Blender 3D: Cinematic Animation & Geometry Nodes – Dune Part 2/3

1. Course Overview: Hi. Welcome to Part two of the Dune Master class series. This is a step by step tutorial where re recreate movie shots using Blender. If you haven't watched the previous one, don't worry. This also works as its own individual course. That being said, I P one, we created our opening shot with the highlander arriving to the planet racus in space, and now we'll continue our sequence as our ship enters the atmosphere. So if you wish to have the whole sequence completed, I do recommend checking Part one first. The previous course was more evenly focused around modeling text animation and post. In part two, we'll spend a good portion of our time building a geometry note system to distribute scale, scatter, and animate our ships. Additionally, it doesn't mean we won't be doing other things as well, though. Once the scene is completed and blender, we'll jump into after effects and continue the rest of our work in post. So with all that out of the way, let's begin. 2. Onboarding: Ally at the beginning of each course, I like to have an onboarding video where I talk about the tools, plug ins, and shortcuts that I tend to use throughout my projects. This on boarding video was actually made for part one, but since it covers most of the tools that we'll use here as well, I decided to keep it instead of redoing another video. So with that in mind, in this course, we won't be using the first three shortcuts marked on screen, as well as the bottom two plug ins. So if you wish, you can pretty much skip those sections and only check out the lock camera shortcut, as well as how to install the node wrangler and copy attributes add ons. If you're already familiar with all of those, then you can entirely skip this video, and I'll see you in our scene breakdown in the next chapter. This is going to be a very quick boarding video in which I'll explain some of the basic shortcuts and plug ins that you'll see me use across the tutorial as we go along. And so if you're familiar with all of this here, you don't necessarily need to watch this video, but I would suggest maybe going to the very end and just watching the last two if you've never used these two plug ins before. And for the rest of you, you can just sit back, relax, and enjoy, as I explain some of these basic things on the right side. Starting first with our shortcuts. And one of the first shortcuts that I want to talk about is the show wire frame. Now, by default in blender, you can't really see your wireframe unless you go into the edit of your objects, so by pressing tab, and now we can see it. And so if you're in object mode, the only way to see your wireframe is by going here, right click and then going into the wireframe of the geometry. And this is a little bit tedious for me personally. I'm a bit lazy. And so what I've done is I've signed the wireframe to be to my semicolon key. So whenever I press it, I can see my wire frame like this. Can just do this yourself by going here into the wireframe, right click right over here on this check mark and then saying either add to Quick favorites, which is a quick queue or to change shortcut, in my case, because I have it already assigned. In your case, it will be assigned shortcut, I believe. And that's pretty much it for the short wireframe. The other one is face orientation. And sometimes when you're modeling, you might have issues with your faces and with your shading, and this can be often caused by your normals not being in the right direction. And so in order to check your normals, you usually have to go under face orientation like here. And again, another thing that's a bit tedious. So what I did was I assigned the face orientation to be inside my quick favorites. So whenever I press Q, I can see here, face orientation and go like that. The next one we have is faces by sides. And this is another one that is only available to see once you're in the edit mode, and mainly it has to do because it's used for modeling. It allows us to see if we have any triangles, gons and such. Essentially, the way faces by sides works is if we go under Select and say, select all by trait, click here, Faces by sides. It's going to highlight all of the objects that have four vertices. If we say five, it's going to highlight all of them that have five. And then if we say three, it's going to highlight the ones that have three. And so when we're modeling, for instance, the highliner here, we'll always want to work in quads having four vertices, and this is going to be used just to double check if we've done everything correctly in that regard. So usually, you'd have to go here under select select by trait, faces by sides. And what I've done is, I again assigned it to a quick favorite shortcut because this is something that I tend to use quite a lot. So when I press Q, I have it right here under faces by sides. Then we have the lock camera. And this one should be pretty straightforward. So something I didn't like about Blender when I moved from cinema for D to it is that when I press go into my camera view using Tilda, I can easily leave the screen like that. And even though Blender now has added this button right here to toggle lock so that we don't leave it. I still find it a bit tedious, and I prefer my method of where I just go here, and I assigned the shortcut of the lock camera to view as my quick here. And so whenever I go Q lock camera to view, it's just quicker to have it always here at my disposal versus having to go either to lock or to go to this button right over there. And those are pretty much all of the shortcuts that you will see me use, I believe, and now we can just jump into the plug ins. The first one being pretty much your all favorite that I'm almost certain that all of you are familiar with. But if you're not, that is the node rengular add on. And to install all the plug ins, by the way, I would say these two come natively within Blender, and these two we will have to install manually, and I'll show you all the resources and the links where to get them. So for the node wanguller, all you need to do is just go under edit preferences, and the node wrangler is a native blender add on. So if you go in here, tap in node wrangler under add ons in the preferences, you'll be able to find it. So what the node wrangler does, if we go here under shading, I have here this material set up. And let's say I want to take all of these objects and simply assign them to create my material. Usually I have to add them one by one like this, which again, can be a bit of a tedious process. And then as well, you need to connect all of them properly, so Mod needs to go color. You need to also take your roughness, connected here in the roughness, and et cetera. So again, a bit of a tedious process. But with the node regular add on, we can just press on the principal BSDF, press Control Shift T, and then select all of these materials, and it's going to immediately connect them properly. So we're saving a lot of time and doing unnecessary busy work here. Additionally, the node regular add on comes with a bunch of other features. For instance, if you press control shift and left click, you can preview the textures individually, and this is going to be very useful when we start billing our textures for the highliner. And then also, for instance, another cool feature is, let's say, we have a noise sure right here, and then we have another noise sectione right below it. And now we need to mix these two together. By default, you would usually have to go mix tip in here, mixed color, adding this node right here and then connecting them individually. But with the node regular add on, if you press control shift, reli with your mouse like this, move it downwards. It's going to immediately create a mixed color node. So, very time saving tool. I highly recommend it. If you don't, I don't think you'll be able to do this tutorial without it, at least not exactly, and it's going to be much bigger of a nuisance, so I recommend adding this one to your plug ins. All right. Then we have the copy attributes add on. And the copy attributes is again a blender, a native plug in that you just go here under edit references. Type in here copy attributes. There it is. And what this one allows us is to essentially, for instance, I have here a cube that has also a subdivision and array modifier in it. And let's say I want to now transfer these two modifiers to this cube that has none. Usually, you'd have to go here manually, type in all those modifiers, assign the values, make sure that they have the same numbers as here. And so, again, a tedious process. But with the copy attributes one, we can just press here, whole shift, press on the other one on the left, press control C and say copy modifiers, for instance. Additionally, it comes off with a bunch of other stuff in the menu. Let's say we have, for instance, copy location, so it's going to copy this location to this one here of the original that we selected. So very useful tool. You've seen me use this quite a lot, not just in this tutorial, but in general. I use it almost every day. Then we have two more plug ins that aren't coming natively with lender. The first one being the UV squares add on, and I'll actually need to maybe undo this one more time. So let's just press tab. As here you see me having ss, so I need to UV unwrap this model. I'll press A, U Unwrap. And so now if I go under my UV editing, inside of here, you'll see that this is how my UV It's pretty good. But let's say I wanted to make these lines be completely straight and not have them bend over in these corners like this. This is where the UV square add on comes in. If I go here under my UV squares, and let's see Snap two X and Y axis, it's going to straighten out all of the corners nicely. And this is not a native blender add on, but it is free, and the link to download it is going to come also in the resources file. So when you go, you'll find it right here in the GitHub repository, you can go here under code, download it as a zip. And then once you download it, all you need to do is go into your preferences, click on install, find it and install it. And that's pretty much it. And the last plug in on our list is quite literally the final plug in that you'll see me use inside of Blender as we go in the tutorial at the very end. And this will allow us to essentially send tracking data from Blender into after effects. I'm not going to be doing that right now, but essentially, for instance, if I press play, you'll see me that this empty is following this cube as it moves along. And so what the plug in does, it's going to allow us to send this data from this empty into after effects that we can then later on use for compositing. This plug in also comes with in the resources file, so you'll be able to just go edit references and install it directly from the resources file that I'll be sharing with you as well. You'll see me using this at the very end. In general, you simply need to select the MT that you need, go into file, export, and AdobF Fax JSX. And that's pretty much it. We've covered all of the shortcuts. We've covered all of the plugins, and I'll show you how to install them, so you're now more than ready to start with tutorial. I'll see you in the first lesson. 3. Scene breakdown: There. Welcome to part two of the Dune Masterclass series in Blender. In the previous video, we recreated the shot where we saw the highlander arriving to the planet Irakus in space. And now as the shot continues, we see it entering the atmosphere. Now, if you haven't really dumped P one, you don't necessarily need to because the only resource that is going to be reused from Part one is going to be the highlander itself, and that's going to be attached inside the resource folder. Now, that being said, I highly recommend also going to part one and recreating these shots that you see here where the highlander is arriving, just because you can then have obviously the entire sequence versus just one scene of it per se. All right. So in this video, there's not really much that you're going to need to do. This is more of my conversation towards you and breaking down the shot step by step of everything that's going to have to be done, so you can pretty much lean back. One thing that I would recommend is going on YouTube and typening in arrival to Iraqis from Doom P one. And so there's going to be a bunch of videos that all are going to have pretty much the same three shot sequence that we're recreating here. You might also come across my video if it says Dot and Pechch on the YouTube account. That's my video. Be sure to, you know, if you want, like it, subscribe, highly appreciate it. But in the meantime, let's break down our shot. So, again, as mentioned, we see the highlander over here, and then we see these small ships. And right off the bat, one of the key, important things, key most memorable things about doing cinematography is the sense of scale. Now, here we have a sense of scale and distance, like There's also, like these small ships all the way here. You can barely see them, and then there's this one right around here where I'm coloring with my mouse. We just changed the color, so it's a bit more noticeable. This one here, and then these ones are all the way here. So there's a huge sense of distance, and then there's a huge sense of scale because the highlander, even though it's so far away, it's still enormous. And these ships are carrying people inside and so we can immediately perceive, like, Okay, so people are, like, you know, this size, then the ships must be even huge, which means that the highlander must be even bigger than all of that combined. So then again, very important, there's going to be a lot of very intricate camera movement in here, whereas in the previous course, it was pretty well balanced in terms of animation, cinematography, texturing, modeling, geometry noes. This one is going to be slightly disproportionate, and part of it is going to be also because of the very intricate camera movement that we're going to have to nail. And so that's why also I highly recommend going to YouTube and following how this sequence looks like because I can only show you this much from images, and I don't want to get a copyright strike or anything. So as we go upwards, then we see that the camera has slowly moved and bend towards the right. And that also means we're now also starting to get a little bit of a lens artifact here like lens flare as well. And additionally, as you move in closer to the ships, we can see that we're having a little bit of chromatic aberration, where here it's red, here, it's blue. And so as we continue to move up, the scene continues. Now it's even more panning towards the right, and we see way more ships even closer to us, but we're also getting this lens flare from the sun. Part of the lens flare is going to be done within after effects in post production. Actually, you don't even need after effects. You could potentially even do it in Premiere Pro or any other video editor, but we are going to be using after effects for discourse as we did in the previous one. And so we have this lens flare that's almost like blinding us. We see have some artifacts here with the different coloration happening. And we see this ship really up close to the camera that's almost cannot even pretty much fit the camera frame as it's close to it. And then it keeps moving towards right and now this ship is slowly starting to cover the sun, cover the lens flare that was happening. And then as we move forward, the camera still keeps moving towards that ship, and it comes closer to closer, and the ship has completely blocked out the sun. And so in short, that is the sequence that we're going to be building here. And so Now that you've seen it hopefully on YouTube. Now that I've broken it down for you. I want you to take a quick minute in between now pause the video, you know, take a quick minute. And just think about how would you approach building this scene, right? Because we have the highlander. We already have this resource, okay? We know how to distribute things along the curve, because we've done that in the previous video. So we've distributed things along the curve. We distributed those ships when we were creating this here over here. We were distributing them. So we know how to do that. To a degree. So what are then the challenges that we're going to have to overcome in this video that we haven't done really before? Think about that. Additionally, how are you going to approach modeling these ships? Right? Then this is a bit of a trick question because in the next video, we're going to be actually building these ships first. But just think about it for a second. How would you approach modeling them, right? You know, think. And let me see if I pretty much covered everything, and I believe that is grammatic I think we're pretty much there, because besides what I just mentioned, there really isn't much else that we're going to have to do. But those little things are going to take a lot of our time. And for instance, with the highlander, we're just going to have to change a little bit of the roughness here because we can see that there's a little of a glossy effect happening as it as it touches its material, the light. And then lastly, which is maybe the most important part of the shot. And that's also going to depend heavily on the resources that you have available within your device is, well, as you notice, obviously, the shot takes place inside of a foggy environment, which means also that we're going to have to be using volume metrics. Now, you don't necessarily need to use it. You can still recreate the shot, and I'll show you a way also using Z depth. But it's still not going to give you exactly the same effect because we're going to need to use volume to get like this look where the light is interacting and scattering. And so we're going to have to control the enotrop. That's the effect, I believe, a volume metrics, that controls essentially the way that the light scatters inside of a volume. And so that is going to be even if we optimize our scene, which we'll try to do our very best to optimize it as much as possible, it's still going to take a lot of resources. So depending on what kind of machine you have, it's going to vary how fast the scene is going to either lack or so, luckily, like I said, There isn't too much texturing that's going to be involved. There isn't even too much modeling. And so this course is going to be both geometry nodes and animation and cinematography focused. So I think that pretty much covers everything I wanted to talk about. So we're 7 minutes in, which is under ten. That's great. And welcome to p21 more time. Thank you for continuing watching my videos, and I'll see you in the next one where we are going to start modeling the ships. Looking forward to it. Cheers, guys. 4. Modeling the ships: Have a completely new blender file open, per usual, on the left side, you have all my keystrokes, on the right side, you have the PUF, which you can access also through the resources folder where all of this is going to be attached. And lastly, I'm using the version 4.1. Now we can go also below that. I believe 4.0. But just in case, I wouldn't go below 4.03 0.6 or 3.9, I believe. So yeah, go between 4.0 or above. In any case, in the previous video, I did ask you to kind of stop and think for a second or how would you approach modeling these shifts, right? And so if you kind of came up with a solution, and your solution was, by the way, you don't need to kind of like do this, what I'm going to do now, you can just relax, enjoy, sit back. And if your solution was essentially to, you know, take this cube, goal let's say in front of you start extruding it, and you know trying to match, like, let's say this shape here that you have, where this then goes additionally extrude it. You scale it in the xx, you extrude it one more time, you scale it one more time, you extrude it one more time. Then you have something, you know, like this. And you cut it, and you kind of already have a pretty decent base for it, I would say, you wouldn't be wrong, right? Like, you wouldn't be completely wrong in going this direction. But if we look really closely at this image as I reference, we don't really have any depth to it, right? Like, we have height. So if I go into my front of you, we have the height, we have the height here as well. We have the width, the width is here as well. But there is no sense of depth. Even if I Zoom in really, really close to the one super close to the camera, you can still only see the silhouette. So, in reality, We can pretty much get away with just using a simple plane like this without any need for depth. And so that's exactly how we're going to be approaching modeling this. Again, you weren't wrong, and if you thought about going with the cube, you're not wrong. If you thought about going with the plane, good job. But just from a resource optimization standpoint, there is no need to use a three dimensional object for the model of the ships in this case. I wouldn't be surprised if they actually didn't use three dimensional objects. They maybe use planes. Like, there's no way of telling exactly here. We don't have any depth information from these ships, I would say. So the way we're going to do is, I'm just going to press A to delete everything and then x like this, so I have a completely fresh blender file with no stuff in it added at all whatsoever. And I'm going to go into my front view. And this is kind of important because we're going to be adding a reference image now, and so the image is going to be added based on our point of view. So if we're in the front view, the image is going to be also in the front view. So if I click he reference, I'm just going to find where I added it. It should be called Scene two reference. You'll find it inside your resources folder again. And so I'm just going to load it, and there's my reference image. And so what I want to do now is simply just make this reference image unable to select it, so I don't want it to move around, so that way I can hover my mouse click around like this. And I'm just going to go shift a ad mesh and go at a plane. This plane, I do want it to be aligned towards my view, so I'm just going to press here aligned view. And now with this plane, what I can do is simply take the biggest ones that I have here and just try to match kind of their shape. So roughly the height is around here. And then there with, I would say, this is pretty good enough. And additionally, we can actually just add a loop cut right here, cut this part out completely, and use a simple mirror modifier to kind of cut down on our time, and there we go. So make sure you also have clipping you're enabled. So that way, this part is clipped, and whatever we do here is mirrored on the opposite side as well. Alright, F here, what we really need to do, the only thing we need to do is start adding cuts, a lot of cuts. So everywhere where you see like this little indentation, you're just going to be pressing control R and adding cuts, and then trying now to match these cuts like this. So we have one roughly here that goes there. And again, you can actually, do this in your own way. You don't have to match this exact look if you don't want to. I do want to be as close to the original as possible. So that way I'm doing it like this. So adding a cut right around here, adding one right here, adding another one right here. And the reason why we're adding two cuts all everywhere instead of one is because we also have like these little angles that we need to meet. So that's why we have also two of them. So this one here, this one there. That's very good. Let's see, over here. There's a very subtle indentation. So what we're creating now, if we zoom in closely are these little indentations that you can see, kind of like almost like steps. They do look very steppy, I would say. That's the right word to describe it. And so we have one here, one over here. And then again, we need to add another one because we do want to achieve that step kind of look. There we go. And then here, we're going to need to drop one right below ops. Not that, in here. It's a dropping one, going inside, dropping another one. Let's see how this looks like. There is a little bit of like an extra one here. Let's see. Let's just GG to slide it up a little bit. It's really hard to tell just by looking at this. So I'm just going to zoom out for a second, try to see if I can tell any difference. I guess it's really hard, so I'm just going to improvise this part on my own. Push this one maybe slightly more, push this one slightly in. Kind of like that. Again, this part now, it's a mixture of using a reference, but also slightly improvising as well. So it's combination of both worlds, to be honest. So this, and then one more. Going inside. And then from here, we can just push it like that, push this one here. And this is our first reference. Now, obviously, it doesn't match exactly with this one, because if we look at it, I believe this one is also slightly rotated, so it's not going to be perfect, perfect. What we could do potentially, if you want is, you know, make this click hole again and then just do slight rotation to try to align it a little better. That's going to, maybe help you out and lock it in again. But I would say that is a bit of an overkill. You know, we can do it only for the first one. I wouldn't recommend doing it for all of them. But it's going to be your call. I'm just going to be showing you the tools now. So once we have this, once we have the first one created like that, what you can go is simply call this plain base. And so for the base one, it's going to be essentially used to create all of the other ones, but in the meantime, we can also press shift D to duplicate it. And let's call this one plain one. So for the one, I'm going to hide the base, and then for this one, I'm going to go press apply the mirror modifier because we still don't have our word cut out for ourselves. Specifically around here, want to press control B while clicking on this horizontal, sorry, vertical edge, and just spreading it out like that, and then adding one word cut over here on top, and then one extra cut right here at the bottom. And we can click on this face right here by pressing three and then going into our face and pressing x and completely removing the face so that way, both sides, we get this nice little indentation, and so we can do some extra corrections now where we take this part. We spread it out a little bit here. We take this part, we spread it out like this, take these two edges, but now we don't have the mirror modifier, so we need to be a little bit more careful. Now obviously, not everything is, even though if it's made in the factory, it's never going to be perfectly, perfectly proportional on both sides. And so it's okay to have leave some room for some imperfections. Where one side looks slightly different than the other. But just be careful not to make it too much stand out because that way, it's going to be a little bit more distracting. So additionally, what we have this last part is, if we look at, there's a little bit of extentation right here. Again, very small detail. It's probably going to be only visible to the ones that are really up close versus the ones that are back. You know, just make sure that we do have it on some, or well, depending might actually have it on all of them. So you can do it by simply pressing control B on the cut right there in the middle. And then three, pressing here on this edge, sorry, pressing two, edge select, and then E, z, adding a little one, right around here. Let's take a look at how this looks like. There is a very subtle, I would call it scaling inwards. So S X And there's like a subtle scale inward and maybe making it slightly lower, just a little bit like that. Is there anything else on the bottom? Can we tell? I think the bottom is perfectly clean, so there we have it. Let's just hide it to take a look how it looks like. And this is our first ship that we've created. Now, we still have our work again cut out for us because we have a couple of other ships that we want to create. And you can go two ways about it. Either you can use this plan one that you created, or you can use the plane base, which is going to help you making it mirror modified. I think in my case, I'm going to use plan one simply and then just start duplicating, pick the ones that are closest to you, so because they retain as much detail as possible. So the one I'm going to go with now is this one right here. Again, I can click this plan base. Sorry, not plain base. I can click again on this MT and just rotate it slightly to try to make this one reference as close to accurate and straight as possible. And now clicking on the plane, I'm going to rename it to number two, plane two. And just scale it down and try to get it to kind of look close to this one as possible. So, for instance, this is going to be slightly lower. Let's see these two sides. Like I said, I don't want to mess too much around with each side individually, so I'm just going to try to scale it horizontally a little bit. And this is already looking, you know, overall pretty good with selecting these two edges, moving them here. These two moving them slightly more. These two moving them slightly more in D x axis. Then taking these two, moving them a little bit more inward. Like that, I would say everything else is looking roughly okay. I might actually take this and make it slightly more wider. So we want to have some slight variations between the ships, but not too many of them, obviously. So then we have one, two ships so far. Let's add a third one. For the third one. I'm going to go with the one right below here. And again, same process as before, where I'm going to rename it. Now to ship number three. And then I'm going to click on this image, make it clickable by going here. On it, rotate it just a little bit to try to make it, you know, as straight as possible. Click on this disable selection one more time. Scale my selection of plane three to try to match it with the ship. And, you know, as it fit, this one already looks pretty good. I wouldn't say that this one needs too much work where we could do is just just lower this slightly down, make it a bit more compact. Very small subtle variations, and then we can take this one here. This looks a little bit elongated and almost like it has it looks perfectly straight, but it feels a little bit more indented on the left side. And as a matter of fact, if we look at it, the one right next to it feels almost identical as this one. So I wouldn't be surprised that they accidentally use the same one right here for Ds two, like an exact duplicate. It would probably say in time. So let's press S now, scale, so I just press shift d to duplicate. Let's call it plain number four. So shifty, duplicate it, scale it now, and then just try to match it. Let's see. I'm going to make it slightly thinner. And then let's see if we can maybe rotate this slightly more to try to get it. This look. I think this is perfectly good. Unclick this so that it's disabled selection. Then just try to make this part right here by scaling. Moving it around GG. And I would say, overall, this is pretty darn good. I'm going to move this slightly more up, and then this one slightly more up like this. Then maybe this one a little bit here, this one a little bit here. Just some very, very subtle variations in them. But again, we are going to be doing now a final checkup just to see and make sure that nothing nothing stands out, so to speak. We don't want anything standing out too much from us. So this part is slightly different. You can see how here it's indented inwards, but over here, it doesn't seem like it's indented inwards. So there are some slight variations. Okay say four is good enough. So I'm going to hide my references. And so what we want to do next is simply kind of like align them all one next to each other. And so the way we can do this is, let's just take the first one and put it roughly around here, so it's kind of almost touching the x axis. And then select this one Cold shift. Click on this one, click on this one, then click on the plane number one, press Control C, and this is using your copy attributes plug in. And then now we can press simply copy locations. So they're all going to be in the same location. So we can press on the number two. Move the number two, roughly here, press S, try to scale it, try to give it roughly the same size as the one right next to it. So something like this, then plane three. Do the same scale it. Let's see, trying to get it roughly the same size doesn't have to be exact, roughly the same size. And then there's plane four. I think that was the last one that we created, the Elongator one. It does seem slightly slimmer than the rest of them, which is good. Slight variations are good. And now what we can do next is simply just make sure that roughly they look similar. Okay. Just hide your overlay so that we can take one final look at them to see if anything kind of stands out to us differently. Would say the plan one is the most accurate or the closest one because that one had the most details. That was this one right here. It's closest to the one that's also going to be in front of us, and then the rest of them are slight variants and so on. All right. We are now coming close to it. We just got to make sure that all of them actually are going to have our scale applied. But before we even apply the scale itself, one last thing to do, I would say, is, well, let's talk about the height. So this is going to be a rough estimate, and right now they are, let's see, Z axis doesn't even say our Z axis. So I guess it is being translated to the Y one, let me see. Our Y is being translated as the z. So we need to apply the rotation as well later on. So I would say right now they're 0.8 meters, so they're not even 1 meter big. So if we were to add a full cube, the full cube would be bigger, because we're dealing with scales and distances and such, I would probably want them to be roughly 20 meters in height. So what I'm going to do is simply go here under, let's see my each one, each item individually, like this. And I want to make sure that this y is going to be around 20. I'm just going to press S, select all of them, and then just try to scale it all the way to 20 roughly here. And now I'm just going to move them right here. So if I go, I check it, 20, roughly 20, almost 20, that's pretty good. So select all of them one more time, and now apply the scale. We can apply also the rotation. And now we have our z being the height. So if you want to have them all B 20, go ahead, you can just go and try to do some subtle changes like this. And you know, but I'm going to keep them as they are right now. So, now we've created ships, and then in the next video, we're going to start working on our distribution. I'll see you guys there. Cheers. 5. Distribute along curve: Literally how we had to create a geometry node setup in the previous course to distribute these small ships coming out of the highlander. In this video, and in a couple of next ones. We'll be creating a geometry node setup, but it's going to be slightly more advanced than the one in the previous video, previous course that is going to be used to distribute these ships again alongside a curve. Now, to start off, obviously, we first need to go and add our curve. So I'm just going to go shift A and search here. I already have a typed in Bezier, but you can just go type in Bezier, and it's going to add a curve. We can scale that curve S 100 like this. Then just go r to rotate z to rotate alongside the z axis, and then press control to rotate it only inside of increments of five like this until we get to negative 90 right here. Then I'm going to go into my top view, and then G, move it so I can line it kind of like this. And while we're also added, we can press tab to go into our edit mode of the curve, right click and subdivide, to get one more middle point right here so that we can add a little bit more height to it, so it doesn't all stay flat like this. So we can just go G Z, add a little bit more height. Maybe try to match this one so that it lines a little bit better. There's a nicer fall off. I guess, something like this. It doesn't have to be perfect right now. This is just for like testing purposes. We're gonna be doing some tweaking, picking way later on once we have everything set up. So for now, we just need to get the functionality of it. That's our primary focus, almost like a proof of concept, so to speak. Alright, so we have this, and now we just need to create our sip geometry note setup that you should be familiar with at this point. So we're just going to take this window, drag it a little bit more upwards, and then go here under our geometry note editor. Press. The curve here, press new so that we have our geometry no input and output right here. And in between, what we can start off first, and I don't think we ever use this one is a resample curve. And a resample curve is simply just going to help us add or remove detail from this curve. So if I press, let's say number let's see number four. You can see how basically it almost like has less points to it. And then if I press, let's say 40, it is much smoother and nicer. So it's a neat one to have here. It's going to be useful. Alright, so we have the re semple curve. And while we're at it, we also see that our Bezier curve currently has a scale of 100, so we should probably press Control A, apply the scale. Otherwise, everything is just going to be humongous. And from here, we can now change this curve into points. So I'm just going to go here type curve two points like this. And from these points, now we just need to tell blender to change these points into these planes. And while we're at this side here of the window, I'm just going to select all of these planes, shift left clicking on them, and then press M. To add them inside of a collection, I'm just going to call this one planes. Collection like this. And now, what we need to do is click on this curve or these points at this point right now, points points. And essentially just change this now points into an instance. So instance on points. And now that we have that, we just need to take this collection, drag it in here. And by the way, because we can see our curve right now, and it would be actually very nice that we could, we can in between also add a join geometry right here. Take this, plug it all the way here, and now we are still able to see our curve because it's taking everything from here. But it's also taking this here that we have. So that's pretty useful. And from here now, we can just take this collection info, plug it into the instance, and now we have them all here lined up, but we only want to tell you to pick one instance, not all four of them, so then separate the children, reset them. And here we have them all aligned nicely. But they're all pointing, I guess, in that direction, we want them to be looking forward. So to do that, what we need to do actually here, we have the rotation of the curve, not applies, so we can just press Control A while having the curve selected and say, apply the rotation, and that's going to rotate all of them. I'm noticing that I still also have my x ray mode turned on here. So I'm just going to turn that off by pressing Alt and Z. And there we go. We can now hide our planes collection. We don't really need to see it. And here we have our planes distributed. So what now would make sense also to do is to simply add a camera to try to get somewhat similar look to what we have in here. So what I'm going to do next is go shift A, search typing camera. I'm going to add one camera right here. I'm gonna press S also to scale, so I can see it slightly better. I'm going to change the rotation of the camera, everything to zero, and then just our x to kind of like rotate it so get like 90 degrees like this. The camera settings, I'm going to use a focal length off 85 millimeter. And then I'm just going to zoom out roughly around here. What I can do is go here on my top right window and just click and drag it on one side so that this left side is going to be to enter my camera view, so I can just see better. I'm going to press control middle clips with my mouse. I'm going to like zoom in a little bit, so I can get a better look of what's going on here. I can press t to hide this window, and I can just hide all of the overlays. And what else I can do here is, let's just see. I'm just going to move the camera slightly more backwards. And so here we kind of have our, let's call it a basic setup. Now, the issue with this setup, is though, is, hypothetically speaking, because our camera is going to be moving off, is going to be panning towards the right. If you remember, like, this is our starting position scene. And then as we move, we move slowly more towards the right, revealing more of the ships happening, and et cetera. And so issue that we're going to have now here is if I press G x, and let's say move this a little bit more, and then R z and rotate it is we can start noticing that there is no depth to these ships. Essentially, if I look closely, like, if I move even more, and then I rotate even more, we can see that these ships are planes, and we don't really want that. So we need to now add a functionality to our geometry node setup that's going to impact the rotation. And tell these ships to always be looking at the camera. So that way, we always have kind of like this feel that they do have a certain depth to them, or we can see the back side of them, because otherwise, like here, we can see that there's nothing behind them. So in order to do that, we need to play around with this rotation here, and it all essentially starts by adding a node called Aline Euler to vector. So what this node is going to allow us. I think here we can just press this to y or x. Let's just keep it like this for now. But what this node is going to allow us next is essentially, we need to now tell it which vector to use to rotate to wars. And so if I go here and I type in object info, and I just say location like this, and I tell it use the location of this camera, so I can just go click here on this eye dropper tool and then go here onto the camera. And I tell it use the location of the camera, and rotate towards it. And I think here now, I need to press Y. Let me see if it press z. Yeah, it's y here. So bivo rotate onto the y axis like this. And so now, if I move this camera, you'll notice that these ships are also moving and following my camera direction as it moves, regardless. But the issue though is, because my camera is also going to be going up, you'll see that these ships are now moving up as well. So we also now need to tell it, not just to follow the camera. Only to follow it inside of the z axis and not have it be impacted by the x and the y axis. And so to do this, we're going to be using essentially a vector math node, I believe, going like this and just typing in vector math. Over here, we can add multiply. And so now we are basically telling it, take this location and then multiply it. Right now we have it by zero, so this one is x, y, and z. So if I tell it to multiply it by one, a number multiplied by one is the same number. And so if I say number multiplied by one here is also the same number, but a number multiplied by zero is always going to be zero. So that means that is going to be stationary. So now, if I go up, you see that it stays like that. How I move the camera, it rotates towards the camera. If I move the camera forward, they rotate towards the camera. Now, obviously, we're not going to have huge movements, but we do have them all now pointing and looking towards the camera. And so this is going to be we can call this one our rotation lock, basically. This is going to be used for locking our rotation and keeping it as is. Alright. In the next video, we're going to be dealing with more details and additions to our geometry known setup to help us achieve this look in terms of distribution and scaling. So I'll see you guys there. Cheers. 6. Creating distance: Now that we have the rotation of our ships locked to the movement of the camera, we need to start thinking about the illusion of scale and distance in relation to our scene. And the reason why I say the word illusion is because from a practical standpoint, if you were to create this idea of scale, which is one of the key parts of Dune, as I talked about a couple of times, and distance that we have here in the shot where these ships that are way way further away are obviously appearing much smaller versus the ships that are much closer to the camera. They are appearing much larger. And then we have the humongous highlander, which, even though it's so far away from the camera, is still huge. So you would have to use, you know, real life or not real life, but, you know, as close to real life as possible scales to kind of achieve this. So you would need to, you know, take this curve, push it all the way back here like that, and then try to obviously here you having the clipping issues, you need to go under your view. You need to change the end of your clip to be much larger. You can already see, you know, this is a huge curve already that we have and you know, controlling it is just going to be a pain. And obviously, then you have the clipping of the camera here that you need to solve, so you need to go into your camera over here and change the clipping here extra zero. And you know, it's just what it is. It's very, very impractical, so I'm just going to control Z a couple of steps to my starting position. And so that's why I say the word illusion because we can kind of fake it by essentially making things that are further away from the camera also change in scale to make them smaller, which is kind of going to amplify the idea of distance progressively. So the way to do this is we can just push this a little bit here. And for the scale part here, what we can start off with is a simple position. So we take the position and we plug that into another vector math, and under here, the setup, we're just going to use distance for the function. And now we plug this distance into the scale. And what this is going to do, obviously, it's super huge, is, but my understanding of this is that it is taking the distance from the origin point because we don't have anything plugged in here. And the further things the way are from the origin point, the larger they are right now versus the things that are closer to the origin point, which are going to be much smaller. And you can't really tell this right now because everything is super huge. But if I take a Mathenoe to kind of help me change the scale, and I divide it. Let's see here by a certain value, for instance, this much. We can see now that things that are closer to our origin point right here in the middle are smaller, and the things that are further away are much larger. So if I were to take this point and scale up, you'll see it's going to get slightly different in scale. All right. And so what we could do now is because if you have a similar setup as me right now where your three D cursor is right here and your curve is around here, you have your origin point right here. You could simply go right click Set origin origin to three cursor. And now we have, obviously the first one that's appearing being the smallest one versus the last one that's appearing the largest one, which is technically the opposite of what we're trying to achieve. So you might be wondering, a, well, why not simply at a origin point right here at this point, at the end, that way, the one that's that's here is going to be bigger, one that's here is going to be the smallest. And you wouldn't be wrong. Technically, you know, that would work. The problem is just from a practical standpoint, because the end part or these two points are going to be the ones that we're going to manipulate the most to kind of help us achieve the look that we have or positioning look that we have in here. The front point is going to be the one that we're going to be changing the lease. So that way, as you can see, it's still going to be closer to the origin point. So just from a practicality standpoint, we're doing it this way. And now, additionally, as you're wondering, okay, but we still have the issue of the first one being small versus the last one being large. You can simply take this plug it at the bottom, so now we're kind of reverse dividing it. And while, you can't really see it now because everything is super small. But if I increase the division here, you can now see that. The ones that are closest to the origin point are super large, ones that are further away, are super small. So we need to now play around with this map range of quite literally, we need to add a node to map our range a little bit differently. So we're just going to go shift a map range. Right here. And so if I now play with these values, you can see, let's just start off by changing this. Actually, let's keep this to zero, and the minimum, there we go. And then this one here perfect. And then this one here maybe smaller. And so if we just play with these values, like this. We can now get the result that we're trying to achieve. Additionally, we can also add one more extra function right here after the map range. We can take this divide, take it right here and just change it to multiply, which is going to be kind of like a value that's going to control our global scale, essentially, so our final size of all of these things. So everything before that controls essentially the scaling of the furthest to the closest of the point that we're looking from, so how much they scale progressively versus one here that controls the global scale thing vinyl. And so that's kind of like our basic setup. Additionally, kind of like a bonus point, because I said here, right now, we are using our origin point. For the sense for the idea of for the point of reference of the distance. What you could do is simply take the object info, for instance, right here. Location. And let's not use the camera. Let's add an empty. Let's go shift A and add Let's type in here. Empty. Let's see cube like this. Let's scale this cube a little bit bigger. And let's call it scale field. Like this, push it slightly back. And now inside our geometry, knows, plug the object info into the vector bottom here and tell it to use this object. And so now if we were to move this cube, you can see we kind of have a field that's telling it to control the height. So I don't think we're going to need now. This is just kind of like an extra show for you to kind of like see what can potentially be done. So what I'm going to do is just click X here for now. I'm going to keep this cube in case I think of a useful use case to use it maybe in the future videos now to come. But for now, this is pretty good where we are, and I'll see you guys in the next video, where we're going to start adding a little bit of extra randomness to the positioning of all of our ships. All right. See you guys there. 7. Adding random distribution: Right now, all of our ships are way too perfectly aligned along this curve. And as we can see here, some of them are up, some of them are down, some of them are left, some of them are right. So in this video, we will be building an additional component to our geometry node setup that's going to allow us to add a little bit of randomness of the distribution along this curve. But additionally, we don't want the ones that are way up front to be fully influenced by it. We only want these ones that are further behind to be more influenced by that random distribution system. And so we can do here is actually take the similar setup that we have right here with our position, object, and distance, no, and we can just press shift D to duplicate them because the same as before in our previous video, where we wanted only the shifts that are further away from the camera to be affected by the scale versus the ones that are really close like this one to stay the same. We want a similar situation here so that this one roughly stays in the same position, but the ones further away get distributed just as we have it here in our pure reference going on. And so, additionally, we can't really plug this in anywhere because we don't have any positioning input. So we need to tell Blender, we need to add a node here that's going to allow us to give give a information to that node, and that node is going to influence the position of each of these individual instances that we have scattered across our And so that node is called translate instances right here. And we need to plug it in to the above one that comes right after the instance on points and not the below one that is connected to the joint geometry. So this one here. And while we're at it, we could actually organize this a little bit better just by pushing this up, and then taking this geometry input as well pushing this up as well. That we know, here we have our input, here we have our output, and then everything below it is what we've built so far. So let me just move it kind of like this. Let's just make a little bit more space by selecting all of these things so we have everything slightly separated. So over here, we have our lock rotation that I have selected right now. Above it. We also have kind of like our starting setup with curve to points and resample, so this controls the amount of ships that are created along our curve. And then we also have our scaling system that we've created, and now we're going to have our distribution system right over here. And so for this distribution system, we want to first start off by normalizing the values that they're going to be coming out of this distance. And so we can add a simple map range. Like this, and we can plug this value into the value. And because I said we want to add some randomness to our system early on. We can also add a shift a random value. But because we're dealing with a coordinate vector system, x y and z, we don't want it to be 0-1, we want this random value to be both in the x axis, y and z. So we're going to instead of float using a vector random value right here. And we can simply go and plug this for now into both of them. And then add it into the translation. And not much is going to happen yet. If you were to go and start playing with these numbers, you can notice some slight differences happening, as you can see right now, but not much because they're all moving kind of uniformly, even though they're connected to a random value. So what we need to now add is something that's going to help us multiply this effect much harder, for instance, here in the minimum one, so that the minimum threshold controls it. And so that way, we can go and add Math node, or we can actually, you know, what, take this multiply from before and then shift the plug it in here. Let's just move it slightly up. And if I control this multiply, you can see that it adds way more randomness, but almost to everything. And so as I said, we don't want randomness to be added to everything. We still want this front ship to be kind of, like, similar to the original position where it was. And so we can achieve that by simply playing with these values right here. Let's try to get close to it as possible. There we go, just putting them in here to zero. And it is going to keep the ship tightened up right here while changing all of the back ones. And I think if we change the max here, we can still get some effects for them individually. But yeah, I would say roughly around here is something I want it to be. So let's just change a little bit more of the values. Try to see what we can get. Okay, we want to push this one to one maybe, and then something close to here. Right. I think this one is going to be good for me for now. Might actually reduce it so that they're not so far off. But something like this looks pretty good. Additionally, we can also increase the amount of our ships that we have so that let's try maybe 30. Now it's starting to look more interesting, but we have also ships that are very close to each other, and we don't really want that. So what we can add here in between the curve to points and our instance points is a merge by distance. So by telling it to say, Hey, everything that's, let's say 10 meters close to each other, merge those two so that we don't have anything conflicting. And so now we're starting to get a little bit more of an interesting look and feel closer to what we are having right here. But, for instance, right now, the ones that are further away here, they're not as small as we want them to be, so we can go into our scale here, and I believe if we just mess around maybe with the divide a little bit and we change our range there we go, we're starting to get much smaller ships all the way there in the back. Like I said, we're going to be playing with these values later on. Right now, we're just building our preliminary setup. That's going to allow us. So now we have created a random distribution system that we have over here. That allows us to control where they are kind of position. And then in the next video, we're also going to be tailoring it so that now we can control all of them together because this one is kind of adding them to our instances individually. And then we want to also have one global system that's going to tell us, hey, move all of these guys left, move all of these guys right, and et cetera. And so stay tuned for that in the next video. I'll see you there, guys. Cheers. 8. Adding movement components: Video should be pretty short and straightforward because the last and only thing now that's remaining to our setup is we need to add a component that's going to allow us we later on to animate the ships and have them move in a certain direction. So we want to be able to control all of the axis of X Y and Z and how the ships move. But we also don't want them to move all at the same time equally, because that will look very weird and digitally created. We want them kind of to have each its own individual slight offset. And so what we can do is actually add a new node, so shift A and type in set position. Just turn on my screen cast keys right here. There we go. And with this deposition, we also get these offset coordinates for X Y and Z. And we can just add another node that's going to give us the same thing called combined X Y Z. And Let's just move everything here, so we have a little bit more to play around with it. So now we have combined X Y Z, so we have the ability to move all of them at once. And what we can do now additionally is multiply or combine these values with a random value, and that should give us an offset for all of them in a way. So what we can take here is, let's see, we can take this random value that we have right over here. We can shift D, put it right maybe here. And we don't actually need to use a vector one, we can use a simple float. So value between either zero and one. And now we need to add a vector math. We can set this vector math to multiply. We can let's plug this one at the bottom, plug this one at the top, like this. And so now if I were to move these, we can see already that some of them have a slight offset as they move up and down, for instance. We can also maybe change with the seed values so that can get a slightly different offset for different ships. Additionally, obviously, can move them left and right if you want. This is now completely on you. But for me, I'm probably much going to be focusing on the z axis because it's going to be going up and down. And obviously, now, you were to put here one, then they should all pretty much move synchronously the same more or less. And then if we increase this to ten, then and then here we put a zero. And then let's see, we put here zero, And then we put another zero over here, and we start moving them now. You'll see that they move way faster and slightly different because the range of a value that we're multiplying it with is between much bigger numbers, so we can even go, if we were to go to 100 here, and then you can see now they're all moving incredibly fast, and we don't really want them to move like that crazy fast, so we're just going to stick to maybe a value of like five and give them this nice little offset. We can maybe change it from zero to be something closer, maybe like this. So it's still somewhat similar, but still different, so we can maybe push it even more up. And so, yeah, this is going to give us a lot of control. And at the same time, our movement is going to be very, very small, so we can even make this number super super small. Let's see 0.001, and that's add one more zero, just to see how this is going to look like. And so now they're barely barely moving, as you can see, even though we're drastically increasing the numbers. So, yeah, play around with this. This is going to give us a lot of control later on. At this point, we pretty much have our entire geometry note setup. It is still not, you know, super complicated, but it is relatively bigger from what we've done so far. In the next video, we're going to be organizing it a little bit and doing the same thing as we did in the previous course, we're adding it here into our modifier setup so that we can actually control all of these parameters from this window rather than having to go inside of here. So I'll catch you guys there in the next video. Cheers. 9. Organizing geometry nodes: Similar to how we did it in part one of this class. In this video, we're going to be organizing our geometry node setup so that we can have it appear here inside of our modifier tab so that once we get into the animation phase, we don't really need to look into this window here and then, add keyframes onto these individual nodes, but from a practicicity standpoint, they're all going to be available to us here on this right window, and we'll be able to close it completely like that. So, I'm actually going to just push this pretty much all the way here so that you guys can have a better overview of what's going on on my screen. Now, that might also affect the screen as keys here, but I think the keys are going to be fairly straightforward and I'm going to be trying to be vocal about what I'm pressing and doing all the time. So the first part that I think we should do is just kind of like add frames around all of these node groups so that we can be a little bit more organized. So what we can start off, and you do need to have the node wrangler enabled for this, but, I mean, I believe, pretty much most of you already have it enabled by now at this point. So we're going to do select everything here like that. I'm going to press Shift P that's going to create this little frame. And I'm going to go here under node. I want to rename this frame to something that matches it theme. So this is going to be almost like our instance settings, I would call it. Then we have another one, which is our rotation lock, so I'm going to press shift here, and then I'm going to go type in rotation lock. Then go for this one. This should be our scale. So shift and B. And let's see move this one a little bit here. Let's call this one scale by distance because it basically scales it depending on how distant it is from the object that we tell it to be here. Next, we have this is our distribution. So let's call it distribution Distribute distribute. Tribute by distance. This is our distribute by distance. This is a scale by distance. And then lastly, this part here is kind of like our global movement. So **** P. And let's call this one global movement. There we go. So now we have all these frames, and we can just move them one underneath each other like this, just for organizations sake, because now we're going to be basically taking this group input and then plugging it into all of these nodes so that we can have it appear here on the right side. And so we can start off actually with the scale by distance You know what? We can start off with our instance settings. So I'm just going to go here under group. Here, I'm going to click Plus and add a new panel. And this panel is going to be called instance Settings, like this. And we can simply start of by telling it, Okay, choose which instance you want. That's going to be the first one, let's call it instance right here. Then say, choose how many of them you want. That's going to be our seconds. This is going to be our instant amount. Let's call it amount. And then detail of the curve. Let's just go and say, let's go like this, so curve resample curve. And then we also want to tell it, merge merge in by what distance, let's call this one merge by distance. So now we have choose the amount of how many we want to appear, the detail of the curve, and the merge by distance. I would actually maybe say, let's move the resample curve above the amount. So insert before socket, so that way we say, Okay, this is how detail a curve by one, and this is how many on that detail curve I want. I just think for personal preference standpoint, I prefer it that way. But I think we have everything now for our instance settings. We can even just move this slightly a bit more here, and we can now add them all inside here. So we want the merger by distance to be the last, we're just going to go from the bottom to the top. Click on the merger by distance, drag it when it says, insert into panel. There we go. Drag then this one, resample, and instance. Let's just call it Choose instance. There we go. All right. We can now take this. G, move it down. We're going to skip the rotation lock for now. We don't need it here. And instead of the rotation lock, we're just going to start now on our scale by distance. For this, let's add, let's collapse this one here or on collapse, and then panel. And let's call this one scale by distance. And here we want to add the divide, and then the two men two max, and we also want to add the value. We don't need to add these two because essentially, if we just change this, let's see. Yeah, kind of gets weird. So I think we can pretty much just get away with using two max and two men values. All right. So let's just go ahead and start off with our Claps this. There we go. Divide Tumen two Max and value. There we go. And now we can just go one by one, value. Insert into panel, two max, insert into panel, two mint, insert panel. And let's go here, insert into panel. All right. And we can actually rename this one so that we know what it is, let's call it divide value. And then this one here is wait to sick. Why do we have to This is our multiply values. So this is going to be our global scale in that case, like that. So the global scale is going to control how all of them are big mutually at the same time. There we go. This leaves us now with these last two, so let's just push this all the way down here in the second to last. And now from here, I think we're pretty much going to connect everything. So we're just going to go from me. Before we even do that, I think it makes more sense to just add a panel. Panel. This is going to be our distribute by distance. And now let's just start plugging one by one from men from Max. Tom two Max, multiply. There we go, and seed There we go. Okay. Again collapse these guys and dis go one by one, distributed by distributed by distance. There we come on, insert into. There we go. Into into into. There we go. And so now we have all are setting for our distribution to value, kind of like our global one. And then all of these ones, depending on how we change it, is going to control how our ship is being distributed along the curve. Perfect. Let's just go back up. And then the last thing that's remaining is are going to be our global movement. So we can add a new panel here. Let's call it global movement. We want it to be at the bottom, insert after panel. So we have instance setting, scale by distance, distributed by distance. Global movement is at the bottom. So we can connect this also all of them individually. We don't need to connect the seed one though so that when you can skip Perfect. And now we just need to again, drag and drop them into our global movement into panel, into panel, there we go. Perfect. So we have everything now in here. We can control our global movement. And the last one that's remaining that we didn't do yet, and this is kind of like the one that is optional because we are not really using anything inside of our scale by distance. We're not using anything inside our distributed by distance, but we are using something in our rotation lock, so we can add these three into one that's going to be called object info settings maybe or something like that. L et's just call it object info settings. Maybe that makes sense. So let's go anal object info settings. Let's just change this so that they're all lowered caps here. Object info settings. We're just going to connect this one to camera. This is our rotation lock. Target rotation, target rotation lock makes more sense. Then we have our scale by distance. This could be our distance field. Let's call it scale. By distance field. And then the last one is distributed by distance field. Distribute by distance field. There we go. Now we have our fields now here, also object info settings. We can actually track and drop it right here. I feel like this is a good position also for it to be. Scale by distance, insert into panel. Insert into panel. We have only two right now. One is missing. Where did that one escape distributed by distance field? There we go. Insert into panel. Alright. I think for me, the target rotation is the most important, so I'm just going to put it at the very top like this. So let's just look at it from now a logical standpoint on how this works. We have let's just go camera here, and then take a look here. We have choose the instance, so we select which instance we want to be distributed along the curve. We tell it how detailed we want the curve to be. We choose the amount, and we say, okay, but merge them so that we have some kind of separation between them. So they're not all really really close to each other. We then tell it, okay, lock onto, let's say, a certain camera or an object, this one. We also say, Well, by the way, if you want, we can use maybe this cube for our maybe even scaling. So let's just say, closer you are to this cube, the larger you're going to be versus the farer. So this cube is really close, and this object is going to be the I this cube is somewhere here in the middle, then this object is going to be the biggest one. So we also have that. In my case, like I said, I am not going to be using it right now. So I'm just going to click. X here, but we have that optionally in case you want to add this setup into, one of your other blender project that you're working on, you can always import it, so that way, you have it nicely organized. And then we have distance. So the further you are right now from this origin point, the bigger the front object is going to be, but the smaller also the ones that are behind are going to be, if I mess around with these values, I'm just going to keep it as it is for now. And then what else do we have? We have our distribute by distance and our global movements. So once we decide to animate everything, for instance, on our Z axis, we can just go and say, Okay, now, start moving. And if we want it to be very subtle movements, we can change this number to maybe 20. That way, this max value might need to increase much more than incrementally, or if it's maybe just like one, and then now it's slower. So we also have that control now set up, and that's pretty much it for this video. Now, in the next one, we are going to be starting to work on our composition, our camera settings. We're going to be adding the highlander to our shot, and then we're going to start also on the animation afterwards. 10. Working on the composition: This video, I want to match my opening shot as close as possible to the first image here at the very top where we see the highliner, and then the small ships on the top right side, a little bit of a distribution happening over there. So for this portion, we're going to be working on the composition, as mentioned earlier. So that will also entail a little bit of back and forth to tweaking and maybe some changes we like, but then don't like. And a lot of it is also going to be to your own personal preference, maybe. So you might not even want to recreate this exact shot shot by, you know, how it looks like here. You might want to, you know, actually encourage you to kind of like, take a little bit of liberty and try to add a little bit of your own spice. So try also to do that. In my personal case, I do want to get as close to as possible to the one that was used in the movie, so that's why I'm going to be heavily relying on here, but you don't necessarily need to if you don't want to. So, to start off, we obviously first need to add the highner into our scene. And so we can just go under file. Click here on a pen. And for me, it's already going to open it. But what you need to do is just go under your resources folder, find a highliner dot blend file, click a pen, and then go into your collection. And then click on the Highliner, and it should be adding it immediately. As you can see, is super huge right now, and that has to do with how the scaling was done in part one of the course, which is also why we tried to avoid it by, you know, adding all of these setups here to help us with distribution distance to fake that illusion of scale and distance in general. As a matter of fact, if I just take the highlander now G Y and push it a little bit back, and I look at the size of my curve here. Right now, our curve is set at 200 meters in distance. I believe the one that I used in my initial test when I was trying to figure this out was around 1 kilometer. So we can actually, you know, find it in the sweet spot in between. Let's just put instead of, well, not even a sweet spot, less than a sweet spot. So we're going to use like 400 meters for a distance, and just make sure to apply the scales so that everything here is set to one. There we go. And now once we have our highlander added, we can probably move it maybe a little bit more to the left so that it's going to be roughly around here. And then we can also reset our camera. Right now, the rotation is set to negative 16 degrees, so we can push that to zero. And then we can start positioning the highlander and everything. And we also might need to do a little bit of scaling, so don't worry about that. Up. So we want to push the highliner a little bit more to the right side. So we can move the camera a little bit. We can then scale this highliner. And while we're at it, we can see that right now we are using a resolution of 1920 by 1080. So we're going to change this to b816. 1928 16, which is the exact same resolution that was used in the previous court video. And I believe it has a similar aspect ratio of 2.35, which is used in here. And so in part one of this course, I do talk a little bit more about aspect ratios, and I'll show you how to find different aspect ratios depending on the resolutions that you're going for. If you're interested in that I encourage you to check it out, but you know, let's continue now with our work in here. Additionally, I am always bothered by this extra capacity here. So I'm going to go under my camera settings and just change my viewpoint display to pass per tout that way. I can get a much clearer idea of how my composition is going to look and what's going to be cut off, what isn't. So that means now that I need to also change some stuff around my highliner. It is definitely a little bit more rotated in a way that I wouldn't want it to be here, so I'm going to go into my right view. And let me just press in hide everything in here, and let me turn on my screen casks. Oh, they are already. They're here. Perfect. I didn't even notice that. And so I want to just rotate my highliner just a little bit to try to get it to a roughly similar shape of a silhouette that we have here. This also might mean that I need to squeeze my high liner a little bit because this one here is much more narrower and its width than the one that we have here. So I'm gonna press S and then X and just squish it until I get look somewhat similar to here. And then G and X to move it roughly to a third of my screen. Now, while we're at it, one more thing, and this is more of a wild guess is that I don't think that we're going to need the entirety of the highlander. Looking at this image only, and then looking how this looks right now over here. I'm pretty sure we can get away with just using the top front part of it up until roughly these inner extrusions here. So what we can do is just to be double sure, let's just copy Control C, Control V, the highlander, put it into the highlander collection. Take this lattice highlander, put that as well. And let's just rename this one to highner backup in case something does go hey wire, and I'm wrong, and then press a shift, left click with your mouse, put everything here to hidden so that we have it as a backup. And then for this highliner, what I can do is just go on my top, going into edit mode, press old and Z to enable my x ray. And I want to Highlight or select pretty much everything roughly up to these lines right here, and then one extra from the inside part. And then once I have that, I'm going to press x and simply delete all these vertices. Clear all z, so I can see what I have left here. Go back into the edit mode, press number two, to go into my edge select lt and then left click. So this way, I select this entire loop and then press F. And now I close it and then I press I to kind of like get rid of this little shading and then press I one more time, just to kind of get rid of that shading. And here we go. Don't need to worry too much about the topology here because this is barely going to be visible. And as you can see, it really doesn't make much of a difference to what we had. I'm going to control do just so we can see the difference. So let's just take a couple of steps. We don't need to do this. So you can see this was before, and just focus on these outer edges. Don't focus on the internal part because we are only going to be looking here at the outer edges, as you can see. And then redo, you can see that there's really not much of a difference. Before. So when we had the back part after when we don't have the back part. Once it's closed, you can't really tell if there's much of a difference. So I would say this is pretty good. While we're at it, we can also slightly R z and then rotate the hyner to face a bit more, maybe towards the camera. We're going to be tweaking with that part later on as well. So I don't think that's that important. I might push the hyner just slightly more into the back. Round here. And then looking at how it's being cut off and framed here. I'm going to I'm assuming that the bottom part is less cut off in the top part just by looking at the angle of cut off here and how deep it goes into its top view here. So I'm going to maybe push it slightly more up right around here so that this part here is narrower versus this part here. And then might also just scale it slightly in the x axis to add back that width that I cut off a little bit to try to get it as close to as possible as I mentioned. And I think this pretty much gives me roughly a decent estimate to similarity to how I have it in here. I'm going to apply everything to the higher control A by scale, and that looks pretty darn good. Now, additionally, we're going to be now working on our curve here that we have set up and our geometry node set up here. What I want to do is kind of because I am being obscured a little bit by my reference window right here. I'm going to open a second window and you don't necessarily need to do it. And the purpose of the second window is just to be able to navigate maybe a little bit more freely if I'm unable to do it on this side. So for now, this is kind of how I'm going to move around. And so what I want to do next is early on at the beginning of this part, I did talk about how, you know, from a practicality standpoint, it makes more sense to use the origin point right here at the front versus at the back. Sorry, Yeah, to have this origin point here at the front versus like here in the middle. Because right now, for our distribution and for our scale by distance, it is looking at where the origin point is and then distributing based on that and scaling based on it. And so we talked about whether or not we're going to need this field. Turns out, we can actually use it quite well. So the issue here was that if I were to move this front vertex here, then it would distance it from the origin point because the origin point wouldn't follow it. But If we click on this cube, and then I click on this curve and then go into my edit mode, and I have this vertex right here selected along with this cube, and I press control and P, and I say make vertex parent. Now, if I move this vertex, you'll see that the cube is going to follow it anywhere it goes. So that means that if I position, let's say, this cube roughly around here where we have our current origin point. Let's see. That seems to be matching it more or less exact. So let's just go like that, press control S scale, or actually, let's make it bigger so that, you know, we can see it where it actually is. And now, if we go here and say, distributed by distance, use the cube, distributed by distance, use the cube. We can also change the name of the Cube and just call it field. And now, if we move, even though there are going to be some changes, what's most important is that our main one, the one that's at the very very front always remains the largest one and the least distributed one as well. And so that's what we have right now. All right. Now, let's start working on the ships that are going to be here in these corners, and et cetera. So what I'm going to do is now start messing around with my curve. And this is the part where it's, you know, kind of like, either you want to do it exactly like me or it's more of a personal preference. In my case, I want to, let's just take a quick look. I want to take these two parts, move them closer to the highlander. I'm going to rotate them in the z axis a little bit more aggressively. Let me just take a look now what we have going on. And then maybe move it a little bit more like. This part might be a little bit too aggressively moved. I'm also going to shrink these handles so that they're not so humongous. And there we go. We can barely see the ships over there and so don't worry about that for now. What I do want to is kind of take this front part now. Let me just go. This is why it's a bit annoying now because of the pure window. Let's see if I can cut it off a little bit more to get some real estate. I guess this is as close to as I can get. What I want now is to take this vertice right here, scale it down a little bit so it's not so huge. And then start rotating kind of like in this axis. Take this point, scale it inside, so it's not huge of a handle. But then this one, I want to expand a little bit more because I do want these ships to also go to the right side because I'm kind of thinking a couple of steps ahead. And I know that I want to have one ship at least on the right side off this main ship. So I'm going to try to push it like that. Let me see. All right. We have this part. Okay, this is maybe too aggressive, so I'm going to maybe do it a little less. Now I'm going to rotate it slightly. I'm going to give it a bit more of an angle and interest like that. And then for this part, I'm going to push it a little bit more up, and then this one, I'm going to push it a little bit more down, rotate it slightly, and there we go. We can barely see these ships in our back. And so what we want to do is just change the to min value right here to kind of get an idea how big are they? Let's see. How big are those ships that are supposed to be in back? They are very small. You can see barely small dots. So we do want to have them be as small as they are over here. But then some of them we do want to have slightly larger, so we might actually mess around with the divide value, push it a little bit more up, and then push the middle one slightly more down, and push this value here. Little bit more up. And this gives us a pretty interesting variation with the ships right now. I might push the mint even further down just to get something really interesting there we go. This looks pretty good. And so it also looks relatively similar to how we have it in our first shot. We can maybe just push this slightly more lower to add a couple of more extra ships right around here. But I would say this is starting to look pretty good, like this. Alright. Let's just maybe push it slightly more lower. Yeah. I think this looks pretty good overall. And again, like I said, now it's just a matter of tweaking. For now, I'm just going to tweak my scaling, and I'm going to worry too much about other things. There we go. So we have a couple of big ones, and then in the back, we have some super small ones. So we have that idea of scale or illusion of scale and distance happening. Perfect. Additionally, last part, I guess, before we close off this video is, I do want to you can see that the hyner is a bit more indented towards. And again, this is an aftermath of the previous course that we did and how we were working on the space scene. So what you can do is use this lattice, this cage around the hyner, go into tab. Click these two vertices, and then go G, Y and push them slightly towards the back so that way. You can even use this line here right on the coordinate that's right next to the higher to kind of help you make sure that it is fairly straight. And so there we go. This is looking pretty good overall, I would say. Alright. In the next video, we're going to continue with our composition, and we're gonna also start thinking about our animation as well. So I'll see you guys there. Cheers. 11. Finishing the composition: Our opening shot set up. But now, we also need to make sure that our final shot, where we have the ship here being at our focus, also resembles the reference image over here. And also, we cannot forget either the last two images as well that we have going on. So first, before we even begin, let me just turn on my screen cast keys so you guys can see over here. And also, we want to make sure that we don't lose our current positioning of the camera if we move it later on, which we will. So to save the current position kind of like to this section that we have right now, we can and just add two key frames, one for the location, so intra key frames, and then another one for the rotation. And so that way, if we now move the camera left, right up and down, whatever, and I press shift and then left click with the left arrow, it's going to reset the camera to the starting position where we lock those key frames on. Perfect. So no, as the camera is going to slowly move up, and I can tell that the camera is going to move up because of how the ship here is being cut off. So in our starting position, our ship was barely being cut off at the bottom, but now it's cut off way more. So the camera is going to slowly move up, and it's going to also pan towards the right side, and we can see that as well by the distance of the ship to the left end of the frame versus here being smaller. So if the camera is going to go g Z, and then it's going to go roughly up to here, Then it's going to go r and then z slowly towards Roughly there. At this frame right here at the top right corner, we need to see an extra ship, so this one right there. What I want to do next, though, before moving into that, there's a couple of small mistakes I did early on when we were setting up our geometry nodes. Nothing too much, just a couple of clicks. We need to go under our geometry node, and we can do it right here in this window. So there we go. And then just make sure that for your rotation lock, you have it set to relative. And then also object info scale distance set that to relative. And here object info for your distribute by faces, have that be relative, and don't also have it be clamped for the map range. So unclamp the map range, because what this is doing is actually making the ships that are fur way still kind of locked closer to the line, as you can see, and we don't really want that. So we can actually keep the clamp, I would say, actually remove the clamp here as well and just keep it as it is now. Alright. Let's go under our three D viewport. And what we can do also we can add a separate field. So we have this field being our scale right now. And also, we can add a separate field that's going to be for our distribution. So for that one, we don't want it to be exactly the same looking, so we're going to add maybe, let's see, where is our empties. There we go. Let's add a sphere. Scale the sphere up a little bit, and then just push it right next to over here. Then go shift left click tab and then click on the verdict, Control B, make vertex parent. There we go. So now if this moves, it didn't work. So let's go one more time. Control B, make verdic parent. So now if this moves, everything follows, perfect, and we can just go now into our scale distribute by distance field, and have it B this one. So now if this moves, it distributes them slightly differently, which is exactly what we want. Okay. And we can also rename this field. So let's just call this one field distance. And then this one is going to be field scale. All right. And now, as the cameras that are going to slowly move up and move towards the right, which is what we just did over here, we need to have this ship appear over this part where I'm hovering with my mouse right now. So let's just go top view and try to move this a little bit more towards the left side. But we can immediately see that the ships here at the front are way too big, so we can maybe tweak our max value to kind of match that slightly, and then just go g Z and move it up a little bit until we get something closer to what we need. All right. This looks as close as I can get. I'm just going to move everything, so I'm just going to select the entire curve, leave the edit mode, and just move it slightly more over here. Move this slightly more right about there. And then I'm going to go now to my starting frame just so I can see how everything is looking here. So I want to push this middle point still back so that I don't lose it. And so you'll notice that there's going to be a lot of back and forth. Well, not a lot, but a decent amount of back and forth now for the next couple of parts, and I don't want them to be that small, so I might even scale them slightly. All right. Additionally, what I want to do, let's just take a look. So the camera is now going to go. Up all the way up to here, and it's going to rotate on the z axis here, and we still don't have our ship, so the ship is going to need to move a little bit more right there. So the ship is going to appear right about there. So somewhere, this is kind of like the frame that we have going on. Okay? And then as the camera continues to roll right towards the ship, about here, it's going to continue moving upwards as well until we have our ship appearing like that. Alright. This looks pretty good. The only thing that's bugging me a little bit is the closeness of these two guys. So I'm wondering if I can somehow change it without impacting my scene too much. So let's just try to figure it out. We just need to maybe mess around with some minor distribution. We could even have that one ship kind of hide them, which, honestly, I don't mind. So let's just go back to our starting position. We have our ships over there. And then we have two ships right over there that are still kind of close to We're to each other, so let's just see if we can kind of mess that up. All right. Hopefully, it won't affect us right now in the next frame. So the ship goes up roughly about here. Slowly starts rotating. We see it, keeps going up about here. Slowly continues rotating. There we go, comes about here and then starts getting closer and closer to the ship itself. So somewhere like that. There we go. So for me, this works pretty good. I think we have our composition kind of set up more or less. If you want to do something differently, a couple of things you could maybe, but this is going to affect your scene as well. So you might need to redo some stuff. So you can change your merge by distance, maybe to a smaller number, which is going to add a bit more shifts to your shot, and I actually kind of like that I'm getting now lightly more ships going on here. But as you can see now, everything has been kind of reset it, and you're going to have to redo these steps again. And so if that doesn't worry you, be sure to, you know, you can try it. Let's just take a look what we have going on. Right now, as you can see, let's go to our starting position. You can see that everything is going on. It's very crazy, so we can probably take up some ships from here. You can take this up. But yeah, be sure to experiment. I'm going to go back to the position that I really like, which was this one here. So ship goes rotating roughly up to here, all right, getting closer to the ship and then moving towards it. So that's going to be kind of like our animations that we're going to have to do in the next video. We now lay around with these values, try to get a look that works for you. Use the images as a reference or come up with a look and feel that you want for yourself. In any case, I'll see you guys in the next video, where we're going to start working on the animation. Cheers. 12. Animating the scene: Car layout more appropriate for animation to also make our life easier once we start doing it. So this top left window, I'm just going to merge it with the bottom one. So clicking when the plus icon appears and then just dragging it downward. And then additionally, I'm going to pull this window all the way up, which is going to be reserved later on for my graph editor. But for now, I only need it for my timeline so that I can add my essential key frames to kind of get these shots first. And then in phase two, we're going to be tinkering with our graph editor to make it to give our camera movement but more natural looking feel versus being robotic and CGI. So to start off, let's just look at our first shot that we have already created. And then for the second shot, we need to move our camera up as we talked about and then pan it towards the right. So I'm just going to move this up right about here. And also, we need to make sure that we tell it at which frame we want to do it. So let's just say around frame 200, but that's going to make our scene too short, and we want this scene to be roughly around 15 seconds long. So we can type in here, for instance, 15 times 24, and it's going to give us 360 frames. So just make sure that you are using 24 frames per second as shown in here. And so once we're done with that, once we're at this position at frame 200, and these are not final, by the way, we can change them later on. Want to move this GZ up around here. And then we also want to move it slightly towards the right with a little bit of rotation like this, be even more rotation and slightly more towards the left, to get somewhat of this look, with maybe a little bit more extra up movement. So roughly around here to kind of get the look that we see in this image over there, and we can even maybe slightly, and this is just my case. S lightly shrink the size of our highner right there like this, and maybe push it just slightly more down, so just moving it right about there. A. Let's press now the letter K on having our camera selected to insert a keyframe and press available. Now, we won't really need the rotation key frame and the Y one. So we can just right click here clear single keyframe and then click on the y clear single keyframe. So we only have these ones now available. Let's just take a look at our current movement. So we're starting off here. The camera starts moving slowly towards the right. There's going to be a very, very small rotation happening as well. And right now as you can see it has the es happening, but don't worry about it. We'll fix that later. And then we can jump onto our third shot here where we have more of that ship being visible. So I'm going to put it almost around 270 here. So in here, we can add, let's see, more movement up roughly up to, I would say here, and then rotation to right about here where we can barely see the ship anymore. So something like that. I'm going to press K available. And then a couple of frames later, right around 320. We want to match almost close to the shop, but still not fully zoomed in. So let's just go G x, move it more towards the right side. Maybe slightly more towards the right, and then a little a little rotation in the z. And if you can't tell whether you're in the center or not, you can also click on your camera. Go here under composition guides, click Center. Then go under show overlay, and this is going to help us match where we want our camera to be in terms of position rotation. So we want it to be roughly here. This is the center, but I also want it to be a little more up right about here. I'm going to press K available. I'm going to hide my overlay for now. And then from this point, I want my camera to slowly start moving towards this subject here. So sorry, G Z Z twice, and then just moving it G Z up until here. Sorry, I forgot to push this to frame 360, so this is our ending one. G Z Z, moving it a little bit more, and then G Z, and then maybe subtle R just to maintain the center position. Let's just take a look. I might have rotated wrongly, but this looks pretty good. K, available, and there we go. So now, if I were to play this, it's probably going to look very weird and off, but as a matter of fact, because we have easy in set up, and we don't have our timings yet perfectly created. We only had our basic key frames here. So let's just take a quick look by pressing space. So the first portion not so bad. I think the issues are going to start around. Yeah. You can see very fast acceleration, weird movement, that feels a bit jarring and so on. So let's just now jump into our graph editor. I'm going to push this slightly more up. I'm going to put my references right here. And also on my right screen, I'm going to use my other blender file where I can actually see how I created or how I matched those graphs so that it's a bit more accurate when we are recreating them as well. So let's go right click here and go into our graph editor. As you can see, we have all kind of stuff happening in here. So let's just start off simply with our X. And then let's hide all of these ones here. Frame all. So the X one is the movement towards the right that we have. So if you see here, we can see that it's moving towards the right. We don't want this key frame here, and we don't want this middle one. Either. What we do want is our shot not to start moving towards your right immediately. We want to leave a little bit of a breathing room because it is transitioning from the previous shot where we had the highlander in space. And so we want to kind of let this one marinate with the viewer once it switches to the next image. So from here, I'm just going to g X and give it. Let's see how much is this. Yeah, like, almost half a half a second. Half a second here a little bit more than half a second of time to kind of let it sit with the viewer before it starts moving. And then also, I don't want it to be so eased out. I want it to kind of like start abruptly over here. And then this handle, I'm going to scale and then move it a little bit more like that. So that this part here does have some easing when it slows down. So let's see. There's a very short second before the movement actually starts. So, as you can see, very short second, and then the movement starts or not even a second, half a second. And then it starts moving towards the right, moves towards the right. So only focus on the movement towards the right. Don't focus on the rotation now, just look at the movement towards the right, and so far it looks very good. I would say, the movement towards the right, so far is okay. We have this part here that might be weird, so we'll see how to handle that. Let's see. We might need to maybe tweak it later on, but so far so good, let's just check now our Y movement, which is our forward one that we added here. So for the forward one, I'll just take a look into my reference. All right. We also just want to actually take out these key frame the extra ones that have been added. We don't need this one. We don't need this one. This one here, we don't need to be that big. We can take this one here as well, make it a little smaller, and then this push it slightly more back. And again, just add maybe here a bit softness towards the forward movement. This is our forward movement that's going to be happening. Right here. So we wanted to kind of be timed also with the x axis. So let's take a look right about, I would say here, maybe where we wanted to start moving forward. So we almost have that kind of set up. Perfect, and we wanted to continue. We don't want it to stop. So the forward movement is going to be roughly continuous, so we can move this also inside a little bit. So as it starts moving forward, there we go. So I think this is the rotation that kind of puts us a little off center. So far so good. Let now let's just jump into our rotation instead of locations. Let's just take our rotation frame all and see what's going on here because that's the one that's kind of breaking, it's still most apart. So for rotation, we can take out this one. And I would say take out tack out this one as well. We can only keep the one that we have here. We don't need to have it so eased out, and this part here can pretty much remain as it is, but we also want the rotation to start off with a little bit of a delay. I'm just going to put it slightly similar to 18 frames of waiting time. So there we go. Before he starts rotating, and then it moves, keeps moving. All right, this is already feeling better, more natural. And then it starts going towards our ship. Okay. And then the last part, I also want it kind of like here to have a bit more of a slower movement. So I'm just going to push this slightly down, maybe make this a little softer, a little bit more aggressive, there we go. And then this one, push it slightly more down, and then just move this maybe a bit lower. Let's just take look where our Z axis is. So let's just move this slightly lower to have it start off actually from here. All right. So let's just take a look now. So far so good. Slowly starts moving up. And then starts moving towards the ship. Perfect. Let's just take a look at our z location now, the last one. Okay. For the z location. For this one, let's just take out this key frame, and then we have two of them here. We don't need two, we only need one. Let's zero d two together. So res S Y and then zero. But we want it to be at the same position, so let's just move this one. More like that. I think that's going to zero S Y and zero. There we go. And then for here, we want to shrink this handle a little bit, so it's much more natural. And again, the same thing for the bottom part where we want it to start off just a couple of frames later. So around 18. So it lands there, and then it starts moving. So it's almost like a delay that we're creating here. And it's very similar to how the shot from the actual movie begins as well. So there we go, gets there, and then it slowly starts moving forward. So this here is where our rotation goes a little bit too far, where it should stop. So let's just take a look at our rotation. So rotation should be right around there. There we go. Okay, it should be much more softer than what we have here. So make it a little bit more like that. Let's take a look at our rotation. Okay. Let's just make this slightly softer. Okay. And then this should be fairly straight almost perfectly. Along with this one should be f almost shorter. Let's take a look at one now. So far so good, so far so good. There we go, and then zooming towards. So I would probably want it to zoom even longer. And I don't want this to go down there, so let's see. We want to probably take this slightly more upwards. Let's try to zero d rough out a little bit, S Y zero. And then just move this one very slightly down. There we go. Okay. And then here is where I want my Y movement to start actually. So the Y movement, I wanted to start a bit sooner. So right around here. That's much better. Okay. We still have a bit more of a rotation happening that I'm trying to fix here. Let's just take a look at our rotation. I guess, if we even this one out completely, S y and then zero, they should pretty much mix our rotation. But it's a bit too aggressive, like I said, and so I wanted to just have a bit more of a fall off That's why I'm kind of pushing it slightly towards the right. I guess this is close to we can get so far. Let's see our Z movement where it stops. Z movement stops right here. So maybe if I push the Z movement slightly more over there. There we go. Much better. Smoother. Perfect. So we have that. And then one more extra final part that I want to add to our animation is also for the ships to move slightly more downwards, but we want to keep them. We want the final frame to be right where they are. So it's kind of like almost like a reverse animation. So let's just go here under our timeline. Click on the ships. And let's just move this here. Go here. We have our min, and let's just go all the way here to our final frame. So we want them to be here for our final frame. So I I, and then Z so press I to insert key frames. And then for the starting positions, we want them to just be slightly more up. So, for instance, holding shift on the min, and then moving this slightly more up, holding shift on this one, moving it slightly more up. On Z one, just changing it slightly, resting y, y, I, and then also making sure that all of them are going to be, let's just click right here, going to our graph editor, and then selecting all of them, right click linear interpolation. And then let's just take a look. There's a very, very slow movement of the ships going downwards. And then we have our scene pretty much being created. There it is. All right. This pretty much concludes everything for the animation. What you can do now is maybe do some minor tweaking, if you want. So for instance, in my case, maybe I just want to move some of these ships slightly more, spread them out a little bit. So just lay around with this. But not too much, and so on until you get the final result that works best for you. I think that for me, this is pretty good. And then in the next videos, we're going to start adding our lighting, texturing, and also thinking about working on the volume metrics, which is going to be the most important part. Alright, once you have the inimation, you're good to go, and I'll see you guys in the next video. Cheers. 13. Adding the light: Uh, to begin, I'm going to rearrange my layout just a little bit. So I'm going to merge these two windows on the top. Then I'm going to zoom out slightly, so I have this top part only assigned to my camera view. And then I'm going to add my PUR RF. Right here, I think it's going to fit fairly nicely. I'm going to lower this, maybe slightly down and then try to match it to get the most out of my space. I guess this is as close as I can get, which is fairly okay. So just shrinking this part, maybe slightly down, cutting it up like this. Should be more or less okay for me. All right. Then additionally, we're going to add one extra window right here at the bottom, which is going to be used for our timeline, like that. We can lower it slightly down. And then this part, I'm going to use for, let's see my three D viewboard. Perfect. And this should pretty much be it for my layout itself. We're going to press n, and then go here under view and just add one extra zero for the n part and then add one here. And I'm going to do the same for my camera just so make sure that there's no clipping going to be involved. So let's add. There we go. These values match up perfectly. Then the only thing that's remaining going into our render settings, changing our render engine to cycles. From supporter, we're going to use experimental because if you weren't here in part one, where we were doing the highliner, we're actually also using displacement, and we're using adaptive subdivision and Adapt subdivision primarily works when you have your future set to experimental, so that's why we need it. For our MC samples here, I'm just going to use around 400 for now, and then I'm going to do the same thing for our render. I might change these setting slightly later on. I'm going to click out the D noise. I'm not going to be using any de noising, and then for color management, I'm going to put it as AGX. And I think that pretty much settles everything that we need for now. We can go in our top layer here and press Z, and then go under rendered to turn on our render engine, and this is how it currently looks like. So to change it, we're going to be lighting up our scene primarily using the sky texture, so I'm going to go under color and click. There it is sky texture. And so now we're just going to be tweaking some of the settings in here. For my sun size, I'm going to change this to something super small 0.01. Intensity. I'm going to keep as is. And then the elevation. I'll probably going to have to tweak later on, but for now, I'm just going to lower it almost like to almost like a sunset, so we're on 3.2 degrees. Rotation. I think my sun is like somewhere on the far right end because I can see it based on the shadows that it's creating on the high liner, so that's fine. Altitude, we're going to be very high up, so I'm going to type in ten KM, so 10,000 meters up is going to give us this like nice, bluish tint. And then we are also going to be changing it. Here we go. There's our sun over there. We can barely see this little white dot. Then for the air, I'm going to keep right now as is, but I'm going to change the dust to zero, change the ozone to zero, and then change the strength to maybe, let's see, I use 0.6. So you know what? Let's just go with 0.6 here as well. But then for the air, I'm going to slightly push the air down to also maybe 0.8 like that. And so this is what we have for our scene currently, gives us this nice little bluish look. And so, from here and out, I think before we talk about the volumetrics or the mist at all, let's just do some of the easy stuff first. I'm going to go to my final frame so shift click. And then for these shifts, we want to change their look as well. So we want to just create some kind of a basic material. I'm going to go here under planes collection right here. A click on this one on the left side. Go under here, material. I'm going to click New, call this one Ships, and I'm going to take this window, move it all the way like this. I'm going to press N in here, press N in here so that I hide the side menu and then go under a Shader editor. So once I have this ship clicked, going to go here and just change the colors, make this one pure black, and then we'll push the roughness all the way, so there's no roughness going on. Maybe just add a very, very subtle metallic, not much. Something like this is going to be fine enough. Now we want to just click on all of these ships. So Sift, left click on this one shift, left on this one. Left left on this one, and then shift on this one that has the material. Brest Control L, and then say link the materials. So now all of our ships are going to have exactly the same material. And we can later on maybe come back to this one. So we can see that this one is it's not pure black. It has a little bit of a tint. So what I can do is actually take this eye dropper and just say, Hey, use this color, so it's closer to it. It has a little bit of let's see how much it's 22, 16%, white in it. So this would be like 100. So we had, like, roughly 16 ish percent if we pressed in here. More or less, 14, 16. Let's just go with 16. So, like this. There we go. So we have our ships pretty much set up. And now we can kind of talk about adding a miss pass. I'm going to hide these ships over there. I'm going to go into my camera view so that everything is here. And we can talk about our volumetrics and our miss pass. We're going to be adding volume now into our CM. So if your device cannot handle volume where you're trying to avoid volume metrics, you're not going to be able to have all of the benefits of it. You can kind of fake it a little bit, so I'm I'm going to skip a couple of steps right now. But what you can do is go here under your view layer and enable your mis pass this one right here. Then additionally, what you're going to want to do is go on your camera settings and inside the camera settings, also here, show miss so that you can see your mist coming from the camera. And then lastly, I believe, inside our render settings. If I go here, let's see, lights, volume actually no here. Sorry, world settings, Ms pass here. We can actually change it. So if we were to push this all the way, let's see past the highliner, this number, like that. Let's see, it goes past, and then we went into our compositing, and you don't need to do this, by the way. Now, I'm just going to render an image so I can show you. All right. It took me 24 seconds for this one frame. And if we go, let's close this and change use nodes, and I add a viewer. You can see that we also have a mist pass here which creates it, and then we can control the strength of it of the mist here happening as well. And so that is one way where you're going to be able to kind of control it. But like I said, it's not going to give you the same effect specifically around this, almost like halo effect of the light and some other stuff with the way that the light is being scattered. So if you can, I highly recommend trying out the trying out using volume metrics. There are some minor settings that we could probably tweak. So the way we're going to do this is we're going to start off by adding a simple cube, then we're going to press S 100 to scale the cube. We're going to go here under our object and then view display as we're going to put it as a wire, so that way, we can see actually what's inside a cube. And now we just want to match the cube. So S Z and then maybe just go into the edit mode. Take this. That's weird. Let's just S Y a G Y. Just try to cover the main area or a shot where we have the highliner, and the ship and then GX roughly round here. S X more or less. Something like this should be fairly okay. Once we have the cube here selected, let's call our cube atmosphere, and then here under new, we're going to add a new material. We're not going to be using a principle BSDF. Instead, we're going to be using a principle volume. So this one here, type it in, and then connect the volume to the volume. Right now, because our density is so high, we can't really see anything, so we need to change this to something like 0.005, and now we can slowly start seeing things. We can still see our sun over there. And so something that, for instance, you won't be able to get by using a miss pass is, if I push my enesotropy all the way, you can see this nice little haziness effect that we're getting on this right side, which is exactly kind of what we want, similar to how we have in this image. So that's one of the things. And now this is taking way too long for you to process you D R endersen. You could kind of tweak this by let's see going under our light paths here, and then changing these values slightly lower. So maybe you can change the diffuse, the glossy, and the transmission here to slightly lower, and then maybe total light bounces, reduce the total ight bounces to four. And it's going to more or less remain similar quality without kind of without losing that benefit of the effect that we're trying to achieve. I'm going to reset my settings here, but you could pretty much lower them to get a very, very similar result altogether. There we go now, and then pushing the anisotropy all the way to one. Additionally, I'm going to add a little bit of emission strength to kind of like mitigate what happened right here where we kind of lost our effect, this one of the mist. So this is kind of like what our anisotropy does. You can kind of see a small shadow right here happening through the mist because of the sun. So that's exactly what I want. We can see it maybe ale bit less now, but if I push it all the way, then we can see a little bit better. Then what I want to do is just change the emission string to something like 0.001. This is going to almost fake it. Going to give me back a little bit of that nice miss. And lastly, for the emission color, I want to add a little bit of blue and haziness. And I have a number here saved that I want to add in here. So under my hex value just type in E 8f5ff. And again, like I said, this is everything here that you see is something that I've tested. I tried out before. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't work. And so it was like a hug lot of trial and error, now I'm just like giving you the condensed version of it. Don't think that, Oh, how does he know which color, which this, which, that? Everything came out of a lot of testing. La, this pretty much kind of gives us a good starting point. If we go to our final frame, so shift right click to frame 360, what we want to have is our sun B right kind of below our ship over here. So what we were going to do next is simply, let's go here under our settings, and then sun elevation, pushing it slightly right below. Oh, right now, it's above. There we go. And then slightly towards the right side. So this is kind of almost like this shot here, the second frame. This is what we want. And you can change the values, play around with it. But for me, what I found, what worked best, what gave me the nice li of this hazy feeling from the sun was this shot right here by having the anisotropy all the way to one. And so this is kind of like how it looks like. I'm going to test take a quick render image test just so I can see how this is, and I'm going to speed up the video from here. All right. So for me it took roughly 20 seconds to get this kind of frame, but here we are. Perfect. And then this is kind of like where N s is going to be where we have the sun rotation right behind our ship like this, more or less. I would say, something like that. We can maybe just change the sun size. Let me see if we change the sun size, that's way too much. So I'm probably going to stick with the settings that I already All right. This is going to be pretty much for this video, and then in the next one, we're going to be tweaking our high liner, which is going to be the next part. So we need to also for the high liner, get like this nice little, as you can see here, glow reflection happening on these stripes that we have. So in the next video, now, we're just going to be changing a lot of the texture settings that we have pre set up in our highler. 14. Improving the textures and light: This video, I want to do two things. I want to tweak the texture of our highner, so it matches the shininess that we see in this reference image right over here. And then additionally, I also want to affect the movement of our sun to match it closely to the shots that we have in here. And then if we also have time, I will also want to change a little bit of the settings that we have created for our principled volume right in here. So, to start off with the Highlander, I'm just going to click on it. And then here you can see this large spaghetti monster that was created in part one of the course with all of these textures. Now we tried our best to be as organized as possible. And so in short, we don't really need all of this stuff that we have in here. For instance, you can see all this, like, damaged stuff done to it, that's purely run through this displacement. And what we want here is just to take the displacement waves and only use that one or our displacement. So we're just going to go here and plug it into the material output of the displacement. And then we're going to change the settings to make it slightly smaller so we can get rid of these nasty damages that were done here. So I'm just going to use something super small, maybe here for a height of like 0.5. And then in here scale, I'm going to change it to 0.1 to get something similar to that. The same thing for our bump map as well, we're just going to take our bump from the top one. We don't want to use the PBR one, and then we're going to plug it into our normal right in here. And we can pretty much maybe even reduce some of the bump map here. I would say to, let's see 0.5. Okay, let's just try one for now and see how it's going to look later on. But let's just keep it here. And then the last part, which is actually the most important part is going to be our roughness here. So we're going to be changing how things are plugged in. At part one, we didn't use any roughness to avoid any kind of shininess happening to the high land because this was the shot that we were recreating. So it was, like, very, very flat. No shininess happening to these edges, as you can see here. But now in here, We can actually see some shininess right you see at these parts. So what we want to do first is kind of create a nice separation for these lines, so that we actually have here under this color ramp that was used for our wave texture. And so what we can do is just take this knot, turn it pure black all the way down. So now we have a separation between black and white, but we want to reverse it so that these ones, the lines that are currently black are white, and then these larger ones are actually black. So we can go under this arrow and simply select flip color ramp. We go. So now if I were to pluck this into our roughness and then preview the roughness and then change this color here all the way to pure black, this is exactly what we'll be getting. And if I were to preview this value, and see how it look like you can see that we now have like this completely huge shyness happening on our highliner. And It's not bad, actually, the more I look at it, it kind of almost works, but we want to add some extra details to it additionally. Also, I'm noticing this is probably happening because the shines, this middle part here, as you can see, yep, that's definitely. So we want to mix this with we already have it mixed in here as a matter of fact. Let's just preview this multiply in between the mix and the multiplier right here. So let's just preview what's going on in here. So this is what we have so far. So if I were to change this, let's say to Lighten, think that should give me some nice details. There we go. And so I'm going to take this multiply and plug it into the roughness right here and then preview the roughness one more time just to see what is I'm getting. So far, I'm pretty much liking what I have going on here. So let me just preview now this entire texture to see what's going on. Let's go into our view camera. Okay, we're slowly getting there. I would say the only thing that's remaining is changing the strength of this color here in the roughness. So I would probably want to push it like halfway up to make it way way weaker, maybe even more. There we go, becoming really good. And now I'm just going to clamp it to get a little bit more of those details, and then push this one slightly more down to get back some of that shyness. And this is exactly kind of the result that we're trying to get. Perfect. So we have our highliner set up now. Yeah, let's deal with the movement of our sun last. The next thing I want to do is actually mess around with my volume metrics. And so what I want it to happen is that the further away it is from the camera, the denser the volume gets, and the closer the one it is for the camera, the less denser it is. So what we can do here for our density, we can take in and add a gradient texture. So if I could just go here under gradient texture, and right now it is puro black, but if we add breast control T and add our mapping. And so for the mapping, we change the rotation to negative 90, I believe. If I were to let's just go in here, or you don't have to, you can just take a look. So when I make this render, right now, our cube is looking puro black. But if I were to change this location, you see that it is affecting how my fog is being moved around. So what I want to do next now is under this gradient texture at my light just died. Let me just replace my light that just died. Sorry about that. Okay, I'm back. Sorry about that. My left light is on batteries. So I guess the battery ran out, and then it just died. Whereas the right one is constantly connected to cables, that one shouldn't ever die, I hope not, at least. Anyway, we were talking about adding a color ramp to drive this gradient texture. So I'm just going to go here under color ramp. And then what I want here is so as you can see this white one is actually there the whitr, it is the denser it is, and then the blacker it is, the less denser. It is. So we want to actually take this white one that's here. We want to make it almost pure black, but not completely. So, you know, like, somewhere somewhere around here is what we want. So it's almost pure bada. So then if we were to push it, then that part in front is going to be denser. So this part here is going to be denser with more fog. Additionally, what I want to do is just lower down my endisotropy, just ever so slightly to, like, value of Yeah, I guess, 0.993 should be fairly okay. And now we're getting this nice little fog effect, very, very similar to how we have it in our initial shot. And so the only thing that now is remaining actually is to push to move our sun a little because you can see our starting position here, the sun isn't as strong as it is in our shot. And so what we can do is just take it. Let's see all the way. Let's go under our rotation, and just move the sun all the way to roughly around 18 degrees towards the right. Should give us a little bit of that nice sun happening right here, while also having the highlander just enough in focus. And then if we want to make it a little bit denser around the high ner, we can push this almost black value all the way, as you can see, it's now completely covering the high laner. So we just want to be mindful of how much we cover it. Let's just take a look how this is going to turn out. I think this is almost pretty good. I'm very somewhat satisfied with this. Let's see, from here. Comparison looks relatively good, I would say. All right. So from here now, as the camera is moving, t just also add a keyframe. Let's not forget to add a rotation key frame here. So let's just press R click or you can add right one here. And then as the camera is moving about, I'd say Here. We'd want this sun to be slightly more behind. Lets see where it's going right now, it's going to the right side. We want it to be slightly more behind this ship right here, but not fully. So we do want to have that glare effect happening, that bleed of the light right around there. That looks pretty good. So L just add one more key frame here. L just press this. And then as it continues going, we kind of want it to be just ever so behind it. Let's see. I need to lower it even further to somewhere here. 11 maybe. 11 seems to be the spot right there. And we can maybe also just change the elevation so it's slightly lower. I guess this is not bad. I want it to be a little lower. Around here. All right, Let me just take a look now. And here, we have it being completely covered. And then our starting shot, we see some of the ships over here. I'm going to do a quick render test, so I'm just going to press render image to see how this is going to turn out, and I'm going to speed this up. So as expected, it is taking longer to render. On my 2080, it's around 1 minute and 12 seconds per frame. So if we have 360 frames, roughly it's going to take three 60 minutes. So just do the math for that. And let's see what we have here. I would say I want it to be even more foggier around the high ner here. And so what I'm going to do next, but everything else pretty much looks good. What I'm going to do next is just push this fogginess, maybe slightly increase the color a little bit more up. Not too much, just a little bit. Okay. Now, let's check the rest of our frames. Okay. I'll probably maybe push this a little more back. E. Here, and then this part then change it a little more up to change the high liner. Let's see. Let's keep moving this more back. Okay. I'm looking at this window here as I'm moving the color ramp. That's my main focus right now. Everything here seems to be looking good. Except, it looks like we didn't add a key frame to the final position of our sun rotation. So let's not forget to add that key frame right here. We wanted to be We said around 11. So adding that last keyframe here is also going to be important. Additionally, I'm going to increase the size of the ship because looking at the comparison image, a little bit more is here at the top, so I'm just going to go clicking on the ship, going under my sittings, and just scale by distance. I'm going to change the max here ever so slightly to get this kind of look. There we go. So I'm going to go now to my starting position. There we go. Super foggy, little bit more foggy for the high lender. That looks pretty good. My middle position, right around here, we're supposed to have that light bleed effect happening. Let's see if if we are. Is it prominent? It is not as prominent as it's supposed to be. So I'm going to go back into my role settings here and just see what's causing that. I might need to push it a little bit more to the wards the right. There we go. Anda press. There we go. That's our light bleed effect right there. And then As we go, it's going to slowly come to this point where it's right behind our ****. So we have pretty much the movement, the animation. I would say the fog also set up to a good result. And so if you're happy with all of this, I would say, we're pretty good to call it a day. And then in the next video, we're pretty much left with just tweaking with our render settings for our final output, and then jumping into post and after effects. Alright, guys, I'll see you in the next video, which would be fairly straightforward and super short. Cheers. 15. Improving the volumetrics: In the previous course, we render our see using the Open EXR file format, and this one we'll be using PNG. And it mainly has to do well, two things. One is, I couldn't help but figure out how to solve this overblown highlight issue that we get once we export it into our after effects. And even with changes in our exposure, Lumetri, it just didn't seem to give me a result that I was satisfied with. Luckily, this shot, in particular, doesn't require as much post processing as we did with our first one in the previous course. So we can kind of get away with P&G, even though it's not my preferred choice. So for our file output settings here, we can just change this here to PNG and make sure you're entering an eight bit. We don't need to go 16 because there's not much color information in here, and our shot is going to be pretty much almost done and ready right out of the render. So additionally, in light of that, we can pretty much do a lot of our post processing in here and then just do some camera imperfections later on and some lens flare details in after effects. So whatever it is that we see here, unlike in the previous course, our shot was completely different than the render one because of OpenX R. Whatever we see here, it's going to be pretty much the same as our file output. So What I want to do, I want to go under here my render settings and then scroll all the way down where we have our AGX, and we can pretty much add some color contrast here and change our exposure and our gamma as well. And this is going to be actually very important. So for my exposure, I'm just going to actually, for my look first, I'm just going to use a medium high contrast. And then if I go to my final frame, all the way here. What you'll notice is that obviously these ships are slightly more brighter than the ones that we have in our final shot. And we can kind of tweak this as well inside of our renderer versus having to worry about it later on in post. So if I go under my exposure and I just start dropping this down, all the way to start let's start around here, negative 0.1. And then I dropped the gamma as well. Around here 2.5. I start getting these much darker ships, which is preferred. Additionally, now, if we go to our first frame, you'll notice that our initial shot looks a little bit off. So we're going to be doing some extra tweaking now in this video to kind of fix all these little things. So I'm going to scale I'm going to scale my atmosphere a little bit more in the x axis to push it like this. And then I'm also slightly scale it in the z as well. I'm going to push this not all the way to the right side. And additionally, I'm going to change the color here all the way to pure white, something that I forgot to previous videos. And now we're slowly kind of starting to get back to where we want it, but it's still not there yet. Luckily, we can play around with our emission strength here to kind of bump us back to our original position, so I can change this 2.004. And you can already see we're starting to get back to where we kind of wanted it to be. So this is kind of like the current result that I'm getting. And it's fairly close to what we want in our final shot. I might want to change my emission strength color to be a little bit a little bit more saturated, and maybe more towards, let's see. Let's try to play with our citration. I was going to see more towards a yellowish hue, see what kind of result that's going to bring. I think this matches relatively close to our two shots over here. Let's take a peek now at our final shot. Again here. You can see we need to play around now with our exposure, maybe slightly just drop it down, go back in here. Let's see if we need to maybe bump up our shot in here, or what we could do is just slightly decrease the density of our fog. That's going to make issues with our highlander. So maybe we don't want that, and maybe we'll just change here to 0.5. Again, now, this is going to be a dance of back and forth, tweaking our settings until we get some results that we're really satisfied with. But I would say this is relatively close to what I'd want. Maybe I can move just these four points slightly closer G and y towards here and that's going to also slightly affect my density. So right around here, I still want to have it covering my camera. So this is as close as I can get so far. And then maybe I can do the same and push this side though, slightly more back. Let's see what we get now. Alright, this is looking pretty, pretty, very close to our initial shot. I would probably want to add a little more sensitivity to our roughness here. So I might just drop this color slightly lower to be to add a bit more shininess happening to our highliner around those edges. That we created. I think this is looking now much better and closer to the original shot that we want. And so I would say this is as close to it as we're going to get so far. I am pretty satisfied with these results. Remember, you can always tweak with all the settings. Check out with your movement of camera. Let's just check our movement one more time. So our camera starts off here. And for instance, I'm not satisfied with this one being maybe a bit too abrupt or a bit too aggressive, but I guess I'll survive with it. You can maybe tweak yours to be slightly smoother. But everything else here seems to be looking pretty good. I would say together. And there we go. The shot is there. So in the next video, I believe we can pretty much just change our final compositing settings to render out our layers and everything. And that's going to be pretty much it. And from there, we're going to jump into rendering our shot, and then going into post production. So I'll see you guys in the next video. Cheers. 16. Render settings: Is it the final video, before we jump into post production, we need to prepare our scene for rendering. As you can see, I have done some slight changes to my shot right here where I changed the endstropy to 0.980, and I've also changed the exposure to negative 1743, and then Gamma 0.404 with the emission color pretty much being this value right here, and that kind of gave me pretty very, very close look. So, you know, as I said, I encourage you to do some extra final tweaks to get your scene to that level that you're trying to achieve that get closer to the shot as we have it in here. And so for me, what we want to do next, at least is now just go over all of our render settings one by one. So I'm going to be using 600 samples. You don't need to go that high. For me, 600 samples render out this shot in 50 seconds, so I'm okay with it. But you can also play with your noise threshold by slightly increasing get more allowing, maybe a little bit more noise in some shots that you can get away with. But if you the decrease it, then it's going to take more time to render out those parts where it has more noise. So essentially, if you want to kind of bypass some of the noise, you can increase this number. So that should kind of, like, help speed up your render times. I'm not going to be using any Denise. And then everything here in my Max bounces of light is going to pretty much remain the same as it's by default and blender. As I said, with the exception of our AGX, medium height contrast and the exposure and gamma that I personally tweaked for my own preference. Then if we look at our file output at the 192-81-6204 frame rates, create a file output here. I already created one folder here inside of the beauty. So I set that up. And then R GB Alpha eight bit pretty much there. And then aside from that, everything else is over here as we wanted. Then for our layers, I added in combined, the missed one that we created very early on at the beginning. And then also I added one for volume for here for direct. And then also I enabled my cryptomats, which we're going to now take later on. Once you have all of that set up, simply glow, click Render Image. I already did that for myself, and that took me, like I said, around 53 seconds to complete. So render out the image, and once your render is completed, just go here under your compositing tab. And you'll see pretty much of a window similar to this. You can add shift a viewer node and then connect your image into both the viewer and the composite in here. What we want to do now is we just want to add separately now the ship. We want to add the other ships to the highlander, the small ships and also the mist and volume direct pass. Let's just take a look how our mis pass is looking. So this is our mis pass. You can see all of these things, and then here we have our volume direct as well. So those are all the passes that we can potentially use in our post production. So from here, what I want to do is just shift A and then file output, and I'm going to go shift A and cryptomat. There we go. So for the cryptomat, I'm just going to start off and select the highliner. So here, we can see it. We can barely see it, but it's there. And so I'm going to simply plug in the highliner in here. And then under my node settings under properties, I'm just going to change this one to be called highliner. Slash highliner. So it's going to create a folder called highliner, and inside the folder is going to create files, also called highliner. Then I'm going to add a secondary input, which is going to be or another cryptomat. So I'm going to shift D duplicate this cryptomt, MT ID change, and then control shift left click with my mouse to turn using my node wrangler, just to find these ships, and I'm going to choose under material so that it shows all of them because they're all sharing the same material, clicking on the ad, and then going on ships. And then going back on the image, as you can see, are here. So I'm going to plug this one into the next output that we've created, and I'll call this one ships slash ships this. There we go. And then that pretty much now leaves only our mist and our volume direct. So in here, I'm just going to add two more outputs. One is going to be called Ms slash Mist, and then the other one is going to be called volume volume D volume re. That's how I'm going to name them. So my mist is going to go into the mist, and then my volume direct is going to go there. And I think that pretty much solves everything else that we need. Let's see, what do we have over there? We had some That was weird. Not sure what that was, but Okay, In any case, I believe this pretty much sets up our scene. Let me just double check into my original composite how I had it created. Yep. That is fairly accurate. And so what you can do from here is simply press render. So, and let's just also leave this beauty one out of here. We don't want to render into the Cute, one to render into the render. So in here. Except, and that's pretty much it. Press render and render the entire animation. And I'll see you guys once this finish is rendering inside of after effects, we'll go deal with post production. 17. Preparing files inside AE: E to after effects. In this video, we're going to set up our files for post production, and for the final part, we're going to also be installing a plug in that's going to help us with chromatic avation. So we're going to be taking things a little bit differently in comparison to how we did it in part one. So to start off, we can actually just close off this window right here, and then go click here under Project. Right click, go Import multiple files. Just need to find all your files that have been rendered. So I have them right here inside of my render folder that I created. So I'm going to click on the Beauty. Start off with there. Click on the First image Import. I'm going to add immediately next window. Now I'm going to go go click on the Highliner, click Import and just do the same thing for all of them, so Missed. Then we have also our ships. And we are also going to import as well, our volume direct. Even though I'm not 100% sure I will be needing it in my use case. You might also want to use it for you, but it will depend on how you created your shot. So I want to click down here because I've added all of the key files for now. And then what we want to do is, I think After effect is that if you click on one of these images and you look at it, After Effect interprets these images as 30 frames per second for some reason. And so what you want to do next is just press Control Alt and then G, which is going to give you this interpreter footage, or you could go right click interpreter footage Min. Then just here, say, assume this frame rate to be 24. You need to do this for all of them. So control G 24, Control G 24, Control G 24, and for the final 124. And that pretty much has our scene more or less prepared. The final part of it is the installing of a plug in. So previously we use a method to add chromatic embraion to the previous video, but for this one, I discovered a little cool plug in that's going to speed up the process, and I think it gives a little bit of a better result for this particular scene. So If you go into your resources folder, you will find there is a file called QC A V 3.2. So all you need to do is just enter the file, and whether you're using Windows or Mac, you would click on one of these two. You can also go here under the documentation and help, which is going to set you up to with a notion page that has all the extra information. And this Quick chromatic aberration three, I believe it's called, comes from a team called Plug in everything. You also have them on YouTube, so be sure to check it out. That's kind of how I found out about this plug in. And so for the installation process, it's really not that hard. All you need to do is go QC A three here. Click on this one, Control C, and then go here where you have actually installed your after effects. So for me, it's in my C, and then I go under program files, and I find where it says Adobe. And then once I'm in this window, I'll click here on Adobe After Effects, Support files, find where it says plug ins. So right here, and then just control, paste it in here, as you can see, I have a couple of other ones. And there you go. The caveat to all of this is that we do want to save our scene now, and then we need to reset after effects for it to actually work. So do this next. So go file, save us, save your scene somewhere. I'm going to save mine right now. And I'll put it. Let's see, here my tutorials. Save. Then once you're done saving, close your after effects and then turn it on. And I'll see you in the next video where as before, I won't be having the camera turned on, as we will be jumping now into color correction. Regardless, see you guys there. Her. 18. Post: Imported our files into after effects, we've installed the plug in, we reset after effects, and now we're ready to start on post production. So to start off quite simply, I'm just going to go and rename this 0012 beauty, so that I know this in my beauty layer, and then I'm going to dragon, drop it here. It's going to automatically create a composition, as you can see in here. Right now, if I were to press play, is going to show me how my current scene And just by taking a quick observation at it, one thing that's kind of slightly bothering me is that at least in my particular case, minus has a little bit too much of a fast movement. You might be happy with yours, so you might not want to do the next thing. But in my case, what I want to do is extend the duration of my composition just by one extra second and then stretch it out, which is going to just slow down my scene ever so slightly. So I'm going to press control and then letter K on my keyboard, which is going to give me the composition settings. And then in here, I'm just going to change the duration add it one extra second. Press enter. And now I need to fill in that extra second by stretching the duration of my beauty beauty Coperate here. So what I need to do is, if you don't see this stretch here, just click on this icon at the bottom left corner, expand or collapse in and out duration stretch panes, and that's going to give you the stretch window. You can click on it. Then under the duration, just change it here to 16, which is going to give you the stretch vector of one oh 66 to seven, so okay. And it's going to automatically add a duration. And you see that it added some extra frames in between it interpolated those frames, which slightly is just going to stretch out our sine a little bit add a bit of that slower movement to it, which is perfectly okay. Go. All right. Now, from here, you can also press Control Alt, and then, I believe, left click, which is going to bring you all the way to the starting frame. And what we want to do next, especially for those who haven't used volume metrics, is we want to add a mist to our scene. Now, if you have used volume metrics, we still want to have that mist into our scene, but it's going to help us a little bit extra with the density of it inpost. So we're just going to drag and drop this mist right above the beauty in here. Now we need to tell after effects, kind of like what color to use for this mis because right now it's using this gray one if you press T to give your opacity sentence, you can kind of control it and adjust it a little bit, but I don't want it to be like this. Instead, I'm going to right click, go under new and then click solid. And then I'm going to choose this particular color EDF FFF, for my solid, p's k and k one more time. Now I need to tell the solid to use this mist as a luma mat to drive my fog. So if I go here under Track Matt and I change this to mist, and I click on this icon here, which is going to change it from Alpha met to uma Mt selected. Now we get our new fog added that is using primarily this color. Now, if you're not happy with the color that you've picked and you want to change the color, an easy way to go into your solid setting is when you have them selected, you select your solid, you press control, shift, and then letter y on your keyboard, and it's going to give you the solid settings, so you can then go here and play around with the color of your mist. In my case, I'm pretty satisfied with the one I have. Again, you can press the litter t to open your opacity settings, control the density this way, or the way I'm going to do it is I'm going to go here under my effects and presets tab that you see right here. I'm currently using the default settings, so that should make the effects and presets tab available for you right here. I'm going to type in here levels. And then if I take this levels, drag and drop it into the mist right here, and then it's going to give me the effects control. I can play around with this value right here in the graph, and that's going to also help me control the density of my mist. For now I'm going to go with something around here. That works pretty good in my case. But something that we might have forgotten is if we look here at our mist, our duration of the mist is still at 15 seconds. So every time that we add a new layer that's going to be from our project pane here, we're going to need to extend its duration to this number in particular here. So simply click on it. Control C, and then click on the stretch 1100 here, Control V, paste it, and it's going to stretch it out. So we have our mist added. Now, in between the mist and the beauty, I kind of want to add one extra layer. We can actually maybe just go above it. As a matter of fact, that would make more sense. So let's just go adjustment layer. And for this adjustment layer, let's use aumetr color, which is going to be for some basic color correction. So I'm just going to drag and drop it right in here. And then if I go here under a basic correction, I maybe just want to maybe, you know, change the contrast just ever so slightly, not too much, so maybe just a little bit of contrast right here. And then let's just go all the way to this frame. What I want to do here is I actually want to lower the strength of the sun. So I'm going to go under my curves here, and then if I go under Luma versus saturation, and I just slightly add maybe two points right around here, and actually u versus Luma Sr, and not luma versus saturation. So I can control undo this. And for this in between the red color, I add these two points, and then just slowly start dragging this down you'll see that it also decreases ever so slightly the strength of my sun. So we don't want to push it all the way because you're going to get start getting some weird artifacts. So I'm just going to change it just a tiny bit. So this was like before, and then this is after. So it just like a very, very tiny switch, can also maybe change to take the yellow value as well a little bit. Then add one more point right above it. So just pushing these two is just going to change the strength. Like that. All right. So that looks overall pretty good. I am getting too much of a yellow or round circle right there, so might need to push this one slightly more up just to bring up the haze a little bit back. There we go. But I think that overall should work pretty good. And then the next thing I want to do is if I compare the color of the blacks in here versus the one in here, I want to actually increase the strength of these blacks over there, so I can go all the way up and then just take this blacks value and drag it to negative, like, maybe negative 89 like this just gives me pretty good. Estimate to what I need. And that's pretty much it for our lumetri. I would say, I'm pretty satisfied with the remaining things. You can always play around a little bit. Maybe one thing that I forgot that I could add is a vignette. So going just right here under a vignette and just taking the amount and dragging it to a negative could give you like a little vignete. I don't want to go this strong. So obviously, I'm just going to have it be like, maybe negative negative 0.5, like, a very, very subtle vignetting. So before after. There we go. All right, after you're done with your color correction, you can play around obviously with these values. You can go into your curves here, you can push the highlights up, you can drag the shadow slightly down to increase the contrast if you want. I am pretty much satisfied with my out of the box, and this is why also we used PNG because one of the reasons we use PNG, the benefits of it is because you literally get out of the box render as you want it. So there's really not much color correction that we want to do. This particular case. So what remains next is actually, we want to add now the chromatic aberration that we use for our plug in. So let's just rename this adjustment layer. Press enter, call this lumetri color. And then let's add a new adjustment layer like this, and this one is going to be called chromatic. And we're going to go here under effect some presets, step in here chromatic. I is going to give you under plug ins everything quick chromatic aberration number three. Drag, drop it into the chromatic right here. Going to give you some chromatic aberration, but in our case, we actually want it to reverse it. We want the reds to be on this side and the blues to be on the right side. So we need to go here under, I believe position here. And when we have 0.5, we need to change it to negative 0.5, and that's going to just reverse our positioning. And then additionally, under stylistic, what we can do is just add a little bit of a blur, not too much, maybe like a three just going to add, like, very some subtle blur. So this would be like way too much. So just like round three, should be fine. Maybe we can just change this value to 0.7 just to make these a little bit stronger, but I wouldn't really go more than what we have currently, as you can see, this is it's very subtle, this chromatic everation. It could maybe just slightly increase the blur to four and then decrease this value to negative 0.6. So around here should be pretty good overall. And then the next thing for us is to add the globe. So we can go again, R click new adjustment layer, enter, type in here, glow, and we can go under our effects and presets and just go glow as well, drag and drop this glow in here. And then we're going to be using some values that I already kind of like know that going to work for me. So for a threshold, I actually want the threshold to be fairly large, and I'm going to change it to 80%. And then my radius is going to be around, let's see, around 200. And that's going to give me like this halo effect around the ship. As you can see here, we also have that halo effect right around here around the ship, and that's kind of what we want to achieve with this globe. That's kind of like the purpose of the globe. We don't want the globe actually to affect around the ship. We want to be inside this part of the ship only. So for that, I'm going to show you also how to do it. But first, let's just complete our settings here. So the radius, I'm going to change to 200 and then intensity, I'm going to even bump that up to 1.6 for now. So it's going to be pretty high, as you can see. But later on we might tweak the opacity right here under our globe setting. So we want to tell this glow to only be affecting the ship inside. And so for that, we need to use a mask. Now, inside of blender, I made the mistake of not rendering an Alpha mask, but luckily, we can convert these ships that we have here into one that's going to give us kind of the advantage to use it. So it's not actually going to be an Alpha. It's going to be a Luma, but let me just show you how to do it. So we need to take the ships, drag and drop it into here, and we again need to stretch it out, so control C stretch factor, control V, right in here. And then from here, we need to let's just preview our ships by double clicking here. So this is kind of what we have right now. And if your scene is completely black, you just need to toggle the transparency create right here at the bottom corner, and that should kind of enable you. So we need to change now the transparency over here, and we're going to do this by simply adding a solid. Let's just go here under solid. Solid composite, and then drag and drop this solid composite under our ships is going to give us now a black and white value, but we want to invert this black and white value. So we're going to actually go another effect, and let's go invert it because everything that's going to be white is going to be kind of like the mask that's going to be used. So right now if we used it, it would only have the globe effect around the white areas and not around the black areas. We don't want that. We want to reverse it. So that's why we're adding a invert now, perfect like this. And then to control the strength of the mask, we can also add a, let's see what this is called. It's something with an E. Oh, my God. My mind is blanking out right now. Exposure. There it is. I'm supposed to remember this all the time, and I currently forgot. I can't believe. Anyway, let's take this exposure, drag it right in here. And then the exposure, if we control the strength of you can see, it becomes wider or becomes digger. So let's just actually see how this works in effect. Let's go back into our composition here, composition C, as you can see. Click on the globe, change the track mat to use the ships, and then change this here again to a luma. Right now, this is how it's looking, so we don't really want it to be obviously like this. What we want is slightly different. So we need to go here under our let's see, chips, and then change the exposure to something maybe lower, as you can see, and this is kind of then what we're getting. So if we change it slightly lower, we get this kind of result, which works pretty good. One more thing I would probably suggest we should probably add our chromatic right above our globe, so it's not being affected by the glow itself that way. So, there we go. So if we can increase. We can also go here, change the globe strength on this side, and I just want to have it very, very subtle just around these edges like this. So we are getting exactly the result we're looking for right now, which is pretty good. And I'm going to go back into mylumetric color and just decrease the strength of these blacks that I added just a tiny bit. There we go. To add a bit more of that ziness to my ship. Perfect. So far, so good, I would say. Alright. Now that we have our chromatic added. We have our globe added. You can also play around with these values. If something is too strong, you can just change it either in here, or you can go and change it in here under the exposure settings. So we have a lot of flexibility in different ways of manipulating our scene right now. The next thing on our list would make sense to be just adding some depth of field. So for depth of field, we're going to create a separate mask, and you might have seen this method before that something that I very commonly use. So we're going to go and add a new solid. This one is going to be pure white like this. And then for this solid, we are also going to now precompose it. So we're going to add it into its own separate group. So I'm going to right click. I'm going to click, precompose and click Okay. I can rename the solid. I'm just going to call it DOF, which stands for depth of field. And then I'm going to double click on it to just enter this group to see what's going on in here. Inside of this solid, I want to add a new adjustment layer like this. And then for this adjustment layer, I'm going to go here on the side for effects and the sep in gradient. And a gradient rep is just going to give me like this gradient that you see here. And for it, I'm going to click on this bottom dot that you see right there. I'm just going to drag it all the way up. So we're now going to create a mask that's going to be used to tell and we'll set blender to tell after effects, kind of like which areas we want to be grade out, grade out, or blurred out to be specific. Sorry. And then which areas we want to be in focus. So everything that has a little bit of a darker value is going to be blurred a little bit more versus everything that has a brighter value is going to be in focus. So we need to add another adjustment layer, so we can actually just control C control V, duplicate this one. Let's call this one here top. And then let's call this one here bottom. So let's just bott. And sometimes when you double click, it opens this new layer, so we can close this layer, go back into your composition settings. Click on the bottom one, click on the gradient ramp, and just replace the position to go like this. It goes bottom, and this one goes top or we can actually have it somewhere around here. Now, we need to combine these two together, so we can do this by simply going pressing normal and using multiply, and this should add us with the both of So if you would think this is too much for you, maybe you just want to drag these slightly more up. You can then take the bottom one, gradient, drag it slightly more down so that we have a little bit more area in focus. Now we need to go back into our composition here, the main one, so we can click on this middle one right there. And we can actually hide this depth of field pre comp, like this because we don't really need it. What we do need is adding a new adjustment layer. And inside of this adjustment layer, we're going to add an effect core called lens blur. So camera lens blur this one right here. Then just drag and drop it into the adjustment layer. Right now, everything is super blurred out because we haven't really told it which layer to use as a mass. So let's just go here on a blur map layer and tell it to use the depth of field, and then also tell it to invert that blur mass. And now, as you notice, the top part here is blurred versus the bottom of. If I go in here and I say, Hey, have this part actually even more blurred out bottom wise, it's going to reflect here in my shot, now more of it is blurred out. Now, obviously, I don't want it to be super strong. Maybe from a blur radius. I want to change some settings. For instance, my aspect ratio to slightly lower. Let's see maybe the blur of it. Also. Let's use I guess three should be fairly okay. Additionally, one more cool thing to show you, sorry, one more Sorry. We can actually hide these two guys as well. And let's add one more adjustment layer. If you want to do like a circular blur. So you can just go here. Let's call this one circle. And then go here under gradient ramp. Put it in here and just change the way the ramp is being done into a radial one, push this here in the middle, and then push these colors around like this. We can actually go and increase the circle, so we can drag this one even further, something like that, and then change these colors, the top one make it white, bottom one make it pure black. So now what's in the center is going to be fully in focus versus what's out of out of it is going to be blurred. As you can see, let's now drag the black values. Let's go where is our gradient, push this a little bit more like this, and then go back into our comb. You'll see that part here, this part here is a little bit blurred, then this here in the center is focused. So this is now a matter of personal preference on how you want to drive your blur. I'm going to increase the strength of it just ever so slightly. Actually like this one. I'm not going to lie. I'm kind of fan of it. Although I am noticing that in here, this bottom back one is relatively in a decent focus, so I'm going to decrease the strength of my blur here to maybe like a three. And then I'm going to go control all the left click just to see how my starting frame is looking. And I think overall this is fairly okay. So we can actually now rename this one and call it blur. There we go. And you can always go back and change this out by simply clicking, you know, use the bottom ones here, and then go back to your com, press capslck, I press it accidentally, and you're going to have the regular blur where the top one here and the bottom one are being affected. This is now again, a matter of personal preference, choose whichever way works for you. Actually, looking back at it now, like I said, I'm going to, this is a trial and narrow testing process where we go back and forth. I'm going to stick with the one that I currently selected. And then additionally, we want to add a light burst effect. It's going to give us a little bit of extra that what I call it anamorphic lens look. So we want to go under new adjustment layer. And then let's call this one light burst. Like this. And then let's go into here and type in light burst as well, CC, drag it, put it in here. We don't want to use these huge values, so we're just going to change everything here to one, it's going to give us a very nice subtle blur effect on the side, so that way, it kind of helps out as well. So it helps with the scene quite a lot, which is really nice. Now, the last thing that's really remaining or two last things that are remaining is adding the lens flare effect and the grain. So for the lens flare itself, we just need to go here into our project, right click, import file. And I was able to find this lens flare on YouTube simply. Just typing in free lens flare YouTube, and it'll show you a bunch of them. So just take this one and then import it And now we just need to add it to our scam, we can add it to the very top of our sca right around here. And so we want this lens flare to happen. Let's see, let's hide it for now. We want it to start happening actually right about here is when we want it to appear. So let me just hide this one here. So we want the lens flare to happen right around this part here when this here is appearing. So if I turn on the lens flare now, and then if I go here under it's the mode and change this to screen, starts to give me this nice little effect on the side. And I think if I press play now, it's going to take a while for it to pre render. I'm just going to press play, wait for it to pre render, and then just preview this scene as it looks. Let's preview our shot now. And also, if this is taking way too long, you can turn off some of these effects to speed up your preview time, if it's taking too long to render out the preview. So let's just go press play and see what we have. This looks pretty good so far. Nice little lens flare. There we go, looking really good. And then as it covers it, it's supposed to disappear. So I need to work on my timing here a little bit, change some of the durations of the lens flare, so I need to lens flower to pretty much stop around here. So maybe if I push this, let's see. This is where the nsloer needs to stop almost. There we go. Then let's see if we go like this, this is also way too long. Maybe I just need to change the duration of it to be something around here. Let's see, this part, it goes, and then here it stops. And then maybe this part here. I can actually have it be appearing about let's see. So this looks actually pretty good. Let's press plate. Now, if this lens player in particular isn't working for you, I'll be adding the link to where you have this library of a bunch of the other lens flyers, you can try out with different ones as well. So that link is also going to be included. For me, in particular, this one does a pretty decent job as well. There we go. You can also time it a little bit better just by pushing this maybe slightly lower here. That looks better. Pushing this slightly more back, or actually pushing this, let's see. Somewhere here. Yeah, and then pushing this one like that. Let's see, tweaking it. There we go. Much better timing. So, this pretty much concludes this shot. So only thing that's remaining is just going here under dit, simply clicking here under Sorry file, and then export add to render Q. You can use these settings that you currently have and then choose a specific folder where you want it to be added. And just simply click save, and then render, and this is going to render at your scene. As mentioned, all of the resources here that you see will be in the resources folder, including also the links to the lens flares and everything else additionally. So This is pretty much concludes this course, and I'll see you guys in part three, where we're going to be building our final shot. Hope you've enjoyed it and see you there. Cheers.