Nebulae Cloud Flythrough in Blender | Free Tutorial

[Music] welcome to this bonus chapter from the space VFX element series with Gleb Alexandra and me-80 Burroughs in this chapter let's go large like really large and attempt a massive nebula cloud fly through I think we can do this thing and still be back in time for breakfast anyway let's get stuck into setting up our scene so this is our default scene I've split the view already we've got a node editor down below and we've got the 3d view up top I've also set it to cycles rendering and we can now switch our device from CPU to GPU since this graphics card is compatible don't worry if yours isn't though just leave it as CPU but since we are setting this at GPU I'm just going to hit f12 to render the image and you can see this little orange square that's darted around the scene these are our tile sizes and you can see at the top here we've got five point six nine seconds to render that if we calm down a little bit down here around the performance area and set this from 64 to a larger tile size so 512 let's try and then hit f12 again we'll see instead of it being five point six nine we now get a render time of 3.0 seven so we're going to set that up to increase that render time basically if you set some CPU though keep that really low say something like 16 so I'm just going to hit escape and then switch into our rendered view and you can see as we move around here the view is a little bit jagged as it tries to calculate what to show us on screen this is a pretty good resolution for a lot of things but for now we're actually going to set this fairly high say something like 256 and now at the first thing it tries to show us is a little bit smoother so we get a lot less of those jagged lines basically so this object has a material on it already and I've set it to use nodes which is why we've got this simple diffuse shader set to a material output but we don't really need this so what I'm going to do is select it press X to delete and then I'm going to go shift a and add instead a shader emission shader and then let's drop that in and we can hook this up like this or I can control left-click and drag through it to destroy that connection and since we have the node Wrangler add-on enabled and we're going to need that enabled we can go ctrl shift and click on it just to automatically hook that up to our material output so since we're going to be using a lot of emission shaders to pull this effect off we don't really need that much in way sampling so I'm actually gonna left click and drag across these two values and set that down to 1 also I'm just going to come down to light paths and we're not really using any of this stuff so I'm going to set the bounces down to zero and the same with all of this basically this is going to be a very simple rendering setup hopefully to give us as much speed in the rendering as we possibly can otherwise I'm just going to leave all these other rendering options as they are let's press Z to toggle the wireframe here and stop it from rendering in the viewport and we've got this lamp in the scene that we don't really need so I'm going to right select it and then press X to delete and here's our camera over here so let's bring it back to the center of the world by pressing alt G and then let's reset its rotations by pressing alt R and then what we can do is just drag that up a little bit and instead of this cube the whole effect is going to hinge on these emissive planes so what we can do is press X to delete this cube and then go shift a and add in a mesh plane instead our materials gone though but it's still in the list we can just left click to open up our pulldown menu and select our material back again next thing I'll do is just split this view so a left click and drag from the top right there open that up and then we could press 0 on the numpad in this view to be able to look through the camera will be rendering from and we can still see a general 3d view on the right hand side so let's take a look at what we are actually rendering by hitting shift Z which is the shortcut key to switches into our rendered view and we're a little bit zoomed out so I'm just going to scroll the mouse wheel in just to tighten that in and we're also rendering outside of the camera border which we don't really need to do as that's going to slow things down for no reason so let's just come over to the rendering tab off the properties window and hit add a little border check box also the background is a somewhat depressing mid gray let's just tidy that up let's come over to the world tab and we'll set that down to the blackest of black and for some reason this kind of reminds me of James Bond you can go control 3 to throw a subdivision modifier on there and maybe you can kind of see what I mean but anyway let's just undo that with control Z and these black borders here are indicating a bit of a problem because we want to have the camera not be able to see the edges of our plane so I'm going to select the camera by just right selecting it on this edge here and then come over to the camera settings and then our focal length let's just pull that right up and you can see it's starting to stretch out in the little graphic icon that we have for the camera I'm just going to set that up and keep pushing it really fast or something like 70 it's just round that off this is the sort of focal length that might be a little bit more believable for kind of space objects anyway and the next thing we can do is select our plane and let's get a little bit of a material for us to be able to see since this pure white thing is not that inspiring so let's set up a little bit of a shader here let's go shift a and add in a shader mix shader' since we have our emission shader we just want to mix it in with something else and we'll mix it in with some transparency so let's go shift a and add in a shader transparent shader put that on top let's plug this one in to the top socket which will bump the other one down into the second socket for us now to derive this factor so at 0 we're going to be fully transparent and at 1 we're going to be into a mission territory again let's go and add a noise texture so texture noise and this is the fact that output that we can plug in to our factor and where it's black it will show the first and where it's y tilt show the second thanks to the node Wrangler done we can go control T and it will also generate these vector nodes for us and I'm going to choose the object out and plug that in instead and we're probably not going to be using the mapping node just at the moment anyway so I'm going to go control X just to delete that while still maintaining this connection through and all so now that we have our object out we don't need to be able to see all these other sockets so I'm just going to collapse this down with ctrl H and let's just tuck that in a little bit also this tends to be a little bit on the low contrast side so let's team this up with a converter color amp drop that in and it automatically hooks it up for us if we took this up about 20% on either side so up to 0.2 and down to 0.8 we're just going to increase our contrast a little bit next thing I'm going to do is just make this noise a little bit larger so let's set that down say something like 1.5 and a detail a bit higher it's a 5 so we're still go maintaining those overall large forms but we're just with this detail we're going to get some more intricacies being thrown into the bargain so right now if we select our camera and try and push it through things get pretty uninteresting really quickly so bring that back and what we want to do is grab our plane and we want lots of these but just as we're setting up let's just get a handful of them so far so say maybe around five to ten of them and we can achieve this using our array modifier so let's come over to the modifiers go add modifier array and it's put it off to the side which is definitely not what we want so let's turn off our relative offset and stick it on constant offset instead and then let's play with our Z value because it's on the z axis that we want to push this down and then if we take that up it's going to push it towards the camera so let's push it in the negative direction instead something like this now at the moment we've only got two altogether so let's set that up as we said to somewhere between five and ten let's go with eight and we can see we're getting a bit more into that ghost in the fog with a blizzard background kind of a thing going on so let's fix a couple of things here let's start by taking this color ramp the black end of things and what we can do is squeeze this in so we can make a lot more of the space instead of just the clouds and also we're able to see now a lot more of the borders of our planes again so let's tap into edit mode and just press s and scale that up until it basically covers the borders of the camera so it's scaled up by about four and then let's just left click to confirm that and now if we tap back into object mode select our camera and now drag that down through the clouds we can see that we're gonna start getting a soar to fly through effect all right so let's undo that with control Zed select our plane and we'll develop this a little bit further so let's give ourselves some color variety in here right now we've got this almost pure white thing going on in fact it will be pure white if I just selected on this emission color value and just tuck that up a little bit but we don't want that we want some mysterious blends from one hue to the other so let's set that up in fact it's pretty simple we just use this noise texture here let's go ctrl shift and D to duplicate it so we maintain our connection into that object coordinates and then let's plug our color out into the emission color straight away we've got pretty much what we want but we do need a little bit more control over this so for example the colors are blending from one to the other a little bit too quickly into shorter distance so let's set the scale of this way lower like 0.1 and the detail doesn't need to be this high either so let's just set that down to about two L speed up our rendering ever so slightly and then let's go shift a and add in a color hue saturation node mostly too just to use for the saturation slider here so let's set that down to say something like 0.5 and then to tint the overall color let's give ourselves a color mix RGB node drop that in let's set this to multiply and we'll multiply this by white for the minute so let's take that all the way up so the RGB values are old one so right now anything multiplied by one it or itself in other words is basically just itself so it's going to have no change whatsoever but if we do take this color swatch lean it towards a color like say maybe blue you can see it's going to tint the overall hue into that blue and now we can use this factor slider here to kind of increase that effect or not so I'm going to set that down to around 0.3 so let's give ourselves a little bit more space and took these shaders in over here and then one more node I'll go shift a and add in a color RGB curves so basically what this is going to do is allow us to increase the overall contrast so I'm just going to put in a couple of points here drag them into position so that we've got roughly a kind of an S shape crush down the darker areas and brighten up the mid to light areas a little bit and then if we want to we can use these RG and B splits to be able to push it into maybe slightly into the blue there and maybe let's drag down the green a bit more and the red a little bit more as well maybe the green a touch more than that even and there we go so what we've got at the moment is just eight planes in our scene and we could do with a lot more of these planes to be able to fly through so let's set this up to about a factor of ten so we want to times this by tenth or eight times ten no surprises it's 80 not the trickiest of math somes there but now we have our 80 planes to be able to fly through now the problem with this though is if we come over to our rendering tap and scroll down to the light paths area here we have our transparency set to minimum and maximum of eight so once the camera sees the transparency of our eighth plane there beyond that it's basically just going to fall apart just render black but we want to render everything really so let's take this up to beyond 80 so let's set that up to say 94 now and now you can see it fills in a whole bunch of other planes that won't be rendered a second ago but we can also see these vertical striped lines which if we toggle into our wireframe with the z key we can see it basically just the borders of our plane two main ways to go about this really is we could actually just fade out the edges or we could just tap it to edit mode and press s and scale out so that it basically encompasses the whole of the view there which is probably the easiest way to do it so let's tap back into object mode press shift-z to take a look at our rendering and then we can make some more tweaks where we can take the look in any direction let's start with this area here the noise texture which is going into our color amp which is basically just driving how much of this is transparent so let's make some larger opaque areas by squeezing in the white side of things let's drag that over and also I'm going to try setting this a little bit lower say around 0.8 so things a little bit larger and then we'll mix this in with something else which is going to be even larger so let's go shift a and add in a color mix RGB node I'll set this to multiply and so that the changes update a little bit quicker in the viewport there I'm just going to scroll the mouse wheel back a little bit just to shrink the amount of pixels that blenders trying to render for us and also to help things I'm going to set the start resolution under the performance let's set this down to say 128 so with that I'm going to grab a noise texture and the color ramp and go ctrl shift and D to duplicate it while keeping our vector in and then let's plug this into the second socket of our multiply node there and turn that all the way up now rather than it being exactly the same settings I'm going to set this slightly differently so say let's try something like 0.2 and we can make it not quite as harsh a transition by just spreading that out a little bit just make it a bit softer on the larger shapes and then on this one here let's just drag this over so we have a little bit more filled in but really this is all going to be down to personal taste to just give it a little bit more variety of what's happening in general I'm just going to the distortion just a little bit on both of these and really at this stage we're going to need to select a camera and we could try and drop it through our planes using this z-axis but unfortunately it looks like our start resolution here in the performance section is still a little bit too high since the viewport isn't really updating in time so let's set this down to 64 and then left-click and drag on this set axis again and now we're basically getting our fly through effect working quite nicely but we could still do some pretty decent tweaks and quite large changes overall pretty simply as well no less so let's come over to our scenes tab and come down to the color management and give this some curve action so overall we can just increase the contrast here similar as we might do with an RGB curves node so it's left-click and drag a point into the curve here and drop that down and then left-click and drag another point bring them together in an S shape to increase that contrast creating an overall pretty dense blue hue to everything as well and just to counter that slightly I'm going to back this off a little bit overall by coming to the blue Channel add it in a point here and just drop in that back a bit and now let's grab our camera and just take a mother fly through and see what we've got so quite liking that but I think we can increase the exposure a little bit here as well and that might give us some nicer extent to our overall contrast as well and with this it's as you can probably feel we could tweak this all day and it's really just down to personal preference we have these tools over here we have the actual array material itself that we could tweak with and get quite large changes with very very subtle tweaks here so I encourage you to play around with this to get the just the kind of vibe that you want to see so that's our clouds done with but let's balance what we have so far with some bright pinpoints of starry light do that we'll use a particle system that can use a plane as an object so let's go about creating that plane let's go shift a and add in a mesh plane and then just to make things nice and easy I'm gonna hit the / or the divide key depending on how you look at it on the numpad and that will enter us into this local view and also I'm going to stop this from rendering by pressing Z and it'll toggle the wireframe there Wescoe shift-z in this view instead and tada it's not very interesting right now because we don't have a material for it so let's click on the new there and let's call this star and instead of a diffuse shader let's delete that with the X key and instead use an emission shader so let's drop that there and then go ctrl shift and click on it just to hook that up and what we're looking for first of all it's just a small circular point of light so for that we'll use a texture gradient texture and let's just plug in the factor into the color of the emission for now and we're using a linear type at the moment but we want a spherical type instead but it's slightly off-center there we want that circle to be obviously starting from the very origin point of the plane there so to do that we can go ctrl T to auto generate these vector nodes now we could switch from the default generated coordinates to the object coordinates and we have our circle in the right place of the plane we don't need to see the rest of these outputs so let's go ctrl H - claps all that down and then also instead of just using the quadratic sphere which is a slightly nicer fall-off in my opinion I'm going to set that back to spherical and instead control the fall off using a math node so let's go to the converter math node drop that in and set that to power now a power of two is exactly the same as the quadratic sphere but we can now set this even higher so let's maybe try something like 6 and it's going to shrink that down what gives more of a fall-off between the darkest areas and we can make that even smaller by setting that up to say something like 8 but I'm going to keep that around 6 and we can always tweak that a little bit later on so let's press B border select across them drag them out and let's add some other elements to it so let's give it a some streaky like vertical and horizontal stripes to this give it the sense of a little bit of a lens flare let's go JJ Abrams's on this thing let's just grab these borders let's across them go ctrl shift + D to duplicate them up in fact we don't need a duplicate of that one so I'm just going to hook that up and delete this one bring this up to share between the two and let's add what we're doing here on to what we've got already so let's go shift a and add in a color mix RGB node drop that in there this one can go in the second sock this one can go in the first and then this can go into our emission shader like this okay so let's set that to add and we want to completely add these together now we'll take our X scale value and stretch that ride out to something like this and then maybe shrink the y-axis down a little bit we kind of pull it out a bit like this and then we have one of our streaks so let's just set that to 10 just around it off and this one's 0.5 okay so that's fine let's grab these guys again let's border select across all these control shift D to duplicate them up and I'm going to replace this first socket with the output of this so let's plug that in there and then also the output of this is going to simply go into the emission color output okay so we've got basically the same thing happening here going on here again but what we're going to do is just reverse these so let's set that to 0.5 and this one to 10 and now we have our staff like shape alright cool for the moment we have this just coming up to an emission shader and we don't really want that so we're going to do what we did with the clouds in which we're going to couple this emission shader with a transparency shader via the mix shader' so let's go shift a add in a shader transparent shader put that on top and it's add in our mix shader' drop that here and push this into the top one which will drop the other one down into the bottom and instead of it informing the color here now we're going to inform the factor instead as you can see it pretty much doesn't make any real difference but now we've got this color that we can just maybe switch around and push into whatever we want now I'm going to leave it somewhere around there so it's very slight lean into the red so that's our plain done with but now we need to basically just set up the particle system so I'm going to press the divide key on the numpad again just to bring those outs of that local view drag this off to the side instead of it being called a plane though I'm going to call this the particle star and this plane here is a cloud array so let's just call that cloud array alright so let's get our particle plane in a particle system so let's go shift a and add in a mesh cube and this can act as our volume if you like to place all our planes inside when I hit seven on the numpad to take a look from top orthographic view and just scale that cube up so that it's wider than our planes and then from the side view let's press three on the numpad to jump over to the right orthographic drag that down to somewhere around there and then press s and then Z to scale that up on the z-axis and it should completely encompass the all of our planes there and we can stick all our stars inside so let's come over to the particle system and click new to create a new one this one I'm just going to call star system and then the number of them can be a thousand for the moment now we want them all to be in the scene right from the start so we're going to have them finish emitting on the same frame as these start emitting so we're going to stick them all in at the same time but we don't want them to die after 50 frames so I'm just going to take that really high so we don't need to worry about it and instead of emitting from just the faces the very edges of our bounds here if you like I'm going to set that to be the volume instead if we hit alt a now basically they're going to all fall down which is not really what we want so let's shift + left arrow back to the start of the animation and we'll deal with that so let's come down to the field weights here and set our gravity to zero and let's try our animation again with alt a and now they do all sort of just drift off so let's fix that let's go shift + left arrow back to the start and then let's come up a little bit and we'll find our velocity area the normal set to one let's set that bow down to zero instead and make sure we're at the first keyframe with shift + left arrow alt a and then we can see everything's pretty much staying where it should okay so at the moment the just points well that's not really what we want we want stars now often stars are kind of pointy but that's beside the point let's put that particle plane in that we spent all that time on so let's come over to the rendering area and first of all it's going to try and render the emitter the cube that we use in which we do not want to happen so I'm going to uncheck that and instead of using these halos let's select object instead and from the pulldown it should be fairly easy to find our particle star from here I think we can afford to make these a little bit larger so let's try something like this and also the random size of them let's crank that all the way up as well so we get a little bit of variety there and let's go shift Zed in this view to take a look through the renderable camera and we don't really see anything so I think we need some more of these since the clouds are basically obscuring most of them so it's come to the top of our system settings here and we've got a thousand of these let's set this up to something like four thousand five hundred maybe uh-huh now a couple of them are starting to pop into view so let's just also just correct the orange ness of this I think seeing them against the clouds here is making me want to come over to here and just tweak the emission color here slightly maybe leaned that more into the blue kind of thing alright so with that we can select our cube again in fact let's rename this to the particle system come down to the general emitter size which we can find in a couple of different places but I'm just going to use this size area here so let's left-click and hold shift just to get some finer control to this maybe take that down slightly as well and then let's select our camera I'm going to select it in the outliner and let's just drag that through the scene see what we've got a few of them whizzing by there and I think that's an overall a pretty nice effect the only real last thing to do is just take our camera at the top here switch this what we've got down here to be say a dope sheet and let's go to the first frame so shift + left arrow press I to add in a keyframe let's add in keyframes to the location and the rotation and then let's go to the end of the animation so let's go shift and right arrow so we have our 250 frames here so let's just use the standard default frame range it gives us and then we'll drag our camera down to somewhere like around let's see before it gets too dark and we end up on the outside maybe to about there let's press I and add in another location rotation but so there it isn't so uniform let's press R and just rotate around a little bit like this and see if that's a nice let's go I and input the rotation values there that we've got and then let's go shift and left arrow to the start and then press alt a and then it'll ramp up get fast and then start to slow down again so to change that let's just press T to bring up our keyframe interpolation so by default it's given us this Bezier so I'm going to set that to linear instead so that's just a smooth constant speed all the way through so let's shift left arrow to the start alt a to play and let's see if we can get a fairly reasonable sense of what we've actually created all right one thing that I'm noticing is as the camera turns the borders of our planes are going to start becoming apparent so let's select the array press tab to enter into the edit mode and press s to scale it out even further so something like this let's press tab again to enter back into object mode shift + left arrow back to start again and then let's press alt a and see what we have again so I think that's a pretty nice kind of drift through but I think really I wouldn't mind the animation being overall a little bit faster so let's just make it twice as fast by just selecting this end keyframe and dragging that up to say something around 140 and let's go over to the rendering tab and set this to 140 so we can speed it all up overall so let's go shift + left arrow back to the start alt a again and we get in a little bit more of a swift move through everything now and I think that's a lot better the other issue is the fact that these planes that we have with the Stars on are kind of spinning around with the camera we want these to be kind of always in line with the camera so something we can do about that is we can select our plane that we have here we can come over to the constraints tab we can add an object constraint to copy the rotation and we can copy the rotation off the camera and we can also set the particle system over here let's come over to the system settings and we can also enable rotation here and now it straightens all those up for us so if we press alt a again we hopefully should have something where the planes always in fact let's press Z to total a wireframe since we can see the wireframes of all our planes there that should allow us to be able to see if everything is sticking in just how we want it and it is alright the next thing I want to make sure is if we select the camera and come over to the camera settings we can see the clipping range is at 100 so things a hundred units away aren't going to be rendered so let's press 1 on the numpad to end a front view if we select this particle system and press n to take a look exactly how large is the dimensions are actually above 100 so we want to be able to sort a camera out here so let's set that up to I don't know ten thousand instead and now we can see we're going to get everything in view so let's press alt a again in this view just to make sure everything is within the bounds of the camera that we want and it does look pretty good so let's go shift + left arrow back to the start press shift-z to take a look in our rendered view press alt a to take another glance through what we can see but again the performance is a little bit too high so let's come down to here and find our performance area so that we can get a little bit more off the chain here let's go 48 let's try that see if that's going to update for us still not maybe if we just scroll the mouse wheel back a little bit just shrink down the view a little bit we get a little bit more of an update so that's a bit more workable so I apologize it's extremely small I realize that but we can get a decent feel for the overall animation clearly we're going to need to render this out just make sure that there aren't anything that is in dire need of the tweak although I is congradulations space travelers we are finished we have made it to the end of the universe however there is one improvement we can make to this by using the distance fade node group from the space VFX elements course this will fade any geometry out as the camera gets closer to it this way we won't get any sudden sharp transitions as the camera moves from one side of the plane to the other side which is exactly what's happening here the creation of the node group is explained thoroughly in the course as many of you will know since a lot of people have that course now globe and I have been really blown away seeing all the awesome results you've been sharing with us though if you don't you have the course and therefore don't have this distance fade node group don't worry I'll include a link to a blend file with the node group in it for you so you can still add this final step if you do on the space VFX course though you will of course also get access to this nebula cloud project blend file which you'll have already received in the latest resources pack file that'll also be the case for future bonus updates that we have planned so it's at this final step and bringing our distance paid node group so here I am back in the project blend file for the clouds fly through and I've got the camera selected and if we just come over to around frame 117 or so and just use the left and right arrows just go one step forward into 118 and then back with the left arrow to 117 you can see this is our area where we have quite a sharp transition now with that in mind we'll select our mesh plane which is basically our cloud array and we'll switch this back over to the node editor so we can take a look at our nodes and all we need to do really is bring in the distance fade node group and we'll just drop it in at the very end so let's bring it into the scene let's go file append and then what we want to do is navigate to wherever we have the distance fade blend click on it come over to the node tree we'll click on the distance fade I wanna pen that from the library now when we go shift a and we can come down to our group section will find distance fade there and we can just click and drop it in now this distance is actually set quite far away at 30 so it's basically faded out a whole load of what was in front of the camera which is a bit too far so I'm going to set this actually quite low to say something like 2 and let's zoom in at the location of where our camera is and just manually grab it and what we can do is just left click and drag up and you can see now it's basically fading out and not doing that whole sharp transition thing so if we just select the planes again select our distance fade group press m to mute it and then grab the camera let's just give ourselves a bit more space and then left click and drag on the z axis pop that through and we can see it just pops at that point select the plane again the array and then we can unmute this with the M key and this is where the magic cap we can take our camera push it through and it feels way more natural and it has to be one of my favorite tricks it really sells the effect one more thing we can potentially add this to is the particle star since that's the only other material that we're using in the scene at the moment so I'm just going to do exactly as we did with the other just drop it in at the end here shift a to add in the distance fade and then I'm going to set that really quite low again to something round two and that is basically us complete all we need to do then is come over to our rendering settings just make sure we have a decent place to put this just render out some pngs we don't need to think about alpha because we're not really using it so I'm just going to switch that over to RGB just set the resolution we want make sure this is set up to 1% when you're doing your finals come up to the very very top and just hit the big old animation button [Music] so that was the final animation and you can see I've extended it and faded this between some other variations it's actually quite a lot of fun just making some subtle tweaks and you get some really quite different moods alright everybody so this has been a tea borrows from CG masters net as part of the space VFX element series with Lev Alexandra from the creative shrimp thanks for watching and if you'd like to see more from the space series visit either crazy shrimp comm or CD masters net watch the trailer see what you think and I'll see you out there on the other side

Channel: CG Masters

Views: 124,417

Rating: 4.9749923 out of 5

Keywords: aidy burrows, aidy, burrows, blender, free tutorial, video tutorial, tutorial, cycles, clouds, cloud, flythrough, volumetric, cheat, fast, flying, nebula, nebulae, blender (software), space, space vfx, elements, space vfx elements, cg masters, cg, 3d, cgmasters.net, noise, array, procedural, texturing, materials

Id: CB8_QKQ4eKQ

Length: 32min 59sec (1979 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 16 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/gleb_alexandrov]

If you, by accident, have missed the course itself, here is a product page: http://www.creativeshrimp.com/spacevfx.html :)

[u/[deleted]]

OMG i remember you. you were on BlenderGuru's website a bunch of times because your photorealism is INSANE. And you were the amazing artist behind the poliigon demo renders!! right?