- [Martin] Hey everyone,
Martin here for cgboost.com and in this short video,
part of the quick tip series we are going to have a look at constructing something very handy for your environment shots,
a starry night sky element. I mean, you could just download an image or shoot a night sky shot and that can work very well in day shots but once you start searching
for night sky elements, you will usually find out that they are grainy or blurry, usually unusable for 3D
purposes, which means yes, we shall make our own
starry sky from scratch, using just fader nodes and layered on top of it, various elements from a soft glow to animate clouds and of course, the moon. In the end, you'll be
able to put it into any of your night scenes to serve as a backdrop that you can easily adjust and animate. (dramatic music) This video is, by the
way, closely connected to my master 3D environments
course in Blender where you will learn, for example, how to make deserts, mountains, highlands, oceans, 3D clouds, weather elements and more. For a few weeks still, this course will be in early access stage with discounted prices. So yeah, check it out if
I peaked your interest. Let's start this lesson by making a sphere to serve as our sky dome. Make it a rather large
one, like 1,000 meters, which you can set here. Once you do, however, it's best to raise the
view clipping in here to not have your viewport cut it off. Apply the scale. It's usually a good practice, especially when you plan on doing some texture mapping node work, which we are. And since I'm not
planning to use the sphere as my environment, rather as a 2D background for my scene, I will, in fact, delete most of it and use just this half sphere, which you should do that this point for later use in your own scenes is deactivating the
shadows of this object. I mean, if you make a really
large sphere, like this, it will, of course, cast a shadow, obstructing parts of your terrain. So to avoid this, right off the bat, we need to go down here and uncheck the shadow and ray visibility. That is if you're in cycles. If, like us, you will
construct the sky for Eevee, and let's switch, in fact, you will need to create a new material and down here change
this shadow mode to none. With this done, name it Sky Dome, make its shading smooth by right clicking and choosing it here and also, you can hit Control + 2 to add more subdivisions to it. All right, and with that, we are ready to map some
starry sky onto this image. So first, let's start
working on our material here. Open up the shader editor and start plugging stuff
into this color socket. To start off, it's going to
be this noise texture node. And we can also fly inside of our sphere to see it better. If you activate the Node Wrangler add-on, which I'm sure you know is
among your built-in add-ons, you just need to activate
it in Preferences and I don't even know why, at this point, when clearly everybody is using it, it's still not active by default. But anyway, with it active, you can just press Control
+ T with the noise selected and you get this coordinate mapping setup. And in here, just leave everything as is. To be honest, you didn't
even need to add it in because Blender uses these
generated coordinates by default, anytime you don't plug anything
into this vector socket. But I wanted you to know
the Control + T shortcut. And you can also already jump
into the render preview mode and you can see something is happening. It just doesn't look like stars. But we'll work on that right now. To achieve the starry sky backdrop, set it to about 1,000 in scale and detail of six or more and leave the rest as is. Now, let's see, you have
this typical color noise, which we don't really want. Instead, we want to make it stars. So first logical step would be to get rid of the colors. You can simply do that by adding the trusty companion to all shader editor edits, the core ramp node. Now, when you adjust
the endpoints like this, well, well, well, right away, we have some nice-looking stars. They are dim but when you plug them into the emission shader as well, they start emitting. That was easier than you thought, right? I settled at the values of
0.65 for the black point and 0.7 to 75 for the white point, depending on how bright
you want your stars to be. Okay, let's select the nodes, hit Control + J to frame them and name the frame here
in the sidebar menu Stars. You can even change the
color and the size here. So that's the starry field and next up comes the
bottom edge light glow. The node you can use to
create a gradient seeping from below onto your starry field is this gradient texture. Let's, in fact, unplug
the starry field first to not see it, and plug in this
gradient texture by itself. First, into the color and
then into the emission. And here's a little trick. If you hold down Shift and
right mouse button drag, you create this reroute node and now, let's drive our
connections from this point. The advantage of this is next time we want to plug something into these two sockets, you don't have to plug it in twice but instead, you only plug it here. Saving time like a pro. Okay, back to the gradient texture. By default, you can see it's positioned from +x to -x going from
white color to black. I found the gradient to be kinda hard. So in fact, let's switch to
this quadratic one first. Second, I want it to come from below, not from the side. So for that, let's hit
that Control + T shortcut and this time, we will use it. By the way, leaving the coordinate method to generate it has one advantage. And that is if you later
start scaling your sky dome, the texture will stay the same. So now for it to shine from below, we just need to rotate
the y-axis -90 degrees and push it on x-axis
until we see some result. And you may need to hold down Shift when manipulating with this x value because it gets very sensitive. Now would be appropriate time to add a camera to our shot. So let's add one. Position it wherever you want it. Raise the end clipping, of course, to avoid far distance
clipping of our sky dome and set up any resolution you want. I will use the cinematic 21:9 aspect ratio and a fairly wide lens. And now with the better
idea of the final shot, you can play around with
the mapping a bit more, even with the x value. A very fast way to control
the color of this glow is to simply add a mix RGB node here and make it a color
method with vector one. Now you can just play with the color here, making it slightly bluish, or any other color you want really. Finally, we want to blend
it with the starry field. So for that, you can, in fact,
add one more mix RGB node and leave it to mix. Plug the stars to the first socket, the globe to the second socket and here we go. And by the way, if at this point, the globe is too soft
at the edges for you, you can always add a curves node here to raise the intensity for the midpoint, low points or high points or make it more contrast-y. A really handy node this one. You can also rotate
this on y somewhat more to make it coming more from one side or the other. Frame this network and
call it a Glow Bottom. This one can function as anything really. For example, an atmosphere layer or a dimmed glow of the coming dawn. Next up, we can start adding the moon. I have found that by
far the easiest solution is to just use an image texture and stick it onto your sky dome. So you can search for a CC0
transparent moon texture, download it and just import it with this image as planes add-on. Another one of those indispensable add-ons that should be active by default. So once you add it in, make it larger and stick it onto your sky with the snapping options activated. Hit Center and Align Rotation and then just move the
plane across the dome while holding Control. Place it where you want the moon to be and in the shader editor, plug it into the emission as well. To control the color of the moon, you can again add the color mix node with a similar color as
we used for the glow, only you don't have to make it as intense in the factor here. If you want the emission to be controlled by this color mix too, just plug this output into it. Also, you can adjust the emission if you plug in a curves node in between the mixed node and the emission socket. It's, in fact, better if
you raise the dark point and bring down the highlights so that the emission more evenly spreads across the moon. Cool and you know what will
make it even more cool? Activating the bloom option
in Eevee Render settings. I ended up with the settings of 0.6 in the threshold, larger intensity and bluish color. Now, to ensure the moon
sticks to the surface of our sky dome, you can first parent it to the object, and then you can also add
the shrink wrap modifier with default settings, make the target our sky dome and you can also add a bit of offset so that the moon never
intersects through the sky dome. Very nice, but the moon is
missing a bit more glow to it. So that's what we'll do next. The moon glow we could
create in many ways. For example, by sticking in
a spherical gradient image behind the moon image plane but I wanted it to be part of my sky dome material. So instead, I duplicated
the bottom glow network and reused it to make a moon glow. So first off, let's plug it in by itself and change the gradient
type to be spherical. Then it will be just a matter
of scaling down the glow and positioning it here so that it's where the moon is. Before we do that, however, we can change this
mapping type to texture. Without going too deep into
how the texture type differs from point type, what's important now is that if you want to
make your texture smaller, in point type, you would have to go up with the scale while in texture type, you can input numbers smaller than one, which at least to me
always makes more sense, especially if I want to
experiment with placement. So after a bit of playing
around with the scaling and positioning, I
arrived at these numbers. This is, of course, not the
most user-friendly solution. The glow is traveling over
our sphere kinda unreliably but you can do that. And mind you, the numbers
here will, of course, depend on the position of your sky dome of the camera and also
where you want the moon to be in the shot. And if you find a better
solution for this, definitely let me know in the comments. Next up, there's the color node. I left it at about 0.5. I did not want it to be too colorful and finally, I plugged it
in with a very low factor and mixed blending type. However, this glow wasn't
good enough for me. I want it to have a larger outside glow and smaller inside glow. For that, fortunately,
there is an easier solution. You just use this glow texture twice. Before we do that, however,
let's frame this new network. And then duplicate this color node and also, duplicate the mixed node and plug it behind the first one. Finally, plug the new color node into this new mixed node. Okay, that just blended
in the very same glow as the previous one. Only making it more intense. However, a node that will allow us to play around with the shape of the second glow is
again this curves node. By making a contrast curve like this, I was able to bring down
the less-intense parts of the glow and bring up the highlights, making a smaller, more intense shape in the center of it. Then just edit the factors up here, blending them until you like the result and you can also play
around with the color of the two glows here, of course. Very good, this is getting us somewhere. Final layer of detail we'll add are going to be these clouds. For that, we'll use a
noise texture, a 3D type. So again, plug this in
here for now by itself. Scale of four and we can
make it quite detailed and a level of 12. Also add a bit of distortion. Next, bring in a color ramp to be able to make it black and white. And increase the contrast like this by bringing the two points together. 0.45 for black point and 0.55 for white
point looks about right. To plug it into our network, bring in a mixed node and plug our last mix output into the first socket and for now, let's leave
the second one empty, making the cloud white for a while because now we're making
only the shape of the clouds. So we will plug this noise texture into the factor. That essentially mixes in the white color to the spots defined
by this cloud network. Now we can see the cloud shape clearly but of course, we don't
want it to be this white. Before we solve the color though, let's figure out the mapping. With Control + T, add the mapping network to the texture but this time, we'll choose this object
method to drive our mapping. However, we will not
use the sky dome itself but rather, let's add a new empty and choose it down here
in the object picker. It's now very, very small but if we scale it to
the scale of our sky, which was 1,000, the clouds became the right size. And you can even change
the type of the empty to be sphere. Having a helper object like this is a great method to have direct control over the positioning, rotation and scale of your textures, especially textures you want to animate, like these clouds. If now you want to make them move, you can simply keyframe the empty, rotate it or move it,
whatever looks best for you. Now, there's a small downside to this because when you scale your sky dome, the clouds will not scale with it. For that, there's a simple solution. Just parent the empty to the sky dome. See? All good now. Okay, it's time to adjust
the color of our clouds. I mean, I don't want to make
anything elaborate here. Basically just make the clouds darker with a brighter spot around here where the glow of the moon is. And since we already have this
glow position figured out, you can just duplicate this
network and push it here. To see it better, let's again plug it in by itself. You can change the type here to be this quadratic sphere because that one gives you
a smoother glow gradient rather than the sharper sphere type. Then just play around with
the mapping node again until you find appropriate
position for the glow to be around this point where the moon is. You can also plug in our
favorite color ramp node but this time, we can use
it to color the thing. By adding a dark blue to the darkest point and soft blue to the brightest points, you can color it in a much
more believable fashion. Like this, for example. Now we want to use it
in this cloud structure. So instead of the plain white color, plug in this color ramp
into the second socket and voila, we have achieved
much better looking clouds. And now you have this
good looking sky dome that you can easily scale, rotate and pan around with your camera, appending it to your night scenes. Of course, this whole shading network could be made much more elaborate, adding more structure to the clouds and overlaying even more elements. However, I wanted this
tip to be short and easy. So that's where I'll leave it. If you watch the previous video I've made, focusing on weather effects, you can, of course, add in, for example, a falling snow simulation and with a bit of work and building a few other elements, create a simple, yet good
looking real-time scene in Eevee. And of course, if you want to make some
more advanced environments, you can join my master 3D
environments in Blender course. There I'll guide you through
all the important steps. And with that, I thank you for watching and see you next time in some of my other
videos here at CG Boost or at my personal YouTube channel. Links are in the description. Stay creative, my friends. Martin out. (dramatic music)
