiful is just terrible the moment you zoom in and now the thing you can do is we can pretty much just sit here and wait as long as we like it'll just keep doing more iterations I might try turning on the noise reduction here this kind of Smooths out my image a lot more than I would like it to though so I'm going to uncheck this down here you can see the progress in getting to the Target iteration level right now this is sitting at 19 and honestly I think that is enough so I'm just going to show you guys to export we just come and click export and at least for the sake of this tutorial you know you can normally export to PNG if you think this is good enough for you but I'm going to export to XR and so I'm just going to save my image and that will just take a split second and now the blender portion of the tutorial begins so I'm just going to open up a new blender file and I'm going to hop over to the compositing workspace we're actually just going to be using blender as a compositor for this case I will switch over to cycles and GPU compute I have no idea if this actually improves anything but it honestly just feels weird to have any other setting at this point now before we do anything I'm actually going to adjust my performance settings so I'm going to set my edit to lowquality and you're going to want to check this open CL box this honestly should be turned on by default I don't know why blender has it off it just enables you to use your GPU for some nodes for the compositor super awesome speeds things up I always make sure to use that you can also turn on Buffer groups this helps a little bit not as much but it's pretty de decent and with that we can go ahead and grab an image node navigate to wherever you stored your file and shift rightclick to add in a joint let's add in a viewer node and I'm just going to check the snap to grid option now we actually have to render something in order for blender to like recognize our scene and so I'm just going to go check render image something will render very very quickly and there we go now if we disconnect our image and plug it back in now if you look at your image you're going to see there's really nothing here you can see that little speck but it seems like we almost don't have an image with ifs and saving to exr it just gets rid of all that brightness that we added all those gamma adjustments and so we're going to have to add those back in manually and the nice thing though is that we'll have a lot more data to work with so if we were working with PNG we'd just be totally locked in but since we're not we can actually work with this image a lot more so I'm going to adjust my gamma let's do something like a 1.5 1.6 and you know I'm looking at this and I'm think I don't like that transparency it makes it kind of hard to edit so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to shift a and I'm going to add in a lens distortion node because that gets rid of our Alpha just a quick and easy way to do that and you can always come down here and adjust the exposure and Gamma as well by the way the benefit of using this versus the nodes is that editing these will cause it to recalculate everything editing these it just applies it to the overall image nice and easy the next thing I want to do is if I zoom in here you can see I've still got some of this noise so I'm just going to shift a and I'm going to grab a blur node switch it to fast gion and let's just give it one pixel of blur in each Direction and then we can actually add in a d noise node before then this does make our image a lot more sort of smudged and if you come down here if you open that composite view you'll see it it's still displaying a HD image CU I upscaled to 4K we're going to need a 4K render area so just boost that to 200% if that's what you're doing render out another image it'll take like 4 seconds and there we go so I quite like this but I want to add a little bit of sort of Bloom so the quick and easy way to do this and for the time being I'm going to remove this D noise node just cuz it's a bit intensive to have that node there let's grab another blur node and a mix node plug this guy in here leave this as gsan plug that in there set this to add and then just blur the image a whole bunch there we go and we can just adjust this Factor as we like that seems pretty nice I'll also grab a brightness contrast node toss this in earlier let's maybe up our contrast a bit and you'll have to uncheck this convert pre multiplied by the way maybe go a little bit lower there we go and now one last thing we can do is just add a hue saturation value node and I just like to play around with this you can usually get pretty cool results from doing stuff like this you get that really nice ice blue mixed with purple I think that's pretty cool and that pretty much concludes the compositing effect now one thing when I look at this this particular one it's a bit sort of smooth almost sort of glasslike rather than the Nebula look I want so I'm just going to hop back here here hop back to my editor and let's just add in a little something more let's add in another aine maybe we'll shrink down our workspace now I've just sort of fidgeted around with those settings and let's find another shot to line up and I kind of like the look at that hop over to final mode and I'm just going to let this render out and Yeah that's the result now one last thing I told you guys I was going to do and I highly highly recommend using this if we come back to exploration mode we can switch down here from projection perspective to equal rectangular and now we are seeing a 36° echo rectangular map of the actual scene and so it's obviously very very weird to move around but if we switch over to our final you'll want to unlink these and set your resolution to an even rectangle and now there is one thing you have to know on the blender side of this though there is sort of a vertical compression that happens with the 360 image so when you bring it into your world you can just bring it in like you would a regular environment texture but once you are in here you're going to have to click on this press contrl T and that'll bring up the mapping node just set your z2.5 and it's going to take a second to update the lights and yeah that's the tutorial y'all but now before you go one thing I do want to shout out is I've actually been working with a really cool team of people on a game called Flagship frenzy the social media page recently just went live if you guys want to follow the development it's on Instagram @ Flagship frenzy and it's a pretty cool way to see how blender and these more open source tools are being used in actual professional game development and how you might be able to use these tools to either further your Artistic Endeavors whether they be just as a hobbyist or as a career as always guys I hope you enjoyed this video if you did consider liking subscribing all that YouTube jazz and I'll see you all in the next video

Channel: Alaskan FX

Views: 10,137

Keywords: Space, VFX, Blender, IFS, Fractals, Fractal, CGI, 3D, Free, open source, easy, beginner friendly, Melodysheep, Nebulas

Id: Q51aTqcS63U

Length: 24min 27sec (1467 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 09 2024