Quick Photo Realism In Blender

in january i made a video called achieving realism in 12 minutes showing you how i put together scenes quickly in blender a lot of people asked me to make a follow-up to that video going into more detail about my process i also get loads of people asking me to make video tutorials on making a bayern blender so here it is this should be a fairly easy video for you to follow as long as you understand the basic features of blender so first things first we're going to need some basic lighting i got rid of that default cube and the light from the scene and i use this really handy little add-on called easyhdri that allows me to quickly load in hdr images from my library if you haven't used hdrs before they give you nice realistic looking lighting reflections and even a background with basically no extra work there's even a hdr image from inside the blender institute complete with suzanne monkey head i went for this outdoor balcony scene i'll leave a link to this in the description below i dragged a pink glass reference image in the blender from windows and i just pushed it back slightly on the y-axis to move it out of the way next i used the ruler tool to make sure it was all built to the correct real-world scale it's really important for folder realism to make sure all your assets are not just the right proportion but the right real world scale to make the pink glass i just added a cylinder moved it into the correct shape in edit mode for the bulge part that comes out the side of the glass i made a loop cut with ctrl r and i scaled it out a little bit and then i used ctrl and b to bevel it into a nice curve right click on the mesh in object mode enable shade smoothing and then in the normals property panel enable auto smooth and that will fix all those bad shading issues finally i just selected the bottom face and i use ctrl b again to add a little bevel to the bottom of the glass select that top face delete it we donate it to add some thickness to our glass we're just going to add a solidify modifier give it one to three millimeters of thickness hit apply drinking glasses are a little bit thicker at the bottom so they don't smash when you put them down that's really easy to do in blender what we're gonna do is go into edit mode select the bottom face inside the glass go into white frame view and the side view turn on proportional editing either by clicking the little circle icon at the top or just pressing all on the keyboard and we can grab that face and move around however you can see that we're grabbing the whole mesh at the moment and we only want to move the faces that are inside the glass luckily the proportional editing has this option called connected only that's going to fix that problem so now we can grab that bottom face press z and we can just move it up slightly on the z axis and that's going to give us that little bit of thickness at the bottom of the glass add a subdivision surface modifier and at the top of the outside of the glass use ctrl r just to add a loop cut we're going to make that little lip that's on the top of drinking glasses hold down alt in face select mode and select the top ring of faces that go around the top of the glass press alt and e and extrude faces along normals and that will pull that lip out a little bit then just use ctrl and r and add another loop cut right near the bottom of that lip and i'll add a little bit of support to the edge make sure you apply the subdivision surface modifier and our glass is now done it's time to move on to the liquid to create the liquid hit the glass again go back into edit mode and select the bottom face inside the glass press ctrl and p a couple of times to grow the selection of the side of the glass keep going until it gets to the height you want the liquid to be press ctrl and d to duplicate those faces right click to confirm the position and then press p separate by selection what we've just done is duplicate those faces into their own mesh give this new mesh in a name like liquid called the all mesh glass with the liquid object selected press shift h to hide everything else from the scene select the top edge loop extrude it in a couple of times then press m and collapse do the same thing on the bottom to fill in the faces there if we turn on face orientation in the overlay options we can say that our faces are pointing the wrong way around with everything selected in edit mode just press alt n and choose flip from the normals to correct that problem for the form on top of the bigger we're going to follow the exact same process just select a few face loops from inside the top of the edge just above the liquid duplicate them separate them into their own object and then fill in the top and the bottom of that mesh at this point i decided to quickly get the camera into the rough position that was going to be in for the final render it really helps if you can get the final camera vibration locked down as soon as possible that way you don't have to worry about modeling things that won't even make it into the final render i selected the form mesh and retopologized it quickly with the voxel ray mesher i found that a voxel size of one millimeter was good enough but your mileage may vary depending on the exact geometry you've got and the size of the same just play with the sentence until you get some nice bit of geometry going on while retaining the same basic shape you don't need loads of verts for this all we're going to do is go into the sculpting panel i'm going to use a really light brush just to add a few bumps and a little bit of variation to the foam you don't want to overdo this i found it looks really really hacky if you go too over the top just a few little bumps will do the trick so at this point the bulk valve modeling is done and it's basically completed we can move on to the materials people seem to think that realistic materials have to have loads of imperfections i say all these comments and it's always like oh you need fingerprints you need hair fibers you need all these micro details and it's not strictly true unless you're creating an extreme close-up macro shot these details shouldn't be in the render because they wouldn't be in a real photograph like let's take this photo of some badly pulled pines for instance you can't see any fingerprints on this image right anyway let's start with the glass go into the shader editor get rid of the principle shader and add a glass node connect the noise texture node to the roughness input of the shader add a texture coordinate node and plug the object data into the vector now it's just a case of playing around with the settings on the noise texture until you get a nice looking cold glass effect you can add a color ramp in between the noise texture and the roughness and that will give you control over the density of the condensation making the black value less dark will make the whole glass more frosted if you change the white value it'll make the condensation look less visible for the liquid add another glass shader but this time change the ior to be 1.33 then just play around with the color until you get something you like you can see here i have some weird shading going on on this glass to fix that issue if you get it just right click on the liquid mesh make sure that the origin is set to geometry then scale it up slightly until it clips inside the glass mesh you can get some finer control just by holding down shift while you scale for the form we could set up a particle system and make millions of bubbles but this is all about achieving realism the easy way and you can't really make out individual bubbles on most photographs of bigger anywhere i noticed so what we're going to do is just shade it with the material give it a principal shader and use the slightly off-white color and then pick a slightly more saturated shade of cream for the subsurface color give it a low value on the subsurface scattering lower the roughness a little bit and give it a transmission value of something like 0.1 in my version i noticed i got this weird yellow band that was caused by a gap that was in between the form and the liquid when i re-meshed it i just went into edit mode and i flattened out those bottom faces by scaling them on the z-axis finally to create the bubbly surface what we're going to do is use the voronoi texture and plug that into the factor of a bump node and i think that gave us a pretty good looking head on the bigger so if we give this a test render we get something that looks like this let's be honest it looks a little bit like a cold pint of piss and the reason it looks like that is because it's completely flat so we're going to add some bubbles luckily bubbles in blender are ridiculously easy just add a circle scale it down and position it until it's at the bottom of your liquid mesh go into edit mode select everything with a and press f to give it a face this is going to be the emitter for the bubbles so call this object emitter for the bubbles create a i cause figure reduce it down so it's just got one subdivision right click on it and shade smooth then scale it down until it's really really small move that up on the z-axis until it's well out the way of the camera you don't want that showing up in the final render give the emitter object a particle system crank up the number of particles to like 10 or 15 000 something like that change the render type to be object and pick the bubble object that we just made the outgo sphere make sure you uncheck show emitter otherwise you'll end up with this weird white circle at the bottom of the final render if we play the animation now you can see that these bubbles rise up but then they fall back down again to fix this we're just going to go into the failed weight options on the particle system shut off the gravity and then we can play with the scale and the scale random values to get loads of realistic looking bubbles now if we play the animation though you can see we've got another problem the bubble shoots straight out the top of the bigger select the form mesh make it a collision object in the physics panel then if you select this option for kill particles what will happen is the bubbles will die as soon as they hit the form layer as they should in real life just give the bubbles a basic glass material with an ior of 1.33 no roughness change the color so it's similar to the liquid but maybe a little bit lighter that's your bubbles done now we need to make some condensation droplets around the outside the glass select the glass and select all the face loops going around the sides of the glass by holding down shift and alt while you left click leave the very top and the very bottom of the selection out just get the faces that are around the side duplicate the faces into their own object just like we did with the liquid in the form before call this object droplet emitter create a sphere move it up well above the scene in wireframe mode go into side view and delete half the mesh then use proportional editing to grab the top of the mesh turn it into a tigger drop shape duplicate this figure two or three more times and make some slightly deformed versions give these objects a clear glass shader with an ior of 1.33 select all the droplets and use ctrl and g to add them all into a new collection call this collection droplets or something like that select the droplet emitter give it a new particle system and change the type to be hair under render change the type to collection and then select that collection that we just made with the droplets in it if your particles are facing the wrong way like this you're going to want to flip them 180 degrees on the z axis if your particles are miles away from the emitter mesh like this make sure the origin of each droplet is aligned to the back of the mesh so your droplets are probably going to look a little bit too uniform at first to change that just go over to the emit type and go to face and then change the distribution from jitted to random to get a bit more randomness into these particles we can also add a new texture set that to clouds and set the type to hard if you go into the particle system settings we can go to textures and choose that texture that we just made then go back to the texture panel and a new option will appear called influences if we turn up the value for distribution blender will scatter the particles around based on that cloud texture that we just made so if you give this another render it looks pretty good now but those droplets are a little bit too circular for me for the table just add a plane scale it down and turn on vertex snapping to align probably with the bottom of the glass give it the material of your choice i just went for this wood plank texture set i downloaded from texture haven here's a pro tip if you've got node wrangler enabled you can control shift and click on the principle shader and that will allow you to import all your texture maps at once and add on and even set up all the nodes for you so i added a few loop cuts to the wood and i used control and b to bevel them then i extruded those faces down a little bit to add the gaps in between the wood i selected all the top edges and i gave them a little bit of a bevel of their own just to smooth off the harsh edges perfect 90 degree edges are extremely rare in real life and they're a dead giveaway that's something cg i added a hue saturation node and a mixed node just to alter the colours slightly of the texture now we're in the final stretch let's add some wet spillage marks under the table create a new image texture in the table material called app wetness or something like that connected to the material output so you can see what you're doing if you use a white plain brush just draw on the marks wherever you want them to appear in the texture paint settings plug the wetness image into the clear chord factor of the principle shader combine that with a roughness map using a mix argument too you'll probably have to flip the color of the wetness map before you put it into the mix rgb just use an invert node for that finally make another mix rgb node but set this one to overlay and plug the wetness map into the factor plug your diffuse color into the top slot and make the bottom slot a darker shade of brown what that'll do is it'll make the painted areas of your wood look wet and they'll also be darker like they would be on a wet wood surface once you've got those nodes set up you can even go back into the textured paint and you can paint on all the wet areas in real time and see exactly what they're going to look like just remember to save out your wetness map as the image texture before you close blender otherwise that's going to disappear when you next to open up the file okay so let's render out this bad boy under the colour management tab change the look to medium high contrast and bump up the sample count to as high as the day i went for a thousand i think for this was enough you're probably going to need quite a few samples though if you're using 2.83 you can enable adaptive samples to cut down on the render times add some sort of empty object to the same and line it up with the top of the glass this is going to be our focal point now if we select the camera we can go into the camera settings and enable depth of field and then we can target the depth of failed onto the empty if you lower the f-stop number you'll get more blur into the background i went for 5.5 f-stop on this you're gonna have to probably play around with the sentence until you get something that looks good depending on the scale and various other factors and finally since we're rendering out loads of different glass shaders we're going to want to crank up the number of light bounces for glossy transmission and transparency make sure you enable the option for denoising data in the render pass tab and then we can go straight in the compositor and we can set up our denoiser ahead of time just add a denoising node and then connect up the noisy image normal and albedo passes into the corresponding inputs on the node connect the node to the output the raw render probably looks something like this it's pretty good but we can add some extra touches to this in the compositor we can increase the realism of this scene just by adding in some chromatic aberration with the lens distortion node chromatic aberrations those little weird bands of color you sometimes see on photographs when they're out of focus slightly if you bump up the dispersion value it will make your sane look more realistic but be very very sparing with this even a value of 0.1 was far too much i think it went for a value of 0.02 in the end which was subtle but it does just add that little bit of extra realism and makes it look like a real camera finally just add in a rgb curve node into the scene and tweak the contrast until you get something you're happy with then connect up all your nodes as they should be connected and you should have yourself a pretty fine looking render of a glass of bigger if you're a member of my patreon you can get access to the same files for this tutorial as usual if you're not a member of my patreon well you should have a look go and sign up sorry hit like and subscribe if you found the video helpful thank you very much for watching i'll see you for the next one guys

Channel: DECODED

Views: 368,203

Rating: 4.9494891 out of 5

Keywords: tutorial, DECODED, Blender, blender 3d, software, computing, classes, blender for beginners, blender online, free 3d modeling software, open source software, 3d software, vfx, vfx artist, beer in Blender, photo-realism in Blender, Hyper-realism in Blender, Lager in Blender, Create a pint in Blender, cold drinks in Blender, Blender 2.9

Id: PCuVNF5RQHg

Length: 16min 54sec (1014 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 27 2020