Tutorial: Anime style clouds and starry nightsky in blender

hi i'm kristoff and today we're going to be making an anime inspired night sky with stars and clouds i made this scene inspired by makoto shinkai is your name and today we're going to be focusing on the stars and clouds if you're curious about the scene you can download it together with the source files of this tutorial following the link below now without further ado let's start making a night sky let's start a new blend file let's delete the camera delete the cube and delete the light we're gonna add a uv sphere let's size it up let's set it to shade smooth gonna turn on the x-ray and we're gonna go into edit mode and then we're gonna select the second half of the sphere and just delete all of the vertices and this is going to be the skydome that we are going to use for our clouds i'm going to set it to viewport shading and let's dive into our shader editor let's add a new shader we're going to add an emission shader and let's add two voronoi textures one of them we're going to set to 3 and the other one to 15 and we're gonna blend them together using a mix rgb node let's plug the distance into both of the nodes and plug it into the emission let's also add a mapping and texture coordinate node and plug it into both of the voronoi textures and then we're also going to add a color ramp after the mix and that way we can get a more stylized version for our clouds and by mixing we can get these little cloud shapes we're going to turn this into a transparent shader to do this we're just going to add a transparent bsdf a mix shader i'm going to plug the emission and transparent into the mix shader and plug our color ramp into the alpha and we're going to go to our material properties and set blend mode to alpha blend okay this is going to be the base for our clouds uh what we can do is also scale the z um what this is going to do is going to stretch the clouds and as you can see the upper clouds aren't stretched as much as the ones below which is a nice effect and something i want i can exaggerate it even more by stretching it a bit and then also what we can do is we can take all of the vertices the lower vertices of our dome and we can stretch them a bit also to get a different effect if we want i like this bell curve yeah that seems about right and i'm gonna set my scale to 1.5 for now okay now we're going to add a bit more detail to our shader and we're going to add two must grave textures i'm going to set the scale to 60 detail to 10 and dimensions to 1. and the next one i'm going to set scale to 90 detail to 10 and dimension to 1. and we're going to mix them in using a mix rgb node gonna set the mix to a soft light on each of them and then we're gonna set it to zero and we're just gonna mix it in to taste if you think the clouds are too big you can go to the color ramp at the end and adjust it so you can get some smaller clouds if you want to and that's a nice base setup and i think that's a bit too realistic and i'm gonna adjust it by adding some color ramps so let's add color ramps in between the voronoi textures and the mix rgb node and we're going to do the same for the must grave textures and then we can start adjusting them i like to adjust them like this and for the musk grave i'm gonna turn these around i think again i can get some sharper details by moving this uh black more towards the middle and this is a nice effect i can get some soft edges combined with some more harder edges and there seems to be some detail so that's what i like uh you can play around with the different settings or different sizes if you want to to get different sort of effects and you can add additional layers of detail but this is where i'm going to leave it for now now that we've got this set up we're going to add some shadow and to do this we are going to copy everything up to our color ramp our verona to our color ramp and we're just going to copy paste it great drag it down here below and we're going to plug this into our emission shader and we're also going to add a new uh mapping node i'm just going to delete the texture coordinate node and we're going to take our former mapping node we're going to plug it into this mapping node make sure it's connected to both of the voronoi textures once we've got this set up i'm going to go to the c scale of our second mapping node and i'm going to set it to 1.03 and this is going to provide with a nice highlight now i can go into our last color ramp and i can set up the colors for the scene so i'm going to use tree colors let's set it to a dark blue a middle blue that's based on the dark blue just a tiny bit lighter and less desaturated and then i'm going to pick also a more light blue and desaturated and this is going to be the shading of our clouds i'm gonna set it like this for now and i like this effect yeah this seems about right let's add a background color let's go into our shader editor and go to world and let's go to our background node we can separate the shading of our background from the lighting by adding a mix shader another background shader and we're gonna go insert a light pad and then this camera array and insert it into our make shader and that way um we have two controls one controls the light um we're not using that right now well let me let me demonstrate that so this controls the global lighting and then this controls the background color and it's separated from each other so that's quite useful and now we're going to start working on the background color and start working on the stars as well so let's first set up a gradient so we're going to add a gradient texture plug it into our background let's see it's tilted so we're going to add a texture coordinate and a mapping coordinate let's rotate the gradient by 90 degree and we're also going to lower it by setting the x to 0.1 and now we can add a color ramp in between the gradient and the background and this gives us some control over our background let's add some nice colors i'm going to pick a lighter blue for the horizon and then we're gonna select a darkish blue for the rest of this guy to get more of a soft gradient i can set it to something like b spline and this will make it transition even more into each other we can add an even darker blue if you want to okay this will do nicely for now i usually tweak the colors at the end but this seems about right now what we can do is add some fog to our clouds to make it blend in with the edge of our horizon let's go back into object mode and here after our color ramp we're going to add a gradient a mix rgb node let's plug in the gradient into the alpha of the mix rgb and let's set it to the same color as our fog let's add a mapping and texture coordinate node let's also rotate it 90 degrees and let's also add a color ramp our fog is up so let's invert this yep that's what we want this is sort of the effect i'm going for and this is going to add some missed to the clouds that seem to be further away let's start working on our stars so we're going to go back into our world the first thing we're going to do is add in a milky way and to do this i'm going to add a mix rgb we're going to add a gradient texture let's add a color ramp let's have a look yep there it is and let's set up our call ramp like this we can make it smaller and we can make it softer by making it into a b spline now let's add a texture and mapping coordinate and we're going to add a separate x y z and a combine x y z plug it and we are going to manipulate the x factor so uh let's plug the x into a matte node and back into the x value and we're going to add two musgrave textures for the first one i'm going to set scale to 2 and detail to 60. for the second one i'm going to set scale to 10 and detail to 0.2 and we are going to mix these in together into the x vector and this is going to create this jacket milky way that we can use you can get a more jagged effect by playing around with the settings or mixing in a different value but i'm gonna leave it like this for now i like this and i'm going to set the white value to a turquoise and i'm going to mix it in using a color dodge and this is going to give a nice and soft highlighted effect that's all swirly next up i want to have the same uh fog effect going on as with the clouds and i can just go to our cloud and i'm just gonna select the gradient color ramp and mapping that i used for my uh clouds and let's just paste it into our world and let's mix it in i'm gonna add a mix rgb node i'm gonna drag this into the alpha and let's select the same color as we used for our clouds and then we need to adjust this as well i can also lower the fog a bit make it softer by setting this to a b spline stuff like that and so this will create some fog okay let's add some stars and so in between our color dodge and our color ramp i'm going to set up a voronoi texture let's add it in using a mix rgb and we're going to set scale to 100 and then we're going to add a color ramp and set the color ramp like this and this gives this star effect which is nice but what i also want to do is give some color to the stars so we're going to take the color value and mix it in with our stars so to do this we're going to add a mix rgb note we're gonna set it to color and we're gonna take the color information from our voronoi plug it in and let's set it to a value of one and this gives us uh all kinds of colors a whole rainbow of colors but i want it set to some uh colors that i want usually stars vary somewhere between more of an orange color and a light blue color so i'm going to pick something more red and bluish you can add different colors in this color ramp if you want you could add yellow but i'm just going to add some white so i have some blue stars i have some just white stars and some red stars okay and now i want some extra stars that are located near the milky way and to do this we are going to copy paste our voronoi let's set this one to 200 let's mix it in using a mix rgb node oh yeah before i forget let's set this mix note to screen and this one too let's plug the voronoi in also add a call ramp all right and this is going to create a lot of small stars but we only want them to be located near this milky way and so we're going to keep it simple and we're just going to use this color ramp of our milky way as an alpha and plug it into this screen so now we have uh more stars towards the milky way and we can adjust the amount by playing around with the call ramp and maybe you want even more stars so let's select our voronoi set it to 150 and then we're going to add it in again using a screen let's add another color ramp plug it into our screen and again we're going to use this color ramp as an alpha all right let's have a look at our scene and that is it that looks pretty cool let's have a look at this shinkai scene i used the grass from my eevee grass tutorial in this one and i also added this moon which is basically a very basic emission shader set with strength to 20 and then i use a blue to get it to glow i also used some curves to get this comet's trail and then i use the procedural shader to make it appear like it's moving i'm not going to go into too much detail about the comet but if you're interested you can always go have a look at the notes following the link in the description below and that concludes our tutorial i hope you have some use for these clouds or a night sky in one of your scenes let me know if you liked it in the comment section below please like and subscribe and see you next time

Channel: Kristof Dedene

Views: 76,591

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Id: m4aOZm6auxQ

Length: 26min 11sec (1571 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 04 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Nomad_art]

I found this video really helpful. Currently trying to learn the dark art of shaders. This showed me some new techniques and ways to work within them. Thank you