Realistic Renders? EASY - Blender Lengthy

[Music] so when it comes to blender tutorials what you're about to watch is return of the king the final installment of the trilogy in part one the fellowship of the ring i showed you how to make the corridor in 3d so we have this 3d environment that our camera moves through then in the two towers which some people think is the best movie which is nonsense i showed you how to make the slinky animation which is also going down the corridor so now in return of the king which is the one who won the oscar so hopefully i can live up to that promise in this part we are going to combine everything together so slinky plus the corridor all together we're going to need to talk about volumetrics some camera shake to make it look more realistic compositing materials basically this is just the episode that makes me not need to record a fourth one it's going to be a mismatch of a whole bunch of nonsense so hopefully you're ready because it's about to get insane part three return of the king i think we should probably begin so we left off with the animation now also in our corridor so this is what our blend file looks like currently and really the goal of this is to get it from here which kind of has all the assets to something we can hit render and be proud of something we can put on our fridge so i think the first issue with this is the camera animation so the camera animation right now is doing what i want it to do um in fact we let's select our viewer camera which again is different from the projector camera go back and watch the previous tutorials if you have no idea what i'm talking about basically this just has a keyframe here for the beginning and one for the end and it's going to be changing a whole bunch of stuff mainly location and rotation so it's just following along but the thing is this is kind of too perfect and we want this to look more photorealistic in other words we want it to look like there's a cameraman with shaky hands who doesn't know what he's doing in other words it needs to have a bit of wobble to do this there's a great ian cubert tutorial about this but to do this we're going to be using the same method go to the graph editor which shows us all our keyframes all our graphs for this animation a name we we are interested in let's open this up uh we are interested in the x euler rotation in other words we are looking at the x component of the rotation which is this one it's the one that wobbles up and down unlike the others that go side to side and like left to right right so we're interested in this x component because that's the one that wobbles the most during animation and when we have this selected you can see right now there's not much going on but if we hit n apply a modifier so right now we are changing the animation itself using procedural animation we are going to add a noise modifier well let's zoom out uh you can see now we have we have our camera shake there you go we've added our realism we've got a our coked out dude just recording this thing we want to take this noise and just make it less intense right so first of all it's happening too frequently there's too much like it's happening too fast so you're going to take this first scale slider and just smooth it out a lot so now it's uh it's a bit better maybe we should do even more so now we have kind of like a less frequent shake but of course the magnitude the strength of the shake is still crazy and that's what this second strength slider is for so i'm gonna make it instead of one i'm gonna make it point one a tenth of the strength and you can see visually this just makes it less intense and now we have something that looks a tiny bit better um what we can do is let's slow this down even more to something like seven just so it's very minimal and let's see what that looks like so already kind of looks a bit more realistic um generally the last thing i tend to change with this noise modifier this procedural camera shake is add a bit of depth which you can think of as kind of like the roughness of this curve so if you add that it kind of looks like a mountain ridge instead of smooth you don't want to make this too much because then it's going to have too many fine motions so what i recommend is just having a depth of one which just adds a bit of a little bit of extra inconsistency that we wouldn't have gone before so i think we are pretty happy with this in fact let me slow it down just a bit more and let me make it just a bit stronger so there's a bit more variation but less frequently and there you go we have a bit of a camera noise a bit of a camera shake you can also do this with your other rotation components so y and z i'm just going to add a tiny bit to the z component and you can forget about why it's not too important it's actually going to look a bit weird if you add too much and i like that we kind of have a dutch angle thing going on and i don't want to ruin that so z euler rotation same thing you're going to add noise which is going to be at a different part of the graph it's going to be blue for this one we scale it up to something like 9 and then we make it way way less intense something like point one and even that's a bit much we could divide that by two and add a depth of one okay so now we have a bit of a camera shake you can always make this more or less intense depending on you know what kind of shot you have for me i'm going to make it a bit less intense and i think at this point we can say that our camera shake is good so what does this look like it looks like our camera with a bit of wobble that you can barely see unless you're looking at it from the perspective of the camera so at this point do we have realistic-ish camera motion and the next step is to make our slinky not look like a piece of white plastic unless that's what you're going for we want ours to be metallic reflecting the environment which is the nice thing about creating our three-dimensional environment it can actually be in the reflection so let's do that next really is a miss mishmash how do you say that word really is a collection of random topics just thrown together into the uh finale to do this what i'm going to do is i'm going to go to the shading workspace this is where we make our materials of course and let's have i'm sorry for the camera going up and down it just moves whenever my mouse is in the corner we are going to select if i can find it i'm going to select my slinky mesh and create a new material and for this one let's actually visualize all our notes for this one we are just going to make it a full metallic you don't want to do anything between zero and one zero means not metallic one means metallic stuff in between doesn't really make sense we're going to make it metallic and then a bit less rough in other words a bit shinier so something like 0.3.4 this slinky right now is a bit too bright for my liking so i'm just going to dip that down a little and the main trick if you're using evie again if you're using cycles it's going to be photorealistic at least more so the trick with ev to get this to look more realistic is actually not in the material you're going to go to the render properties and i want you to enable screen space reflections which you can see does a big difference so this is the before and after so this is going to make it actually reflect what is in screen space what can be seen on screen it's a bit of a hack but that's why ev runs so fast because it's made out of hacks like this and this gives us much more realistic reflections and also we can make this a bit darker depending on the depth of darkness that makes no sense that you want for your slinky um some other quick things while we are in the render tab let me just go back to a frame where it's contacting the ground a bit more uh it would probably make sense to enable ambient occlusion this is just going to add a bit of contact shadow which is actually going to make it look like our slinky is interacting with the ground a little bit more you can also enable bloom although right now there's no light source bright enough for that to matter so i think unless you want to add some clear coat or anything weird like that if you just want a nice metallic slinky we have now done that so now we are on to the next part which is volumetrics or atmospherics in other words if you look at this shot right now it kind of is starting to look realistic but it's kind of suffering from that jimmy neutron there's not enough stuff going on in the shot and also yeah just it also just doesn't look very real so let's add some atmospherics to do this we're going to do the easy method we are just going to add in a cube and anything inside this cube is going to have fog so just scale this up so it consumes our entire scene and then for the shading workspace and let's actually view the outside of this cube we are going to give the cube itself a material but we don't want a surface material we want a volumetric material since this is going to be a volume it's going to be inside the cube giving it a fog and mist and all that connect this to the volume and you can see already this gives it a nice smoke and before we continue if you're using ev volumetrics just make those volumes a bit more refined and you can see if we go to our camera view it's kind of like too cloudy to see anything so you can just bring down the density in other words how strong the smoke is or the volume so right now it's still very high but you can still kind of see what's going on so this is kind of like having too much atmospherics in our shot you can keep bringing this down until it's just kind of like a mist occupying our space so maybe even divide this by two so this is a with it and this is without so without with you can see really does add something and if we were to give this kind of like a yellowish kind of grungy dusty color it would look more like a old corridor which you know this thing already does look like that so this kind of really depends on your shot what you want uh but i'm not going to stop there this is return of the king i'm just going to show you how to make volumes in a cube and that's it uh no we're going to make it more procedural and in some sense more realistic so do we that we do not want a uniform fog in fact we want some areas to be dustier and uh mistier than others so how do we do that well instead of having a single density value that controls the density everywhere what we can do is we can in fact use noise a noise texture yes not only for surface but for volumes this is a three-dimensional quantity that we can visualize in our density and right now it doesn't really look like it's doing anything but that's just because we need to add in a bit of a color ramp and me we need to have some areas have way way less fog so we can see the variation so take your bottom handle the black where there is zero fog and just bring that upwards and you can see now we have kind of like a cloudy thing uh which means that in some areas there's going to be fog and in some areas there won't now of course we don't want there to be kind of like all or nothing kind of response uh where we have very little fog we just want it to be subtle so it doesn't need to be black just kind of like a very dark gray or something like that so nowhere is it actually zero but in some areas it is more intense and you could do the same thing with the um you know the top slider you don't need to have like a area with a very very intense amount of fog that's up to you so you could bring that down but what i like to do is once we have our color ramp i'm going to control this using another node outside of it namely a math node so right now we just have a bunch of quantities that we could uh we could visualize like this probably better to visualize it as a volume although although it's not working out too well and that regard what we're going to do basically is we're going to multiply this in other words we're going to scale the strength of this by something like 0.5 so make it half as strong so you can see we can make it more dense less dense whatever this is our controller for that so i'm just going to crank this down until it looks about right i think this is good it might for some people's taste this is probably way too foggy but for me i'm like i do want that old looking feel so uh we have added atmospherics that kind of give our scene depth which is kind of the whole point of this so what is the next thing on the docket uh well we have a realistic camera but maybe this is just a me thing i like adding a lot of shallow depth of field i like stuff being out of focus and i like also doing focus pulling so like looking at your finger that's in focus then at the background you're saying i want this in focus then the other thing and that's called focus pulling changing the object that's in focus namely for this shot what i want is i want the background to be in focus so the slunky's blurred out and then after like a second it you know focuses on the slanky and nothing else okay so how do we do something like that that's a good question well first of all we we want to let me try again first of all if we select our viewer camera which is the one that we're viewing out of we can enable depth of field if we were to make this very extreme you can see that right now some stuff's out of focus and you can kind of choose you know right now our slinky's in focus and the background's out of focus or you could do the reverse but we do not want to animate this focus distance we don't want to choose our focal plane manually instead i'm going to use a object focus on object i'm going to choose an object that it's always going to focus on how are we going to do this well first of all let's hide our cube for now it's actually pretty distracting what i'm going to do is i'm going to add in an empty i'm going to add in an empty and position it exactly in the middle of our slinky so this is going to be the empty that represents the general motion of our slinky so i keyframe location then on frame 120 uh being the last keyframe we're just going to move this down to the center again and add another keyframe so right now if we were to view this it should be falling not perfectly like you can see sometimes the empty's ahead and sometimes it's behind and that's because our slinky goes with a linear kind of motion in other words the interpolation is linear it doesn't speed up or slow down whereas our empty does have bezier interpolation so you just hit t and instead of bezier you're going to hit linear and now our empty is going to be kind of dead center of this motion okay so you're thinking fine now we have an object to focus on so you're like okay mt005 we can select our camera let's view it and then you're like okay we make this the object that we focus on and that will do exactly what you think so right now we have our shallow depth of field but our slinky is always in focus um that's fine but it's not necessarily what i said i wanted i wanted to do some focus pulling where first the background's in focus and then this so in fact in fact our empty is not enough we're going to need to add in a second empty that is parented to this one to get what we want and you'll understand in a second so first let's duplicate shift d and let's remove the keyframe so now we have one empty that's just here and then the other one that follows with it you can see it's following with it what i'm going to do is i'm going to have this empty and i'm going to shift click i'm going to have it parented to the other so that's ctrl p and then enter so now you can see whoops i think i messed that up let's try that one more time what we're going to do is we are going to have this empty parent it to this one so shift click control p object boom and this one doesn't have any keyframes so you can see now they are moving together one's following the other but it's not necessarily one on top of the other which is kind of the point because we can have our empty start off over here something like that so it's focused on the background we'll put a keyframe there and then after let's say 30 frames it's going to go right on top of this so just kind of have it be on top and then they are going to move together so in other words we have kind of a additional degree of freedom where first we can have our empty move around and then it can move with the motion of the slinky and this is going to be our focus object so let's actually give it a name we can call this thing focus so right now if we were to enable this as the new focus objects of the viewer camera we are going to change this to focus right there you're going to see that in the beginning our slinky is going to be out of focus why because the empty's back here and then after 30 frames this is going to go into focus and now we can just kind of play around with the aspects the properties of our depth of field so i'm going to make this more intense 0.15 so some stuff's really out of focus and then the slinky is really in focus and the background is out of focus and this is just the you know kind of like filming an ant kind of a depth of field kind of situation maybe you don't want it to have to have it be as extreme as i'm doing it here but you know screw what you want this is what i'm doing so here we go we have our realistic camera motion at least we have some camera shake is what i mean we have our depth of field we have our materials we have our atmospherics which by the way now that i'm looking at this kind of completed um sorry i got distracted and now that i'm looking at this kind of completed i do want to make those a bit stronger actually it's because i'm not viewing them so alt h to do that there we go now it's looking nice my brain just thought oh i guess we need stronger atmospherics no they were just disabled and you can see how with depth of field everything plays together very nicely so now the final step really is if you're happy with this i think in my you know initial project i added some dust particles we're going to skip that now the question is are you happy with this for me the answer is yes and the rest of this is just going to be some basic compositing rendering stuff so let's pick a frame that we want to use as our reference so probably not this because the slunky's out of focus let's pick one like i don't know i guess a frame like this is pretty good to give us a vibe of what our shot's going to look like right now we can hit f12 and it's going to render using ev so it's going to be you know three to four seconds there you go so right now this is what it looks like and the rest of our work is going to be some very basic compositing tricks so go to the compositing workspace with nodes enabled again the reason we can see this image is because i hit render i hit render before if i didn't this would have been empty so make sure you do a render preview ctrl shift click to have a viewer note so we can actually see what we're doing and i'm just going to link these together so now the name of the game is to add some nodes in between here so from our initial render to what is being outputted we add some nodes to give this some visual interest the first thing i like to do is i like to add in a gamma node and yes we could control the gamma from here and it will you know change what it looks like interactively but i do like putting this as a node so that we don't have to mess with this from the render settings but it does raise the point that we could use this slider to kind of pick what we want so i like kind of a darker look which seems around point eight point nine so in other words we can take our game slider make it like 0.9 or is it inverted here that's the interesting thing i guess it is inverted so you want to make it instead of 0.8.9 it'd be 1.1 1.2 so you can see now it's nice and dark so i'm going to go with 1.15 for this so that's something i actually never looked into the gamma being different here than here okay so that's the first thing so this is before and after just gives us a bit of depth next what i like to do is i like to add in an rgb curves and this is just kind of like a fancy way to add contrast with more control so in the darker color so this is like the shadows and this is the highlights and right now it's linear meaning everything is one to one i'm going to take our shadows and make them a bit darker in other words make them lower and i'm going to take our highlights in other words the area to the right and make it a bit higher so it's like contrast but we're specifically saying make the shadows darker and the highlights higher so this is the before and after you can notice that the parts of the wood that are in shadow are now much darker and the highlight the bright area on the metal is now much brighter so that's the before and after and then finally and this is kind of like a controversial step i like to add in a bit of lens dispersion that's kind of like the chromatic aberration the color splitting that happens on the edge so if we were to make this value very big so you can see what it does you can see it adds quite a bit of color variation and you can have it fit so that it doesn't have the corners of the frame have nothing in there so that's what dispersion does so this is zero i'm i i like to keep this pretty low at something like point one but you can see at the very corners and especially with this fog which makes everything a bit kind of muted and a bit wider really does some nice dispersion stuff so this is before and after and long story short if we were to bypass all these nodes this is our original render right it's just kind of this over exposed thing and then this is our final render it kind of looks more atmospheric in a lot of ways okay so are we happy with this i think so so you just have to picture what we have right now uh but with all the compositing steps and i'd be interested to see uh what this frame looks like where we actually have our slinky out of focus and by the way while this is rendering if you use the newer blender builds eevee now has motion blur and that's what i rendered mine with because i didn't want to use cycles i wanted it to be fast and you can actually utilize ev's motion blur to have our slinky have motion blur i'm not going to do it for this tutorial but just know that it exists um so yeah that actually looks pretty interesting here as well and about that whole motion blur thing if you're using 2.83 so i think the motion blur things 2.9 you're gonna notice that yes there is still motion blur but this is actually only camera motion blur it's not object motion blur so since our camera is moving it is in fact useful uh but we're not going to get motion blur just from the compression of our slinky but this is this is something worth that um enabling there's no reason not to um and yeah that that's essentially our shot you can always like go back and change literally the shape uh of the slinky or or you can make these slinky brighter or darker or you can make it a rainbow slinky which is a tutorial over at the patreon but long story short you basically do what we did and instead of hitting render you hit render animation to export this whole thing of course you want to choose you know what kind of file type you want i use ffmpeg to output a video instead of a image sequence but that's neither here or there and not relevant to return of the king so hopefully you enjoyed this tutorial series where i took you from part one to part two and then in fact to part three uh hopefully you learned a lot there's a lot of tricks embedded in here and i dropped my headphones again just like the end of the last tutorial i think unless i edited that out hopefully you enjoyed if you did the best way to support this channel again i only put this advertisement at the end because well anyways the best way to support this channel is via patreon uh patreon is a way for you to get you know not only a way to support this channel and keep it going but you're gonna get exclusive tutorials discord access behind the scenes access project files like for example this completed blend or maybe the original one i made is going to be up there but to all 420-ish you know it is 420 of you that are active patreons patrons uh thank you uh for those of you watching now who want to become patrons thank you as well i do appreciate it you could do it from month to month to month or just disable it one month whatever you choose um but completely optional although you should know that the patrons are what lets these tutorials be free and not paid of course the exclusive tutorials are paid in the sense that they're only for patrons but the reason i can make stuff like this free is because other people are kind of carrying the load in some sense i wouldn't be able to do this full time without them but long story short i hope you enjoyed this tutorial series that is free patreon does exist it would be nice if that is something you're interested in for you to actually follow through on that but that is your choice i put this at the end of the tutorial so it wouldn't interfere with your viewing experience i have been cg matter default cube now signing off after two half hour tutorials in one like 20 minute tutorial i hope you learned something and thank you for watching that's it that's the show

Channel: Default Cube

Views: 42,447

Keywords: blender, tutorial, lengthy, easy, animation, realistic, 3d, cg, cgi, vfx, slinky, modifiers, procedural, render, photorealistic, volumetric, fog, volume, smoke, camera shake, compositing

Id: -OkGFQphlDc

Length: 22min 56sec (1376 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 05 2020