Blender 3D: Cinematography Masterclass – Dune Part 1/3

1. Intro To The Course: Hi. D in here with another blended utoral. This will be the first of a three part series in which we'll be recreating the arrival to racis sequence base from the movie doom. In this course, specifically, we'll focus on the opening shot in which we see the highliner arriving to the planet Iraqis along with the small ships coming out of its carrying Htrads. This course is intended for both beginners and slightly advanced users who have already watched a couple of videos and are now looking to improve their skills in terms of realism, texturing, cinematography, modeling. And post production. We'll start off by doing a quick breakdown of our scene and then move straight into blender. In this step by step process, you'll be recreating the planet racks from scratch, using procedural textures and then move on to model the highlander, a cylindrical shaped ship used for interstellar travel in the universe of Dune. From there, we'll jump into texturing the highlander where we will utilize a variety of blender nodes in order to bring our scene to life using mostly procedural textures. We'll also cover some basic geometry nodes setups, where we'll be animating our small ships coming out of the highner. For post, I chose to use after effects due to the complexity of the shot, and in case you don't have it, you can also get a seven day free trial on the website, which is more than enough for the duration of our compositing stage. So, with all that out of the way, let's begin. 2. Onboarding: This is going to be a very quick burning 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 these 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 explained 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 little 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 wireframe like this. You can just do this yourself by going here into the wireframe, right click right over here on this checkmark, and then saying either add to Quick favorites, which is a quick que 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, gns, 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 highlander 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. And so, usually, you'd have to go here under select select D by trade, 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 wrangler 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 wrangler, 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 and the preferences, you'll be able to find it. So what the node wrangular 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 Md needs to go into the base 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 BS DF, 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 building our textures for the highliner. Then also, for instance, another cool feature is, let's say we have a noise texture right here and then we have another noise sture right below it. And now we need to mix these two together. By default, you would usually have to go mix step 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, click with your mouse like this, move it downwards. It's going to mediately create a mixed color node for you. 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 plugins. All right. Then we have the copy attributes add on. And the copy attributes is again a blender native plugin that you just go here under Edit references, tap 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 an array modifier in it. And let's say I wanted to now transfer these two modifiers to this cube that has none. Usually, you would have to go here manually, type in all of these 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. A here, you see me having s. So I need to UV unwrap this model. I'll press A, unwrap. And so now if I go under my UV editing, inside of here, you'll see that this is how my UV map. Looks like. 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 so this is not a native blender add on, but it is free, and and the link to download it is going to come also in the resources file. So when you go, you find it right here in the GHubRpository, 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 into tutorial at the very end. And this will allow us to essentially send tracking data from Blender into After effx. I'm not going to be doing that right now, but essentially, for instance, if I press play, you'll see 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 effx that we can then later on use for compositing. This plug in also comes with the 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. And you'll see me using this at the very end. In general, you simply need to select the T that you need, go into file, export, and Adbter JSX. And that's pretty much it. We've covered all of the shortcuts. We've covered all of the plug ins, 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. Cheers. 3. Creating the planet: So for the first video auditorial, I want to start off with something fairly straightforward and simple that's not going to be too much of a challenge. In this case, that's going to be the creation of the planet. Mainly because, well, we don't need to do much of the modeling, but also at the same time, the texturing is fairly straightforward, as you'll see as we move along. So, to begin with, what we can do just right off the bat is, you know, take out everything that we have here, press A and x, and you can see all my strokes here on the lower left corner, and we can simply start by adding an object that is most similar to a planet. In this case, that is going to be a UV sphere as we can see here. I'm going to have 32 segments and 16 rings, and I think that's perfectly fine. So from here, what I can do is just press shade smooth. The only issue here, though, is that you can see that it's not perfectly rounded. You can still see these vertices points going on here, even if we shade smooth it. So I'm going to add a pressing control and one, one more extra level of subdivision as you can see here. And we're pretty much done with the modeling of the planet. The only thing now that remains is, you know, getting detect string. So before we move into detect string, I just want to set up some of the render settings because we are going to be turning our render engine now in a second. So one of the things that we need is to change this to cycles. I'm going to put here experimental GPU compute. I'm going to use 250 samples. I don't think I need to go more than that for now at least. And here, I'm going to turn off Denise. For my color management. I'm going to use, let's see SRGB filmic, I'm going to change this to AG x so that we get better highlight roll off over there. And let's see. I believe that is pretty much it on this front. One last thing that's actually remaining is turning out our render. And we can also go here and just change, let's see the color to pitch dark. Actually, one thing before we do that, let's just go back into our solid view. So S is something that I forgot to talk about. And that is, well, when I posted this video, a couple of people, like, really, you know, we commented about how the size of scale was very close and similar to how it was portrayed in movies. And so I want to elaborate a bit more about that in terms of the scale of the objects that we need to be building. Well, because first of all, we can't, you know, create a planet object here that is going to be the exact same size as a planet itself, because probably would cause issues for a blender. It might probably crash, but, you know, it maybe probably also very impractical. So we do the best that what we have, and we try to mimic the idea of scale. So let me just quickly spend a few seconds to talk about this. So in the shot that we are right now going to be building is, you know, we have this object with the high liner, which is used to transport ships across space across galaxies. I think even I'm not sure exactly. Sorry for that. And if we just look at this object here alone. So just looking at this here. So try to disregard the small ships that are coming out, we can't really say you know we can't really perceive how big or small this object is because there's nothing to compare it with. But immediately, as we see there are the ships that are coming out from here, We can really say, Okay, well, we have people that are inside of these ships. Therefore, if these ships are big by themselves, and then we have also this ship here that is even bigger, then, you know, this is pretty huge by default. And then as the ship goes up slowly and up, we start to notice the planet, and then we get to the planet here, and then we can see that, you know, the planet takes roughly a third of the screen but the ship taking one third, and then these guys come out like that. Right. Another thing and maybe we're getting a little bit more ahead is that we're going to have to work without lighting as well. I'm not going to talk about that now, but if you look at this image, try to maybe see if there is something specific about a lighting that's unique to both objects. So like something that's different here in comparison to here. Try to figure it out and then I'll talk about it when we get to that part. All right. So this is kind of like the sense of scale that we need to try to nail. So we can, as I said, use real size objects. So instead, we're just going to press S 100 and get 200 by 200 is pretty still large, but it's like nowhere the scale little planet. Anyway, from here, what I want to do then is just going into my rendered, and we're going to go into the world, push this all the way to black like that. And now, if I remove the overlays and the gizmo, we are pretty much in deep space with nothing to see around us. I'm going to push this a little bit up here and then go into my shader editor. And speaking of lighting as well. This scene is fairly simple in terms of it because, you know, in space, there is only one source of light, and that is the sun or the star, whichever is closer. And so from here, what we're going to do simply is add a light and go as the sun. And there it is. We have our sun. We can change the settings here a little bit, like, maybe, I don't know, let's put in let's put it in 15 for starters. I was just getting some random messages on my phone. Sorry about that. And then we can also play around with the angle a little bit here to try to give this a little bit of a nice fall off and then move it, maybe something like this. This isn't going to be the actual planet that we're going to be using in our final shot, but it's going to be kind of as a base for that planet, if that makes sense right now. Don't worry. It will make sense once we get to the composition part of the scene. So from here, I'm going to just push this maybe like 230 to get this nice fall off here, and I'm going to start by adding a texture. So speaking of textures, if I open my PRF here and just like zoom in a little bit, I have some pictures of Mars here that I saved. And I believe these are all taken from NASA. And I believe there is like this huge four k or eight K map of both of the planet Earth and also planet mars that you could potentially use to build off planets. Alternative to building planets, you can also use a procedural, which is the direction that we're going to go. But a quick fun fact, as a matter of fact. If you watch the movie, Dune, Part one, when they land on Iraqus, there is, like, a scene when they're looking at the two moons that are on the planet that are orbiting around the planet. And one of the moons has like this huge, like, ridge going on here. I think it has like three. They call it the hand of God. I'm not 100% sure, but if you compare that one to this one here, they look almost identical. So, which makes me think that they either used the textures of Mars a little bit and then just changed them to make them look like the moon of the planet racus or they used it as an inspiration. But I think they used actual images, and then they just manipulated them a little bit. Not 100% sure. This is just the theory. Anyway, so from here, let's start building our plan. We're not going to be using, as I said, actual image textures, we're going to be building our own procedural one. So this is going to start off by adding a noise. And a quick heads up. If you're using blender four point. So anything below 4.1, instead of a noise texture, you're going to be using a mus grave texture. I believe in 4.1. So what they did is they combined the noise texture and the mus grave texture into one, completely canceling out the mus grave and then just adding all the functionalities into the noise. So once you add the noise or the muscar texture, you're going to go into the type and change this to rig multi fractal, which is going to give you like this kind of shape. And while we're also at it, you know, looking at planets, there's not much shininess, even if we look at this shot here, there's no shininess to it happening. And so they're pretty rough just by default, like that. So we can push this to 0.9. All right. From here, what I can do is, you know, we can play around with these values a little bit, where the magic is really going to start to happen is once we add these two, so I press control T using my node wrangular atom, and we add a mapping node here. And now we duplicate this noise texture here, and we essentially disrupt or not disrupt. I just, like, change the vector mapping that is happening from this node into the noise texture and we mix it with another noise texture. We're going to start getting these, like, very unique shapes essentially that you'll start to notice. So if I go here and press control and shift, and then right click, It's going to give me like this line that's with two dots. And so if I go down to the noise texture, it's going to immediately add a mixed texture like this. You can also, you know, go here, shift A and type in mixed color. It's the same way, except, you know, this one is a little bit faster, I would say. And this now creates this very cool looking shape. If you're old enough, if you remember iPhone, if you're old enough that would be three. I believe iPhone 11. That was the one. Like, I had, like, this planet planet in the background. This kind of This texture right now kind of looks like that planet. So if you were to map like the colors that were from there, you could pretty much get a very similar look. In our case, we're not going to be using that, but we are going to be playing with these values. Now, if at this point, you know, you might be even asking yourself, like, how do I know in the future, like, how am I going to know which values to use. And well, there's, you know, you know, either you know what every texture what every thing does, every node and blender does and what every value here does when you change it, or, you know, you simply experiment. It's usually a combination of both. You know some of it and other things you experiment. And in my case, you know, I didn't know exactly which numbers to put in here, what to do. I was just simply spending, you know, an hour and two, just like experimenting, trying to get a certain values that I found worked best for me. And so when you watch these tutorials, usually, there's a pre planning that goes into it, trying to figure out what works best, and then showcasing it to you so that you don't have to waste that time trying to figure that out. Hence the value of the tutorial. So in this case, I'm just going to tell you the values that I found worked best for me. And those are going to be around here, I think I put like somewhere around one maybe 1.6, I think, something like this. And let me just take a look here. All right. So this one, I lower it around. 12 roughness was, I guess one then here, seven. I'm not worried too much about these because maybe we're going to also have to change them slightly a little bit later, but I do want to get a general, you know, look of the plan. So here we have 16. I'm going to put like 16.5. And this nails pretty much this part here. And then we can also push this slightly lower to, like, Let's see, 0.26, something like this. And then in this noise picture, really what's going to make this unique is if we crank down here up to like 100 and now we're starting to get this really nice planetary shape here. We can also change the cuarity maybe roughly 23. Again, you don't need to adhere to these exact values that I'm putting in. You can use your own judgment and try to come up with the values that you want to have for your planet yourself. You know, you don't need to use the exact ones that I do. And then here and we're just going to push this to, like, Something like this is like this ridge happening right here. This looks very interesting actually. So I'm going to keep it at this. So I'm not even adhering exactly to the values that I use. I'm also improvising as I go along. And now, now that we have the planet, really, what we need to do next is essentially just map out the colors that we want from here. To these black and white values that we have. And a very easy way to do this is going to be just using a color ramp. So just going here into the color ramp. And then here, let's just take this value. So I'm going to go into my I think it's called eye dropper. There we go. Eye dropper and just selecting here. I'm going to use the eye dropper also here. And select maybe a lighter part like this. Now, it isn't perfect yet. We are going to need to do some tweaking. And your source of light also is going to, you know, affect it to a degree as well. So what I want to do next here. Let me see. I think I'm going to just push this one maybe here. I'm going to add one more, and push this one, make it slightly darker. Then this one here might increase the saturation. Give it a bit more of this exactly this kind of color that I want. I might do the same here. I also push the saturation a little bit. I don't want it to be this dark, so I'm going to push this one, maybe a little bit. Also, I don't want it to be like that. That's a bit too much, I think. Something like this. And then this one here, the last one here at the bottom, I might want to push it a little bit up. So I get like these lighter parts of the planet. And again, you might not want to have this exact look. You can just, you know, play around with the values to get something that works best for you. One thing to notice is that there's not this many details going on, so I might just go and, you know, decrease the amount of details. That are going on here. And maybe going here and also, well, I do want some details, but maybe we just crank down the roughness a little bit. Then cracking down to roughness, maybe here pushing the details a little bit more up, I guess. But then cracking down to roughness. Something like that, and then maybe playing with the gain. Let's see. I do want to if I drop this down, then technically the size of the ridges is increasing. So that makes it feel bigger and less detail. So if I and this is looking really good right now. So a little bit of experimentation gets us quite a way and gets cooling objects. Again, we can play lacinarity here. Okay. And maybe now go and play more with the colors so that they blend a little bit better. I would say. So they're not so aggressive in their coloring. Then this one here, that's the brightest. I'm going to push it. Something like this. There we go. I feel like this one really kind of gets it closest to what we have in here, especially as the light is coming here to here, this looks pretty good. So you can try to get these like that. Here are the x values, so you can go and just typing these numbers. 976 42c. A, c72 A, c7c2. And then the last one here that I use was A 351. My suggestion would be try to get your own look going. Don't copy exactly experiment, play with the values. You know, play with this here, change it. I already like this even better. You know, so there's so many options that you can create with this technique and it gets you a long way. So one more thing to do. Let me just push this maybe, something like this. And we might even change this a little bit later. So one more thing to do is, let's just push this a little bit here, and let's add a mixed color. If you look at my pup here. And if we look at the image of Mars and you look at these edges right here, you can notice there's a bit of a white light fall off happening. I believe this has to do with the atmosphere ozone or just like definitely some atmospheric fall off happening there. And so in order to create something similar to it, what we're going to do is add here, let's see. Okay. We're going to add a weight layer, layer weight. Sorry. And we're going to take the fernel and just plug it into the factor. And so what the fernel does is gives us this kind of light fall off depending where the light is coming from around the object. And then if we just drop this down to, like, maybe 0.2 and showcase it here, this is what we get. Now, this is a bit too aggressive for my taste, so I'm going to definitely try to play around with this color, maybe try to get it close to the planet itself, kind of like this. And I believe this is pretty good by default. Like that maybe just slightly a little bit less. So it's not too aggressive, then you can play around with here, see how you want it to go. Something like this gets us quite a long way. Perfect. Another detail that we can also add, but we don't want to go too crazy with it is simply going here typing in bump. Adding a bump map by combining the factor of the noise into the height and then going into the normal here, but we don't want to go, you know, d aggressive. So as I said, we want to be very, very subtle with this. So just go all the way down probably something like this, like 0.2 0.3. So it's like it's barely noticeable. It is there. And again, like I said, this is more of a base. We're not going to exactly use this planet that you see here. We're going to but we are going to use this texture set up for sure. So play around with these values. This is pretty much the basis for our planet. And so from here in our next video, we're going to start modeling the highliner here that we have. And we're going to also talk a little bit about the challenges that I had to, you know, figure out through the process because I do think that sharing the process of how we got to this point also is valuable information on its own. So thank you so much for watching. Hope you've enjoyed this video, and I'll see you in the next video. That doesn't make sense. 4. Intro to the Highliner: Let's quickly talk about the high Lner. So the highliner is this cylindrical shaped ship in the world Universe of Dune, or at least in the Vu version of Dune, where it's kind of used for interstellar travel, and there's a very specific reason why the ship itself is cylindrically shaped. So it kind of acts as a wormhole between two points in space. So as you pass through it, it's kind of like passing through a tunnel that leads you from one point in space to other kind of similar to the wormhole if you've watched interstellar or the way that it's explained in event horizon, the movie. So the reason why it's shaped like that is because it's a tunnel between two points in space. But if we look at the scenes. So here I have actually I believe this is a concept art that was used for the movie, as we can look at it here. And then here you can see a very similar shot that was actually used in the movie. I believe this is when the Benger are arriving to the planet Keldon. Is a led the home of the Atrads. I can't remember exactly. Sorry. I'm kind of blanking out here for a second. But as you can see here, this one is very cylindrically shaped. As it is the one here. But the scene that we're building off, the one that we see here, this one is a little bit different, which actually made me think of for a little while. I believe that essentially there are probably more of these highlander ships that are used in a movie, and they're just different, which would also make sense. There's no reason why one would only be the same, and all of them will look like it. So if we look at the ones that are here and we compare this one here to this one, we can immediately notice that this one is wider on its vertical axis, whereas this one here is wider or its horizontal axis. And not only that, if we observe this material that we see, this is definitely something metallic, we can see this glossy finish right over here, almost like a brush metal kind of thing going on, versus where if we look at this image right here, to me, this looks almost like a stone. I'm not sure how else to explain, but it definitely feels like a stony material, nonetheless, especially like here as well, and round the corners, and so on. And another thing that I noticed is, if we look over here, and then in increase the levels, as you can see, the shape of the ship isn't exactly cylindrical. It's more of a I think it starts off like narrower, and then as it goes further along, it increases and becomes wider. So you can kind of notice it right around, like, see how this one is going like this, and then it goes like this. So this and this. So it's definitely increasing. I think this has to do also maybe because of its rotation, but it also has to do because of its shape. So I think those two things we need to keep in mind. And then if I zoom in and here, we can see that way the light bends. It goes like this, and then it goes like that. And the reason for that is there are actually two I'm not sure how to call this. It would be like, two edges. Like, there's one edge right around here that you can notice it because of how the light is bending over here in the shadow. So there's one edge curve that goes probably around like this. And I believe we can even see it. If we go here, this is one here, right? So this little detail. And then there's another one like that before it actually goes through the tunnel. And it's also here. You can see it's also there, but it's a little bit less noticeable. So it's not as extreme as in this case. So those are just like the small details that we'll want to pay attention to as we now start modeling and building our highliner itself. 5. Building the Highliner base: Before we jump into building the base of our highliner, let me just take a quick second and organize some of this stuff on my layout going on. I want to start with the name of the material here, and I'm just going to rename it Planet. Then here in my collection settings, I'm going to change the name of the collection also to planet. I'm going to change the sphere name to planet base. And then the sun is just going to be planet key light. Additionally, for the planet, I'm going to give it a thematic tag orange because, well, obviously, our dune planet is orange as well. And then additionally, I'm going to go new collection and call this collection high liner and give it a thematic color of red, similar to the spas and guild, if you're familiar with the lore of Dune. All right. From here, I am going to now just organize this layout a little bit better, starting off with pushing this a little bit down, and then also hiding the planet, enabling my overlays, enabling my Gizmo, so I can see it. And I'm going to go here and change this to three D viewport. So this lower part, if you don't have too much real estate on your monitor, I have like a 27 inch monitor that I'm looking on. So if you have a much smaller screen, and you think you're kind of having struggle seeing everything, I would suggest then just maybe clicking here, pushing downwards, and then just working on the top part. Don't worry about the bottom part. But if you can't, it is better, and it is going to be more helpful to kind of have this bottom part, and you'll see in a second exactly why. So for the bottom part, I'm going to hide the overlays and hide the gizmo. I'm going to put this reference right here. And now I do want to get closer to my three d cursor. But because we scaled our planet so big, it kind of gets a bit tricky once you start zooming in. And so a quick dirty solution to that is just going to be shift A at a que where a plane doesn't really matter. You can either select it and then start scrolling towards it, get your way there. An alternative, if you're really far away from it, you can just press Tilda key and then go view select, and there we go. And then you can do the same here, have it selected, view selected, and we're here. Okay. I don't really need this plane, so I can take it out. And I want to start off with the base for the high Lner which is going to be a cylinder because a cylinder is what the high Lner looks like. So I'm going to go shift A and add a cylinder. I'm going to change the amount of vertices because I don't want as many details. I'm going to start off with as little details as possible and slowly build upon those details as we go along because it's going to be much easier to do big changes to less details than to do big changes when we have more details. So I'm going to change this to 16. Okay. Somewhere around here, and I can change the cap field type because we don't really need these cap fields at the top and at the bottom to nothing so that we have the entrance and the exit. Additionally, now, if I go into my front view, I can rotate this by pressing r and then cooling control and so inside, I think, ten degree increments, I'm rotating it to have this perfectly aligned with the x axis. So it's like 90 degree rotation if I go here, and we can see exactly 90. I'm not sure why this has 0.00. I'm just going to change this to zero. But I guess it keeps staying like that, there we go. So from here, I now want to kind of get this view similar to what I have here on my right side of my reference. And I can also add, let's see, a subdivision surface. We can go two ways about it. We can go into your modifiers, add modifiers, type in subdivision surface or it's already here. Or a quick shortcut to do that is by pressing control and one with your object selected and immediately add a subdivision surface modifier. I'm going to go into levels viewport, changes to one more. And you can still see these faces. So to mitigate that, I'm going to go right click Shade Smooth for now. And I'm not going to go apply this subdivision surface. As I said, we do want to keep this non destructive for as long as possible. So what I want to do next is kind of elongate the z axis to, let's see, 3.5. So something, I would say, like this. And then I'm going to scale this S 100 kind of the same as we did with our planet. But as you can see, we're now quite literally inside our cylinder. And so I'm going to start zooming out by scrolling my wheel on the mouse. Just to do the same at my lower window. But if you notice at some point, if you scroll out too much, you start getting this, like, clipping error, I mean, it's not really an error. It's because in our view settings here, we have our clip start and clip end. Our end is at 1,000 meters, so like 1 kilometer, and we are kind of like getting at that point over 1 kilometer distance. So it starts clipping. And so we can just change this by adding an extra zero here. And so we are now good. We can do the same here if we just go press on this arrow, go in our view and add an extra zero right there. And so now if I zoom in closer, zoom out, I can pretty much see everything without it being clipped. Another thing, which is the first and easiest change that we need to do to our base mesh really is, well, right now, we have a perfectly rounded circle. When looking here at our highliner, I think it is a bit more squished on well, in our case, the y axis. So what I can do is just press S and y on my keyboard and then slowly start just moving my mouse inwards so I can start getting this squish happening. And again, I'm using this lower part of my window as a reference, well I have it kind of positioned as closely and similarly as possible to what we have going on in here. Towards this look right there. And I would say as a starting point, again, we can change this a bit later. I would say this is fairly more or less okay, not great, not terrible, but it's slowly getting there, right? The other thing is this lower part. And by the way, we are going to be focusing more on the front part. Of the high Lner because we can barely even see the back part. So the back part, there's going to be some little work done to it, like, a little bit of tweaking, but not that much as we're going to be spending the majority of our time on this front part. And so this lower part is, I think, at a bigger angle, or maybe it's also because we are looking at our highlanger from below. So still, I want to go and select this entire front ring. So clicking number two, going into my edge select, lt and clicking, selecting all the edges, pressing one to go into my vertex select mode, and then pressing holding shift, pressing on the top vertice. This one here, make sure that it's color white while all the other ones are orange. So that means that this one is our active vertice right now. If I go and press the period key on my keyboard and go into the active element, and now I press S to start scaling, everything is going to be scaling towards that point, essentially. Which is what we want, but not yet. I'm going to press escape to reset everything, and I'm going to go into my front view and simply press to extrude X to go a little bit forward, something like this, and now press S. So I can start slowly getting this bend right here. Let me again adjust what we have going on there. And I would say, this is a pretty good starting point. I am going to go GZ, and I'll push everything slightly a little bit down, and then maybe scale it one more time. Like this. And so what you notice is that my front part is pretty much staying the same when I'm doing the scaling, and all of the scaling is moving towards the center part of this dot here that we have, which is why we have the active element here selected. Okay, so this is starting to look pretty good. I'm going to push this G Z now all a little bit more down to get kind of like that in comparison to my reference. I've been constantly looking at my reference while doing all these changes. I'm going to go now back into my median point. And I'm going to just going to do a regular scaling where everything is now going to get scaled. Perfect. I'm going to go into my tab, pressing tab, going into my object mode like this, and then press S and Y one more time to scale everything in its y axis to make it a little bit more like that. All right. So I think this is a pretty good starting point. I am considering whether or not I have done it a little bit too much. Don't worry you can always go S and y, and then just, you know, because we are dealing with pretty much only three edge rings here, so it's very low poly right now, which is also kind of the point why we did it. But yeah, for now, I would say this is more or less pretty good. I am considering adding one more edge ring right here and then pressing here, scaling this a little bit more, just a little bit and then pushing this one towards the back, pushing this one here, maybe just keeping it as it is right now. Let me just check how this is looking in comparison to that. One thing that's quickly bugging us, where we're like, Okay, it doesn't look exactly. Something is missing. And that is because the back part of it is right now actually bigger than the front part, where in fact, the back is supposed to be smaller, either because that's how they did the ship or it's because the ship is so huge and it's further away from the camera, so the back is again small because if something is further, it looks smaller. And so we're kind of going to do a combination of both of those things where it's almost like an illusion where we are going to have everything here selected. We're going to click on the bottom vertice right here in the middle. So, kind of like the reverse of what we did for the front part, I'm going to have this one active element selected and then just start scaling, do something like this. Let me check my front view. Something, I would say, Like that, I would push this one probably more towards the middle, so it doesn't look so weird because if I push it closer to here, I think it looks a little bit if he may be somewhere here, and then this one, make sure that the bottom part is selected, scale it a little bit more. All right. Now the question is, do we want to push it a little bit? Downwards, I would say we do want to keep it kind of in the same level. So something closer to here, all right. Let's just check this part. I do want to maybe push this a little bit more towards the front. Something like that. I think this is a pretty decent base for our mesh. We can actually close the video here. We are let's see 11 20. That is perfectly fine. And then in the next one, we're going to be starting to add some of the details connecting the ship from the inside and so on. All right. That's pretty much it for this video, and then I'll see you guys in the next. Cheers. 6. Adding details to the highliner pt1: Now that we have the base of our highlander created. For this section of the video, I want to work on the front part, specifically the way that the light enterns and bends. And additionally, I think it's also good that we connect this front with the back once we're finished with the way that this light is entering. Alright, so those two key things are going to be the focus of this section. To start off with, I do want to do some minor tweaks with the front specifically around the entrance. And while I have the top vertice selected, I'm going to go make sure that I'm in my active element right here and then just press S to slowly start scaling it inward because I do think that the entrance ring is a little bit too big in comparison to the rest of the body that I see here. So just a very, very tiny tweak right there, and then pressing the middle edge right here, the top vertice of the middle edge. Just doing the same thing, S and Z, slightly pushing it, just minor tweaks, so I can get something close as close to it at least as possible to what I have over there. And then I would also say that if we go to the back part over here, I'm going to select the bottom vertice and just do the same while scaling it all down, and then G Z maybe pushing it a little bit more up. Again, trying to get this illusion that this is a huge ship that goes into the distance, and the further it is, the smaller the back is in comparison to the front. And so this is kind of what I'm getting. Now I'm going to again, select this one more time, S, GZ just slightly move it upward until I can get this kind of look. And I would say this is as close to it as I can get We now. Now from here, again, I would say maybe just minor tweak at this top edge. So selecting the middle edge, making sure that the top vertice is selected, pressing S just to scale everything subtly, and then pressing here, one more time, S scale everything subtly. And there we go. I think this is a pretty decent starting point now. Or the next step. And so for the next step, what we need to do is essentially start extruding everything. Before we move forward, though. One thing to preface is make sure that your scale here is set to one. So if not, just press control A, apply the scale, and then go here, select this edge, make sure that you're no longer in the active element because we want to now start uniformly scaling it inward. And so I'm going to press median point and then press to extrude and then S to do a very, very slight scale inward like this. And then also, I'm going to push this scale slightly outward, so GX very, very, very slightly, G x just somewhere I would say somewhere around here is pretty good. After that, I do want to do another extrusion so E and then S, scaling it one more time now inward like this. But instead of keeping it as where it is, I want to now slowly start moving it inwards. So I'm going to press G x and then move it inside. To around here, press S to scale it like this. And then let's just see where it is right now. I'm going to push it probably. Let's see. I'm going to have one loop cut here and then press and scale it in D x axis and keep one loop cut right around here, maybe scale it a little bit more. For now, this is pretty good. We are going to be doing changes to these loop cuts that we just created. But let's just keep it as is. Additionally, I'm going to add one more loop cut right all the way pushing at GG here so that essentially, I make a very sharp tightening around this corner. And you might start noticing that there is a little bit of a clipping issue that we are seeing. And the reason for that is because we have our view here clip starts at 2.01. So we just need to change this to one. And additionally, here at the bottom one, I can change this to one, and that should mitigate the issue that we just saw. As you can see, everything here is now fixed in that regard. Lastly, I do want to play around with the thickness of this edge here that we have in comparison to what I see in my reference image here on the right side, which as you might have noticed, is a little bit more of a now exponential exposure increase. So even though it comes with a detriment of the picture quality, it doesn't really matter because what matters is that we can see all these details that are important to us. So what I want to do essentially is just take this middle edge that I have in between these two. So lt and left clicking on it, and then just scaling it inside a bit like this, and then scaling this one also a bit like that. And then clamping them together by GG, and then here G G as well. And this should overall just give me a little bit more of a thicker Rim. But we do need to make sure that it is sharp, so GG here, GG here, and then additionally, you can move this slightly more forward if you want or backward. That's onto you or inside again. That part now is really just a matter of your preference. Now, I do think that overall looking at my now entrance, it is a bit small in comparison to the rest of the body. So what I can do from here is just press control and plus. Well I have this middle here selected. And so when you press control and plus on your numpad, it expands your selection. And from here, all I need to really is just play around with the scale, maybe S and Z, scale this a little bit more than G x, push it a little bit more inside until I get again, something that works for my taste. I would say this is as close to it as I need right now. Doing just minor tweaks on everything, you can do the same until you get a somewhat decent, similar result to what you're looking for. But I think for me, this is a pretty decent starting point for the highliner itself for the next step again, and that is going to be playing with the light, the way that it enters and bends. And for this, obviously, we need a light source. So also here, I'm just going to stop here for a second, so you can see that the way that my vertices are aligned, if you want to exactly replicate it. So you can see this one is a little bit more inward. This one is a little bit more outward, and then these two closer because they're being clamped so that we get this nice little brim going on around here. All right. So let's add a light. I'm going to press Shift A to add a sun light, and then G x to move the sun around here. Press S to scale it so that I can see better the direction because the direction of the sun is going to be very important in this portion. And now I'm going to go into the bottom part here press to go into rendered. Make sure that your sending here are cycles, GP compute, that's fine. And for sampling, I don't think we need more than 250 samples. You can go even lower, I would say, if you need. Next, what is important, though, is that the strength of our sun is much bigger, so I'm going to increase this ten fold, so ten. And then rotating the sun slightly towards the high Lner so I can get this loop over there with shadow. That being said, we can't really see the rest of our high Lner in the position and how it reacts to the environment. So I would say if we go here under render settings and we go under film, we can change this to transparent and this should give us a much better look. And so if I now rotate it, it also kind of helps me with the shadows and just getting the position better, I would say close to what I see right here. Now, looking at the top part, the way that it interacts with the light, I would say it is missing a little bit more thickness. So what I could do is just have everything selected, just slightly scale inward and then pushed downwards, just to add some more extra thickness right around these edges and maybe G x moved slightly more forward until you get, again, this part here to match somewhat similar to this. But again, the light here also plays a huge role. And so let's play with the light. What I can assume immediately is that the way that my light is hitting my highliner, is definitely coming towards well, from here, from my y axis towards here because this portion here are in shadow. So the light is definitely at least coming from something like this. Now, the question is, you know, whether it's coming up like this or it's coming down. And just because how this portion of the highliner is being lit up, I would assume that it's definitely coming a little bit more from the bottom part up. So something at a somewhat similar angle that we see going on. Here close to this as possible, I would say, and then RZ just slightly more rotated so I can get this nice little barely, barely looking shadow right there. And over here we have this rim that is happening barely over here. All right. So far, so good, I would say. Perfect. Now, we need to start adding a couple of more loop cuts. So to start off, we're going to need a loop cut inside that's going to be roughly around maybe somewhere here. And then if we scale it, that is going to dictate the way that our light is going to be bending as it enters. But the issue here is that because we only have one loop cut, this is looking very soft, so we need to add supporting cuts to it. And we can do this quickly just by going control B, leveling it, and then scrolling with our mouse feel to add a third one just like this. And this is giving us a much sharper, as you can see here, cornering. Around it. So now, in my front view all Z, I'm going to scale this and then move it somewhere around here. So there's a very strong angle from the top part as it enters. And then maybe here, this one is evened out a little bit. I would say even almost completely. Let me just scale this a little bit more. Scale this a little bit until I can get something close to for starters this. I might do some tweaking a little bit later, but this is pretty good starting point. Let me see now for this one here, I'm going to it is a little bit too aggressive if someone is going to push it slightly more like this. I'm going to clamp this even closer to one another with these two being closer. And then for this one in the middle, I'm going to scale it inward just so I can get this almost like a reversed V like angle going on right there because that is what's going to give me this cut of the ring that we see of the edge happening right there. That's going to be really, really important because it's going to help us control the way that the light it will be bending. All right. Additionally, now, for this cut, we also have this one more here. I am going to do the same thing by adding two bevels, so control B. And altogether three cuts. And now, all I really need to do is just push this maybe a little bit more towards the front. Let me check in the front view how this is looking. This is way too much of an angle for this side. I want this to be very soft like natural progression of an angle. And you can already see we are getting the way that the light is entering. We're getting a similar, very, very, very similar reaction to what we have over here. And so I'm going to keep this roughly around here until later. And then with this portion here, as is going inside, this is looking pretty good. Okay? Lastly, I do still think that maybe this part here is a bit too annunciated in comparison to our front here. And so what you could always do is just scale this part a little bit more maybe in the z axis to kind of mitigate it, push it slightly more down. And that should help make this much softer. And then maybe again, SC, GZ, lay around with these values until you can get something close. Every time you look at it with a fresh set of eyes, it's always going to be looking, I should have done that better, so don't worry about it. I think done is always going to be better than perfect. All right. Let's work on the back part of it right now. For this portion, we're not going to be putting too much work into it. Essentially, all we really need to do is press to extrude indi ax axis like this. Maybe scale it just a little bit, then to extrude one more time. G x in Dax axis. G x here, scale it one more time, make it much smaller. Like this. And then I would say we could extrude it one more time, S and then G x inside to go like this. And now we can just connect it, selecting this edge, poling shift, clicking Alt, selecting the other edge, pressing control, to go into our edge properties, and then going bridge edge loops, just like that, and now we have it. And that's pretty much what we need. All right. From here really is now just going to be a matter of tweaking all of these that we have. The base is pretty much set up. And so for the rest of this video, what I'm going to be doing now. You don't need to if you are pretty satisfied with what you have is, I'm just going to be tweaking my experimenting with the light as it enters, tweaking how it goes inside here, just to make sure to get as close to this one here as possible because I can see that the way my light is hitting, it is not at the right perfectly right angle. It should be a little bit more upwards, for instance, you know, kind of like here, and then maybe it should go a little bit like this. So just playing around with those values is what I'm going to be doing now for the rest of the video, and, you know, I might speed everything up until I get the final result to show to you. All right. All right. I think I kind of have it. So a couple of things that I did. I was pretty much messing around with this edge right around here to control the sharpness of this first cornering. And then to help with the second cornering right around here, it was just a matter of tweaking. Let me show you the positioning of these six edges. So these three right over here, and then these three right around here. So as you can see, the bottom part starts off very roughly flat, follows the curve and is somewhat tight right around here, and that kind of helps Well this part here is a little bit more loose, and this kind of helps me get this really nice curve and edge happening. And then the second part goes right here, similar to how this one goes. And this one comes at a much lower angle, the second edge, comes at a much lower angle, as you can see over there. And then if I push it a little bit lower, you control how the cornering of the edge is happening. So, for instance, here, right now, you have like this very, very strong cornering versus here being much softer. I would also say you could probably maybe scale this slightly a bit more, so it's not such a strong corner here either. Maybe just a little bit. And then here. Again, just play around with these values. Until we get something similar. I'm just going to do a couple of steps because I didn't like Bully what I finished here, and I liked my final result a little bit more in comparison. So there we go. All right. Now that I've finished, I'll see you guys in the next video where we're going to be completing our highliner by adding the final details to it. 7. Adding details to the highliner pt2: In this video, we're going to continue adding the details to our high liner. First want to start off by simply selecting this portion of the high liner right around here, and then I'm going to start essentially using the shear too, which is going to allow me to push this front part of the high liner forward while also having the bottom part pushed backwards. So if I just have the shear tool hell selected, and then clicking on this item right here, I'm just going to slightly push it just forward to give it this nice little angle right around here. Perfect. Additionally, I might even want to rotate the highlander just slightly up, but it might actually do it later on, and I'll keep it as it is for now. One more thing is that we don't really need to press W on our keyboard. We don't really need this cut right here so we can dissolve it. It doesn't really matter. And from here now, we're going to start entering a little bit more of a destructive workflow. For the highliner itself. Up until now, we haven't really applied our subdivision. We kept it as is. And over here, we can see all these little details, these indentations, the extrusions of inward. You can barely see them in this image. But if I go to the concept art, you can see them right here. There's also one right around here. In the final shadow in the movie, you can kind of see them as well here here. So we'll be adding two in the front as we see on this image, two in the front, somewhere close to, I would say the front third, somewhere around here. And then we're adding also three in the back, as we see here, closer to this portion. All right. To do this, if I now press my semi colon key on my keyboard, you will see that it activates the wire frame that I showed you early at the beginning, the shortcut that I created. So this one here. And so if I just press it, it's just a quicker way to go there. And this is if I remove here the optimal display, what I see now is what my high Lnermesh would look like if I were to apply the subdivision surface. And so I don't want these faces to be so elongated, essentially, almost like rectangles. I want them to be a bit more evenly proportionate. And so what I can do is just go click click the semi column key and then add a couple of cuts. I would say one, two, three, four, five, six, I think six is going to be good enough. You know, press escape. And so let's just press the semi column key one more time to get an idea, and this is how it will look like with two levels of subdivision apply. But I don't think we really need two levels of subdivision. So what I'm going to do from here is, I'm just going to press shifty to duplicate this cylinder. And I'm going to hide all of the previous one. I'm going to call this one high liner base. And then this one is going to be high liner applied so that I know ops to ds. Just so I know that essentially, this one is going to have the applied subdivision modifer. I should probably call the applied subdiv So it's even more specific. And I don't think I'm going to need two levels of subdivision to be honest with you. So I might just stick to one. Now, before we apply, if you want to do any of the changes, you can do them now. Additionally, there's going to be a very I'll show you at the end of this video, like a quick work around to, like, how to do additional changes once you apply the highlander. But really, this is now the time to kind of get the final look or what you want, the final tweaks. So for instance, in my case, I'm kind of feeling that maybe I should push this a little bit lower. So if I click on this edge right here and then go into the active element and then just scale it slightly up and then GG move it slightly forward to ease up this transition, and then maybe go here, GG ease up this part here, GG ease up everything just to kind of align it a little bit better. So it looks nicer, kind of like this. All right. I am pretty satisfied with how my highlander looks like, and so we are now going to go and apply our subdivision. Let's see one more time. If we were apply this subdivision, this is what we would get. And that is, I think, pretty good because we can then add a couple of more cuts right here depending on where we want to do these extrusions. So I'm going to go over here, hover with my mouse. You can either click here and apply or when you're hovering, you can press Control A, and that's going to immediately apply the subdivision. So now if I press the semicolon key and go into my edit mode, I can see we got all these new faces on our sub highliner. So you start off. Again, this is not going to be a rough estimate. And so I am going to assume that this first one here, this first extrusion happens roughly somewhere close to here to this point where I've selected. And so I'm going to add one cut in here, and then one cut Here. And so this what we do is if I click on this face that I've done just now, and then I go all the way to roughly to the middle and then one extra face afterwards. So right here. And then I select with my shift and left click on another face and then hold control and left click with my mouse up to here. It is selecting all these faces that I want to extrude. I'm not going to press to extrude. Instead, I I'm going to go with extrude inner and so that is right here, extrude along normals. And then if I click with my mouse, I click here, extrude along normals. There we go. So from here, I'm going to click on this yellow dot and then just push it inside like this, somewhere around here should be pretty fine. I'm already starting to see the way that it's going to interact with the light. Additionally, now, the shading looks very off. So what we need to do is add a new modifier, which is, if you're using a version of blender. So I'm using 4.1. So if you're using anything below 4.1 so 4.0 or below, what you would do is just right click here and go into Autosmooth. But in 4.1 and above depending on when you're watching this, they've changed this auto smooth into a modifier. So we would go here under modifier and then type in smooth and here it smooth by angle. And there we go. We have it, and we have them right here showing off. Okay. Perfect. Additionally, now, let's see, is this the right distance or did I go a bit too? I kind of think that maybe if I were to select everything and just slightly move it, I would say in this direction. Okay. I could just slightly push it just a little bit more here. And it should be fine because our highliners pretty much going to be clouded in the shadow on its front side. We don't really need to worry too much about ruining it on this part, but I think this part of the mesh now is looking good. Now we can focus on the back part. This is pretty much I think happening very close. I think I cut them off over here, but I'm going to assume these three are happening somewhere along here. So I can add let's see one cut in here, one cut in here. This gives me let's see one, two, and I need, let's say one more over here. That's one, two, and three, like this. All right. So I'm going to just now start pressing Control. While having the first one selected. This one here. Make sure that it matches the edge of the one where these other two extrusions are starting from, and it matches the edge all the way down here, the same where these two extrusions are starting from. And so I'm going to hold Shift click here on the middle one now, that's going to be hold Control, click one more time, click Shift, and then click Control. And now I have all three selected, and I can start One thing that does bother me a little bit now that I've selected them. I do think that they're kind of too far apart in comparison to this image here, whereas these two front one are a bit further apart. The three of them are closer and here. And so what I would do is just think about maybe bridging the gap of all three of them. Slightly. Let's see. We have one, two, three, we have one, two, three, This one should be slightly here, and this gap let's see one to one, two, this gap should be here. Now let me see. So we have one could probably move these to a little bit more Even though there's barely going to be visible. I think this is much better now that we tighten this part up. So these two are going to be the gaps. And then these three are going to be the extrusions. So we have one, two, and three. All right. They're pretty much look close enough. You don't have to be exactly perfect. Like I said, they are going to be further apart, so we can barely see them, but still having something similar like this should do the trick for us. So I'm going to make sure that these are aligned. Click here, make sure these are aligned, click here, make sure these are aligned. This looks much better now that I look at it, and now I'm going to extrude it. And go inside, and there we have them in the back as well. Perfect. So from here, even though you don't necessarily need to do this because they're so barely visible, but I am still going to do it. We want to add a little bit of a beveling to them. So even though we could go select everything here and then press control B and start beveling it, I don't want to do it in a destructive sense. So what I am going to do instead is add a bevel modifier right here. And then I'm going to push the bet modifier all the way to the top. I'm going to set the beveling to roughly three, and you can see now it's kind of taking effect on the entire highliner. But what I really want is to not be affecting the entire highliner but only be affecting it to the weight that we set. So right now, I'm going to put the limit method to weight, and it's not going to do anything at all. So it's not affecting anywhere, but if I go now into my edit mode and I go into edge select, and let's press W to go into my box select, and I start selecting this entire edge of this extrusion that we created, There we go, and including also these vertical ones that are going upward. And from here, I press N to go into my settings here. Under item, there is a mean beble weight. If I change this mean ble weight to one all the way, you'll notice that now we have a little bit of a bevel happening that we can control. So this allows us to individually control which parts of the mesh or the model that we have created, we want to bevel, depending on the weight that we give it. So I would say 0.1, maybe 0.5. This sounds like a good number. And I will just keep it as we are getting some small issues here. But like I said, because we're going to be so far off and it's barely going to be visible. This is going to be somewhere in the shadows. And so I'm only making them somewhat soft so that it does bend a little bit better with the light. Like I said, it's not going to be that detrimental. So I'm going to go now and start selecting everything in here, doing just the same exact thing, selecting here, here, here, here, and then mean bevel all the way to one, and there we go. And we can repeat the same process now for these three as well, Manvel. I believe I have all of them. Almost all of them. I forgot the ones here. I'm going to start selecting all of them at once at the same time, so that I don't go one by one. Make sure you have all of them selected. I did this a couple of times already, and on a couple of attempts, I kind of messed up by forgetting to select one, so I had to go back. But I think an easy way to kind of know if you've missed something is to see if everything is highlighted properly in terms of the faces here as well. So I think I have all of them now selected. Man Bevel weight. Perfect. So additionally, you can go now into your bevel settings here under geometry shading. There is impressed hard normals, and this is going to get rid of the normal issue that we had here on the side. So that works perfectly fine. Excellent. Now we can also do is add one more level of subdivision just to smooth out because before it, these corners were a little bit rugged. So if we add one more levels of control one subdivision, we can keep it as is here at the bottom. And later on, we are going to need this subdivision actually once we start doing displacement with our tcuring as you'll see. All right. Moving forward now, one more thing that we need to add is this little cut right around here. So to do that, that should be pretty straightforward. We can just go here on this edge that we've created once we apply to subdivision. And I would probably just go control bevel it out somewhere around here, and then we can do another extrusion along normals. There we go. Extrude long normals. And I'm going to extrude this inside until I'm looking at my bottom screen right now, just to get somewhat of a soft shadow, nothing too strong. You can hold shift, by the way, to just increase increase the stability. So technically decrease the offset if you're moving. So if I don't hold shift, it's going in much larger increments, if I hold shift, it's going in much smaller increments. So I'm holding a shift to go in much smaller increments until I get this nice little shading right around here, so it kind of mimics very, very similar to what we have going on here. Perfect. Additionally, what we can do is also select these two edges that we just now created, holding alt and shift and clicking on both of them, and also giving them a main bevel weight just so that we make it slightly sharper, just like that. Perfect. And that pretty much concludes, I believe, the modeling of the highliner. I'm not sure if I've missed anything. We'll see in the next video, but in this one, one more thing that I am going to show you is as I promised. And that is how we've applied the subdivision surface. And so let's say hypothetically, you want to do now some kind of change to the shape of your high Lner, but you can because, well, we have all these polygons, and also we have the subdivision surface that's kind of slowing everything down. So, how could you do this change? So cool way to do this is by using something that's called a lettuce. I know I already have it here. Let me just show you where it is. If you press Shift A and go all the way here with your mouse, click it, and then scale it by 100 somewhere around here? That should be pretty good. And then press G sorry, S, Z scale it. You're trying to essentially create a cage around your highliner and then S x Gx should be pretty good. And now from here, what you can do is under your highlander, just go lattice. And now with the lattice on top, selected, go and select this one that we just added. So if I were to click on this lattice, now, going to the added mode and start moving it, you'll notice that it also starts moving my highliner. And so this lattice is pretty useful for this kind of movement and changes to the highliner now that we can do later on. If we want to, you know, maybe push this more forward or, you know, squish something. You can also add more cuts to the lattice in both of this like that. So there's a lot of, you know, creativity that can go with this. I'm just going to keep all of this set to. Let me see these ones, zero, I believe, or one. And then the other ones two, there we go, like this. So this pretty much concludes the details portion of the video of the high Lner then in the next video, I believe we should start with the composition of the planet and the high Lner itself. I'll see you guys there. Cheers. 8. Adding details to the highliner pt3: The previous video, I did forget one thing, and that is adding this extrusion, this rectangle here at the front facing part of our highliner. So for this section, I'm just going to follow and do that, and it should be pretty straightforward without too many hurdles, I think. Before we begin with that, I am going to take this lattice and just hold shift and click on it and then move it into my higher applied subtv. So that way, when I move the high liner around, the lattice also follows it. I'm just going to rename it to lattice highner I'm going to hide it for now because I don't need to really see it. And then I'm going to go scroll roughly around here. I'm going to turn on the rendered view at the bottom. And I want to essentially take this portion here, but this one is too close to the cut, and we look at the extrusion that we need to create. It is closed, but it is not this close. So I would say this here is what we would need, but then we need to also add maybe one more cut and then move this slightly down, not too much slightly and then balance out these extra spaces that we have, maybe make this a little bit more rectangular shaped, so it's evened out. And I'd say maybe add one more cut right around here so then these cuts have a nice follow. All right. Once we've done that, make sure that you're in the bottom view, so it will help you kind of select the middle point of the high lander, which are these four faces right here. And then from this point, make sure again that you are in the extrude long normals and turn off your subdivision. Turn off the subdivision by clicking on this real time display, and then clicking on this yellow button, just go in the whole shift and move it slightly inside, not too much. I would say almost just around this is more than enough. So very, very little. And you'll see that it's going to be very, very noticeable actually here, but we have these shading issues right now happening, but we're going to fix that. In a quick minute. If I turn on my subdivision, here's why we had to turn off the subdivision. Let me show you by turning it on. So by turning on the subdivision, we see that we kind of lose our extrusion that we just created. So in order to bring it back while having the subdivision on, because remember, we are going to need to have the subdivision on for future, we need to add supporting cuts or supporting loops on the corners. So we can turn off the subdivision for now so that everything moves a bit faster. I'm going to add one more cut right here. Control add one here. And then there. And so we need to do the same principle for all of the corners where we have essentially one, two, three, four, like faces facing this way. And so adding another cut, adding another cut. And I think this part is pretty much settled which leaves only the bottom. And at the bottom, we need to just add one on the inside, and then one on the outside. Once we've done that, we can now start actually connecting all of the pieces. So with my knife tool with K, I'm going to go into my vertical select mode and then press the knife tool and select this point, connect it to this outer one that we just created and do the same thing for all of these other ones by going here. Pressing this verdex connecting it to here, and then pressing another one. The reason why we're doing this now why we're adding these extra cuts is if we look into our shape, we can see that even though even though we've got the extrusion that we just created with the subdivision, we still have an issue where all these lines are the new lines that we just added, they're all visible. So we need to take care of them essentially. Okay. We're going to be doing it by now adding all of these cuts that we just did, and then taking out the middle ones. So these were the original line cuts that were there before we added the loop cuts because the loop cuts are this one and this one. And now we're taking out the original one, and this should help us control or maintain everything. So if I take out this one here that I just have selected, the entire loop cut, everything goes back, and then selecting this loop cut, x dissolve the edge, and they disappear, but the corners still stay. I purposely kept this one at the left corner because if we'll go down, we can see that this edge cut is connected to the extrusions that we did here. So this is going to cause a very small problem. But there's also very easy fix for it. There's just a little time consuming, not that much. So we're going to select this edge loop, and we're going to select this edge loop as well. We're going to press x dissolve the edge. And as I scroll down, we can now see that we have an issue where at this point, we have a face with one, two, three, four, five vertices, and we don't want to have five vertices. We want to have four. So to mitigate this issue or to change it, fix it, whatever you want to call it, we're going to go a couple of ways about it. And I'm just simply going to start merging this point to this one here. So if I go and I press M, merge at first, and then click here and then here, and then merge merge at first. It slowly starts bringing them together, merge at first. Merge at first. And then now this part here, I don't think I need this cut right around here, but we should probably merge these guys before even doing anything there. So just merge at first. Something wasn't right here. And so for the leftover, I think we can just this part here is good. This part here is also good. The only cut that we need to take out is the one that I have right now selected. And so ops. Control Z. X dissolve this edge, and there we go. Everything should be fixed in that aspect, but we still have these lines going on that we need to deal with. Additionally, we can also tighten this corner up now by adding another loop cut right here and then just pressing it, moving it forward, that should make this much sharper indentation. Additionally, you could also probably add another loop cut right here, and that should make another sharper indentation. So now we have this really, really nice look going on, but we still need to deal with all of this extra. What I'm going to do is just click on all these four faces, and then I'm going to press control and plus on my numpad to expand my selection a couple of times till I get something similar to this expansion because when I press all Z and going into my X ray mode, you can see this looks very messy. There's a lot of faces on all of the places. And so instead, I can just press shift and H and now all Z, I only have this area to work with, and that is quite good and much more easier to maintain. The reason why I did this is essentially in order to be able to later handle the movement of these edges. But something that I just forgot that I realized I think I took I went one step ahead before finishing. Something is, I'm going to go Alt H, do it, so I can see all of the faces, and then click on this edge right here. GG, move it right around here. And again, remember, I don't need the subdivision, right turned on. Then click on this edge, GG, move it here in the middle. I can take this one because I don't need it. And then take this edge, GG, move it up, this edge, GG, move it here, and then take this edge, dissolve it. If I were to turn on the subdivision now, and if I go into the edit mode, we can see that pretty much we have lost almost all of those lines. There's still a little bit of them here and there, but we can just move them. We can move these guys, proportionally space them out evenly and that way, we do get rid of all those cuts. But we do also have now this rounded corner, and we probably don't want it to be rounded like that. We instead want it to be much of a sharper. Lines. So this is where now that step that I just did one ahead when pressing control plus going into this view and then Shift H, sorry, hiding it is going to come into play because from here now, I can start in my X ray mode, GG moving these lines over here to tighten up essentially these corners a little bit better, and then doing pretty much the same around. This vertice, Again, as I said, just tightening up these corners, moving everything a little bit. Pushing this. So just select all the vertices, G G, start moving them around a little bit until you start getting these tighter corners. All right. Let's take a look at how it is. So for me, I would say this is pretty okay. There is some shadow, smaller shadow issues happening in a couple of places. You could probably just play around with how this one is moving to kind of get it better. But as long as we don't have too many of them, I think we should be fine because again, this part is barely going to be visible. So keep that in mind as we do move along. Then this should go probably a little bit more. Like that. Closer. There we go. As long as everything is relatively evenly spaced out, as we can see in these examples, I think we shouldn't have too many issues, and now we have our extrusion over here as well. All right. I think that's pretty much it for this video, and I'll see you guys in the next one where we're going to start working on the composition. Cheers. 9. Starting with the composition: In this video, we're going to start working on our composition for the highliner. I'm going to start off simply by adding a camera and going shift A and then typing in camera, and then I'm going to create a new collection just for the camera, and that one's going to be called, let's see, camera. Now I'm going to push the camera into the new collection. Now, I can't see the camera because it's inside the highliner, so I'm going to press G and y and then just move it a little bit. And you can see how small it is compared to our highliner. The other thing I'm going to do is just press S to scale everything and move my mouse a couple of times so I can see it in a pretty descent size. I'm going to press to go into my rotation settings of the camera and then put it everything to zero and then put the x in the 90, so it's looking directly into the highliner. Additionally, now, we're going to be using also the lower window a little bit more because that's where we're going to have all of the our render preview. So turn on your render preview and then go to the key view camera, and we can now see complete darkness. We can't really see much going on. So I'm going to go G and then y to move the camera a little bit back. But this won't be really enough because as you can see, once we start moving it too much, we get the same issue that we had before early on at the beginning, which is the clipping. And so to solve the clipping, going into your data here for the camera and under clip start press one, and under end, we can maybe add two zeros, and I think that's going to solve the issue for us. Additionally, we might need to increase the clipping here as well in our upper window as I scroll out, because if we go on review, I'm going to add here one more zero. And the reason for that is why we want to have more is because we won't be using this focal length that we see here, the 50 millimeter. 50 millimeter is great when you do a portrait photography and stuff like that. But we are trying to, you know, take a shot of a ship that's in space that's really far away from the camera. And so in order to achieve that, we need to have that sense of distance and scale. And this is where a telephoto lens is going to help us achieve it. So I'm going to actually add one extra zero here to make it 500, and now I'm going to push the camera G Y even further back until I can see it taking roughly like two thirds of my screen, so something like this. Right now, it is dark. But before we even start working on the lighting, we still need to change a couple of our render settings here. So, I've been doing research online about the movie doing for a while now as we know, started working on this tutorial. And one of the things that I was curious about is what was the aspect ratio that this movie was shot in. And the first part was shot in a variable aspiratio that was going but mainly between 235 and something else I can't really remember. And so, because we're going to be rendering everything in 1920, So the 235 equivalent for a ten ADP resolution is going to be 816. And if you're terrible like myself in calculating this, there's also a cheat sheet that you can find online. If you just go in here on this website. So APC ratio cheat sheet, and you scroll down, you can see all these APC ratios and resolutions, depending for eight K, five K, four k, three k, what we're going to be rendering in, which is ten ADP. And so, over here, we see the APC ratio for 108 P being 2.35, which is 1928 16. All right. So this is the EPA ratio that we're going to be using for our video. Pretty useful site. I do recommend bookmarking it, so you have it for future use. All right. We have now PA ratio set up over here. We have our camera in distance as well, which is good. Now, all that's remaining is positioning the higher accurately. I'm going to go under data for camera settings, and I am going to enable here under viewport display my passport. I'm going to push it all the way to one, so I can see better what is my frame that I'm working under. And then I'm also going to go under composition guides and turn on the thirds. And right now, I cannot see it because I don't have my overlays shown, but now I can. So the first thing I want to do is just push the high Lner in the G x axis to take up roughly this much space. I am going to change the light a little bit later, but I'm going to first start rotating the highliner and trying to get it to have the similar shape. I'm going to move this screen here a little bit more to the left, so shift and then middle click with my mouse to move everything to the left. And then while holding control, click middle click with your mouse and then just zoom forward and then shift to move everything. And middle click again with your mouse and then zoom forward to get something like this. I'm going to press T that's going to hide this left menu. And now I have a better view of the high Liner. I need to start essentially now rotating highliner towards the camera, so I'm going to press r and then z and then slowly start rotating until I get something similar of an angle that I see over here. From here, from this angle, I'm going to press R, y twice so that I can get the objects axis instead of the global one and then just start rotating a little bit more upwards to get something like this. Now I'm going to press maybe G z to push the highliner slightly down somewhere around here. Then this is now again where the lattice is going to come into play because we are going to be doing some minor now changes again to the high Lner. And I would recommend probably going here under modifiers and just taking out the subdivision four now so that everything is going a bit faster. For the back part, I want to make it smaller, so I'm just going to press S, but make sure that you have a medium point instead of active element. So medium point and then scaling it slightly down. Something like that. Rotating it a little bit more into z axis. Pushing it slightly lower. I would say this is a pretty good starting point, but I would probably also do sorry. Take these two points here that I see in front and then just push them forward. So let's see G twice, and then just G x twice, then there we go. G x, and then just slowly push them just a little bit more forward so that this is a little bit better front facing kind of like here. All right. We can also see that we have a little bit more clipping happening again. So maybe adding one more zero and then adding one more zero here is going to solve this issue, I guess not. So maybe we take it out. Or this is actually caused by our camera as a matter of fact, so we need to go into our camera settings and then change this here to maybe instead of one to make it ten. There we go. That's fix the issue. Perfect. Now that we have the highliner, let's just go back into rendered view here and start working on our light. The light so probably be going as we know, something like this where we have the source going upwards, maybe a little bit more towards I would say something close to this here is pretty good. The light comes in, it goes inside. That is good. And we can also maybe play, again, like I said, with these values of G x x twice, and then just seeing how it reacts with the light. I would say close to this is pretty good. We can maybe go back and turn on as well our modifier. So the subdivision on. So everything looks a bit more nice and smooth. And now I'm going to press G and just move the highliner slightly down. And I think Looking at where my third golden ratio is, which is here. I think of moving the highliner a bit more in the G x so towards the back because I am going to obviously have the ships come out of the highliner and so I would say the ships should be somewhere here on the third. One of the things with Brown Blender that I don't like is how you can barely see the composition guides sometimes, and tweaking changing them needs requires you to go into settings and changing It's just a mess sometimes. I don't know. I wish Blender had a little bit better way of showing the composition guides personally. Um, anyhow, now that we have this, I would say we can start adding some extra lights to our high Lner because if we look at this image right here, it is not perfectly pitch black over there on the front side front facing side towards the camera. It is not perfectly pitched. As a matter of fact, there's very soft rim light, and there's also, I would say some fill lights on the front facing part of it. And we don't really want to lose all this data as a matter of fact. It's better to keep it, have it, and then in post production, just if we want to increase the contrast and the shadows and the blacks. So I'm going to go change this one and call this key light high liner. Or just higher key lights are going to follow the same naming structure that we had before. So higher light. And then I'm just going to go in my top view. I'm going to shift to duplicate this light, and this is going to be highlighter fill light. And for the flight, I'm just going to rotate it to have it point towards the high Lner, but I'm going to go and change the strength of it to, like, let's see. It's barely visible, something like Something around 0.06 is around the number that I'm looking for. Additionally, I noticed that the angle here is at 0.526. I'm going to change the angle and make sure that the angle here is also at zero. I might, I can keep it as it is, and then in post, I'll probably lower this down if I want to, for now, I'm going to keep this like that. Then lastly, we want to add like a rim light that's going to be from behind. So coming towards this angle. So I'm going to go in my top of you and then shift D add another light, move it like this, and then also have it B from top to bottom, because this one here is a little bit more, I guess, bottom to top, as a matter of fact. Yeah, I would say, Somewhere in between, also a little bit of top to bottom, but then this one is going to be a bit more aggressive so that I can get that part. But I don't want it to be again this strong. And here, I can probably play around with the angle, make it slightly softer and then play how I get around here, and then also rotate it slightly so I can get this exact fall off that you see going on in this angle. I would probably move it. Maybe a little bit more So there we go. I think this is pretty good. Additionally, this top light because it's coming from the planet. As you can see here in this shot, this actual light is coming from the planet itself, I would say it would be good that we change the strength of it to something very soft. But we also change the color of it a little bit orange. Just a little tint of orange. Let's see. I'm going to keep it as like this. And then later on when we add the color and the material, we'll see if we need to tweak it. All right. I'm going to call this one now. Also highliner. We have the keelte the fight, and I'm going to call this one brimight. There we go. So we have pretty much set up our highliner. Everything is and ready. If you want, you can always do some changes, tweak a few things, if you think something is worth changing, play with the ettice tool, and so on. And then in the next video, we're going to be adding also the planet to our shot. All right. See there. 10. Adding arrakis into the composition: Let's now add the planet into our shot. So I'm going to start off by check marking here the planet collection, and that's going to show this here, the sphere, and also the light, the planet kilt of the planet. I'm just going to go top for you and push them a little bit more towards here. Let me see where my planet keelt is. Don't really see it right over there. Perfect. And as I said early on at the beginning, that this is just going to be our planet base for our texture, but we're not going to be using this planet itself or this sphere, technically speaking. The main reason for that is because if I look at the topology of the sphere, there is this triangles on the very very top. Obviously, you could delete this and then use grid fill. But instead of doing that, I'm just going to hide this, and I'm going to go shift a at a cube. I'm going to scale this cube by 100. And then from here, let me just turn on my screencast keys that I forgot for a second. Once I scale this cube, I'm going to push the cube, a little bit more towards here in the backer. I'm just going to start adding subdivision. I'm going to press control one, two, three, four. I think four levels is going to be fine, and I'm going to scale the cube, a little bit more control a applied to scale for now. And then I'm just going to right click and shade smooth. And now I should have, you know, all these nice polygons and everything should be working pretty good. All right, so far so good. But because we now checked our collection and made it visible for the planet, we also have this planet key light, and we also have all these other highlander lights. And now we need to start linking these lights to objects that we want to affect. So, for instance, if I look here under camera, this is my planet. So I'm going to take this, put it here under planet. I'm going to rename this and call it planet main very creative. And I'm going to go at the bottom of you here, turn on rendered. Now, everything is going to be super bright and all the lights are affecting all of the objects. To start light linking, we're going to go into let's see. And for this, by the way, I think you need to have version of blender four point or higher. I'm not sure if it's 4.1 or four point. I believe it's four point. So anything below it does not have the light linking feature available. And you also need to be in cycles for light linking, I believe. All right. So I'm going to press here under highlinerFll light. I'm going to go under object, scroll down till I see shading, light linking, and here I see this collection. This is also why we organize all our files inside collections because it's much easier now to just do the data ID for linking. So this is the high Lner and this is going to affect only the highliner collection. This light here is also only going to affect the high Lner collection, and this light is only going to affect the high Lner collection. You could already see the light on our planet changing because none of these other lights are now affecting it. And so the only light that is affecting is the planet key light. And just for the sake of, you know, even though we only have two collections here, let's also make sure that this one is affecting only the planet and not the high liner, and there we go. So, this one is affecting the planet, and then all these other lights are affecting the high liner. Perfect. Now, from here, we can pretty much start kind of trying to create or mimic this shot right here that we see where the highliner is taking, I would say, almost like 50% of the lower part of the screen. So I'm just going to push this lower up until I get to I guess, something like this. And then the planet is in the background somewhere like way way way back here, I would say. But the thing here with the planet is that as you can see, it's a round ball right now. And even if we scale it so so much and we go G Z and push it upwards. We're still now we're kind of getting the issue of the topology. And so we don't want that. We want to keep the topology condensed as it is right now, so we can have a nice smooth sphere. But we also want to get this a round shape. So the way we're going to do this is just by stretching out the sphere, and so S and X, and then just stretching it in this direction. I'm going to go S and Z kind of like making it a little bit more flat, almost like a flat Earth. One would say, not a flat third, by the way. Just to clarify that for a second there. I just realize how that sounded. And then I'm going to just press this G Z, trying to get this look where it starts this side here, I believe, is a little bit higher versus the side that's on the left. So I'm going to stretch it even more in the x axis. Like that, and now I'm going to rotate it in the y, just a little bit giving it a subtle tilt so that this side here is slightly higher versus the lower side. And again, you can now play around with this by going, S Z, pushing it up down, trying to get the look that you want to go for. I think in my case, something close to this is what I need. I think I need to push the planet a little bit more down. I can do this by SZ. Question is, you know, whether you want it to be Oval at the bottom part. If you do want that, now you can press S and to make it more oval at the bottom. But if you want to be flatter, you can either stretch it out in the x axis like this, S x, or you can also push x. So scale it in the x axis in order to make it more oval as well. So there's a couple of different iterations, a couple of different ways that you could do this. But in my case, what I really just want is to nail this look right here. As I said, on the right side, it's a little bit higher. And then on the left side, it's a little bit lower. I think something close it is because we can't really see how far here on the left side it goes because of the shadow. And so what I'm going to do now is just go under my materials. I'm actually going to click here where I see the plus, hover my mouse over. Once I see the plus, I'm going to drag it to the left. And now, on this side, I'm going to go into my shader editor. I'm going to click on this planet main, and then I'm going to go under materials and choose the planet materials so that I can play with all of these values. And I'm going to start by just changing a couple of them, starting off with the blend here of this kind of like zone that's happening of the fernel and just lowering it down to something I don't know, like 0.0 0.08, maybe maybe even lower. I'm not sure exactly what would be a good recommended value. I'm trying to see here, 0.08 0.09 is pretty good. Additionally, I am going to change the color of it. I'm going to increase the saturation and increase the value until I get something a bit brighter. And then now I'm going to also play with the way that the planet key light is hitting it. I do want to achieve this kind of a shadow. And so for that, I would say, let's see. The light is currently going towards the high Lner and we don't want that. We want the light going let's kind of like nullify it all the way here so that the light is aligned with the x axis. And then I'm going to rotate the light, starting to just rotate a little bit. And I can see that I'm starting to get kind of the look that I want. Additionally, in the light settings, I'm going to change the angle to zero, just so I can get a bit of a sharper shadow four now, so I can get a better idea of how my light is hitting it. And now I'm just going to keep rotating this until I find, here, this looks pretty good. I'm going to enable my settings here so you guys can see also the rotation numbers that I'm going to be using. And This looks pretty good as a starting point, maybe rotating it a little bit more closer to here. This looks really good. Now, just is a matter of adding some angle. So there is a little bit of that soft fall off for the light itself. I might go just lower to maybe around five degrees. That looks to be pretty good. Additionally, now I want to play a little bit with these textures. For instance, something that I didn't add all the way here is a roughness map. So what I can do is just go under the color ramp, duplicate the color ramp, go under this arrow, and then reset the color ram completely because the roughness map is a value 0-1, black being one, a black being zero, and then white being one. So whatever is black is going to be super glossy and whatever is white is going to be super rough without much reflection. So right now, if ever to plug this, you can see you can't really tell by looking at it, but you can now see the reflection of the light being very, very glossy. We don't want that. We want it to be very rough. So I'm just going to push this first a little bit forward to clamp it, and then I'm going to use let me just go control shift and left click if you're using the node regular add on. So I did show you at the very beginning of this course, how to install the node regular add on, and this is going to show me this texture that's being projected. And so once I see the texture projected, I can see that all of this is pretty shiny, and I don't really want that. I want to make this rougher, so I'm going to go almost to 100% white, but I'm going to stop it maybe 20.90. So this is like 90% white, and I'm going to try to clamp it. I might lower it just a little bit to go let's see, there we go. Once you start noticing these corners or these little islands almost that are in a brighter, whiter color. I think this is a good sign because that's what we want. We want these I'm not sure how to call it specifically. I'm going to call these islands or dunes of sand to be a little bit brighter just so that we get this kind of look, as you can see with the shininess. So addition to that, we can also just change this color boost it up a little bit, and then we can push to clamp down these values even more. So we get all this variation, and we can even add a third color right in between there so I go somewhere here and make this one actually even brighter. So Chest around like this, and now we have all this variation that we can play around with. If if you don't like how your shape is looking here, additionally, what you can do is go in here under noise texture and just change it to maybe four D. And you can also play it obviously with the scale. And so for the scale, I'm going to use something lower, maybe I actually like this, 0.960. This looks very, very close, and it was purely accidental. So I'm going to keep it as is. I really like this. I was going to say you can also use the W value here and just move it around and see what you get. I'm going to press control zero, go back to my value. So this is what I have here. If you want, you can copy these exact numbers or you can do something a little bit different. Then here are the color numbers as well. So this one here is 59 f3f. And then this one here is A 77c2. The last one to the left is 976 42c, and all the way to the right is d7a2 65. So these are the values. And for the one here, as I said, this is like 90% gray. So it's like. And then this one here is pure white FFF. So if you want, you can have these exact same values, and to get this it look. For the light, as you can see, these are my rotations, and we pretty much have our planet and we have our high Lner. And last but not least, I would say just looking at the high Lner. This is something I just, like, the peak of my eye noticed right before I was going to close off this video, and we have like maybe three more minutes until we hit the 15 minute mark is I'm noticing that the highliner either it's a little bit more angled or I have pushed the front part a little bit too much. So let me just check if the hlner was hypothetically a little bit more angle, so I'm pressing r and then y two times, and then just rotating it a little bit. So I'm thinking, is this the technique to go with the highner? And maybe it is actually, because now when I push the highliner all the way up, I think this is looking really, really close to the shot that I'm trying to create right here. It is really close, but I think it's also way too angle. So I would say because the high laner needs to be, let's see. I can R Y Y. Let's go into my top view. Sorry for a second here. Make sure that I have the high Lner selected r y y and then just holding shift, rotating it slightly. Somewhere around this because what I see here on my reference image is that these two corners are aligned with the end of the shot. And so that immediately, I can kind of predict or I can tell how much of an angle the high Lner actually is. So it's hypothetically less even than this that I have right now. So the highliner should even be more angled so Ry and then shift and then rotating it a little bit more. And so the angle should be at most around here, this point right now that I have slightly almost being clipped here and not being clipped here at the top, compared to these going on there. So this is really where the high Lner is supposed to be. So if I push it slightly lower. This is a starting position that's going to be with our shot. But then as the camera starts panning upwards, this is the shot where it ends. And so technically, that means that the highliner is going to be then somewhere, I would say, here. Like, this is more or less the ending shot. And this also makes me think that the high Lner maybe needs to be closer to the camera because right now it doesn't look as majestic and big as I wanted it to. So I am going to push the highner slightly closer to the camera. So it takes a little bit more of the space around this much, maybe, let me see how much space I have over here. This is quite a lot of space on this side versus what I have. And so that also makes me wonder about its rotation. I might want to rotate it just a slight bit. At most, this much, at most. So I would say this really is the tipping point kind of where we want to be. All right. So we still have it being angled a little bit too much to the front. And so what I'm going to do before finishing off this video is just push it right a little bit more towards the back by selecting these two points, pressing the key, full stop key going into medium point, and then just pressing G, and then z or x twice. So G xx. Until I get this line that's going horizontally above my high liner nicely, and then just pushing it until I get somewhat of a similar angle. This is too much. I would say, this is just about right. I'm holding also shifts, so I do it in smaller increments. But I would say this is just about right to what we have over here going on. And again, maybe I should move now the highner a little bit more towards the right side of the screen. So G x and then just slightly subtly pushing it over here, closer towards a little further than the middle, I would say, so around here. All right. This is as close to it as I can get, and this distance from the corner of the left side also matches more or less here. You also need to keep in mind that there's going to be the small ships that are going to be coming out of it. And so if you're unsure about your composition, this is the last tip for you. Make sure to go into your camera and then composition guides, if you don't have them turned on. And then if you do, just go into your overlazing can see this here is the golden ratio right around there. So if the small ships are going to be coming out, they should probably be somewhere closer to the golden ratio somewhere around here. So I think this is going to be fine. Anyway, enough rambling, I believe we've added the planet. We are good to go on to the next step of tutorial. Alright. Cheers, guys. Have a great day. 11. Texturing the highliner pt1: While, the texturing process isn't necessarily going to be complicated. It is going to get quite messy as we go along. And this mainly has to do because of all of the details and the layers that we need to add on top of each other to just create this kind of look of the highlander being used over a long duration of time and showing edgeware on it, all these little scratches and surface imperfections altogether. And so, and I know that I mentioned very early on at the beginning of the course, how you know this highlander here, It doesn't seem to have the same material as the one showcased in the scene that we're trying to recreate. And this has to do again because of the nature of the material because for this one, the diffusion is quite strong, and you can see that there is not much reflection going on. It is very flat and very rough by nature, almost feels like I said, like stone or marble not marble Marble is I guess shiny. I guess maybe there is a diffused marble, but specifically stone or like a cement like texture, I would say, in general, feels very rough. Versus the one here on top that has a metallic property to it. And you can tell this just by looking at these corners in the way that the light is being reflected as well like these little scratches on it and you can see right here, and this is kind of common with brush stroke metal. Additionally, you also have these little dots and speckles the way it reflects on this side. And so and also, you can see all these little edgeware details that are here. But obviously, because our shot isn't going to be so much up close, we do have some liberty of not having to go so much into detail. Now, that being said, let me just show you quickly how this texture is going to look like more or less roughly, I would say. And so this is kind of the material that we're going to be trying to build. And I want to show you this mainly because I also want to take a quick minute to talk about the creative process. This is something that, you know, you're going to be doing later on once you stop watching tutorials and start doing your own projects, and you're going to find that when you do your own projects, it's not the same as when you watch a tutorial because when you watch tutorial is essentially a streamlined derivative, or a streamlined process of the creative process. In other words, the creative process is extremely messy. It takes a lot of, you know, trial and error and roadblocks and overcoming things that you don't know or figuring out how to do something. In general, it's very messy. And this whole texture here is very messy. Additionally, I didn't even use at the end of the day, like, I don't know, like, 30% of the of the nose that you see here aren't even being used. For instance, this one here with these scratches. I didn't end up using it. I decided to go a different route, but I was experimenting through the process. And so Dis tutorial and all the other tutorials everywhere that you watch are usually a streamlined product practice product because this is my third or fourth time at this point now doing dutorial practicing it trying to, you know, memorize as much as possible, so it's easier for you to digest it as well versus it being messy and jumping back and forth. So what I'm trying to say to cut this short is, you know, when you start doing your own projects, You're going to expect to see roadblocks, expect to see hurdles that you're going to need to overcome challenges and don't be frightened by them. Don't think that, you know, you need to go back to tutorials. Instead, continue trying to experiment. All right. So sorry for my long chit chat, but I feel like this is really important because I've also watched a ton of tutorials. I've been self taught, and I know the difference between, you know, trying to do something on your own versus watching a tutorial to kind of guide you through it in a very streamlined process. All right. I'm going to push this now to the side. I'm still going to use it as a reference for some color values. But I'm going to start to now change things here on my layout. But specifically, I'm going to push this a little bit more down because I want to use the main emphasis on the top side for my texturing. I'm going to click on the highliner and I'm going to now maybe push this slightly more up and then move it shift left click with my middle mouse button and then control to zoom in a little bit. Have it somewhere around here. I'm going to now press N and go into my screen cask key, so you guys can actually see the screen cask keys on the left window. There we go. So you can see all my buttons here. So I'm just going to position this kind of like that so I can have this space for my references. There we go. I'm going to start off with this main one right over here. That looks pretty good, I would say. And now I'm going to also turn off my overlays and turn on my render, so I can see my highlander. I'm going to push the highlander slightly more up just so I can get a better look at it. Kind of like this. And now press new here to add a principal B SDF. I'm going to call this one highliner and because we're going to be pretty much 90% of this is going to be done procedurally, we're going to start off by adding Shift A, a noise texture, and we're going to be using quite a lot of noise textures in this torial. I'm going to connect the noise texture into the base color, and then I'm going to press control and T to give me a mapping and a texture coordinate node. And the first thing that we're going to be using the purpose of this noise structure is kind of like to create a base coat for our highliner. And in this section, we're primarily going to be working on the base color that is then later on going to be used for the roughness, the normal and the displacement as well. All right. So I want to see what this no structure does. But first, I'm going to add a color ramp here, and then I'm going to press control shift left click on the color ramp. And the reason for that is just so I can better get a look when I clamp down these two values of where everything is. Then I'm going to change the detail to 15. I'm going to change the roughness all the way to one. Clamp down these values a little bit more. And from here, I want to map out this noise texture around the object instead of it being generated. I'm going to change the scale to 0.012 to get a look like this. Next, I'm going to map out the colors that were in here. So the ones that you see here. And for as an example, I've pretty much added here like one, two, three, four, five colors. But instead, at the end of the day, it's actually going to be just three that we need. Again, showing you some messiness from that creative process. So I'm going to add a third one right here in the middle and the one that's going to be all the way to the left, is going to be 303030. And then the one that's going to go into the middle is going to be the following 6f6c 65, and the one that's going to be all the way to the right is going to be let's just see 898278. And so you might be also wonder, you know, how did I come up to these textures? It looks like the one to the left didn't actually get caught. So 00, zero, there we go. So you might be wondering, you know, how do we get to these numbers. And again, I was experimenting. I was pretty much using the eyedropper tool and then clicking on the areas around here, trying to get some kind of value that would work best for me. So from here, I think this is pretty good right now. If you push this a little bit more, you get blacks, if you push this a little bit more, you get whites into detail, but I'm going to keep it as is. And what I want to do next is add another noise sture right below it. So I'm just going to shift D, duplicate this noise sture and then press control T. The purpose of this noise structure is going to be to create this brush stroke effect that you see around here. But, you know, as I said, this is metallic, but we also see it in the final movie shots. We see it here. You see all these little lines coming. And there's two ways to go about creating these lines. We're going to be using both methods for different purposes. Sorry, allergies. And we can also see these lines here. We can see them. So this was the shot from the movie. This was the shot from the movie, and we can see them slightly somewhere here, yeah, like this part here, for instance. But yeah, a lot of these little lines. In order to create them, I'm going to now just add another color p as well, connect this noise texture to the color p and then click on Darrow and reset the color. Control shift left click with my mouse to preview the color and then move it slightly to the left and then move this slightly to the right just so I can clamp down these values to see them better. So what I want to do now is kind of like What's a good way of explaining this? I want to squish the noise so much that it creates straight lines around it. And in order to do this, simply, I would probably have to play, let me see with these values here, can you see that I'm already starting to squish it, but the way that they're being mapped to my object, I'm not really a fan of that. So instead, what I'm going to do is map them out using a UV, like this. And you can already see that there's some of the lines that are going in. But then on this side, on the front side, they're not. And the reason for that is because we haven't still UV unwrapped our object. And so if you're not familiar with UV wrapping in a very short explanation. It is taking how would I put it. So taking a three D object, putting it on a two D plane, and then taking a two detecture and putting it onto that and then wrapping it around back. It sounds a bit complicated, the way I explained it and I apologize for that. But essentially, it allows us to better map out a two detecture onto a three D object, depending on how we unwrap it. And unwrapping, essentially just means quite literally splitting a three D object into a flat plane. It's almost like cutting it open. Kind of like a box wrap when you kind of unwrap a box present, then you have that two D plane wrapped around the box, you opened the box, you open the wrapper, and the wrapper is actually a flat paper. All right. I'm going to go now here in my let's see, three D viewport. I am going to go into the edit mode, suppress tab, and I can see that I still haven't pressed Alt and H to unhide all the previous parts of the highlander itself. So what I need to do is tell blender essentially where from which part to cut open this mesh and turn it into a two D plane. And if I go here under the UV, Editor, we can see how it currently looks like if I select everything. So if I press here press A. This is how our object currently is being unwrapped on a squarish plane here, and we want to change that to be a little bit different. So I'm going to press two to go into my edge select mode. I'm going to press Alt select this entire edge right here, and then I'm going to press Control to give me edge options for Edge select. And I want to use this here to click Mark Sam. There we go. From here, I want to add another one, but before we even do this, let me just show you what it would look like if we were to unwrap it right now. So this is what it looks like right now. But because we told Blender to use this edge here as a seam to unwrap it, if I press to unwrap and click, this is what it would look like. It's still not good. It's still not good. So I'm going to go now inside. And the reason why I want to go inside my mesh is because there's this little line, this little edge that we also created when we were doing this indentation right here. And the reason why I'm using this one is you'll see in quite a bit. But because we added this seam, the seams can sometimes be noticed within textures as like disconnected line, and it'll make a little bit more sense once I show you. So needless to say, when I have this now clicked, I'm going to press control, mark this as a seam as well. So now I have two seams to tell Blender where to unwrap my object. And the reason why I'm using these two is I've experimented trial and error, and this was the one that worked best for my needs. So I'm going to press A, wrap. And this is what we're getting right now. This is pretty good. But there's one more issue that we need to kind of solve. You can see how bent these lines are these edges. And so I want to kind of spread them out evenly and make them all a bit squarish. And for that, I'm going to select one of these vertices right here, press A to select the entire UV map. Press, to go on my U V square add on that we install at the very beginning of this course. And I'm going to select the square grid. This should create this kind of a grid here that I can then use as my UV map. There we go. I'm going to even it out roughly like this, and that should be pretty good. We do have some overlapping faces, as you can see one face on top of each other, but I think this should be fine for our needs to be honest. Okay. Next thing to do now is let's go back here in our three D viewport. And here on top, let's go into our shader editor. Let's see what's going to be going on now. You can see that those lines that we had going in here are gone now. But there's one small line, and that is caused by our seam. So usually when you're creating these seams, you want to put them in places that you can really notice them. In our case, this isn't going to really be an issue because all we need this for is to create those crazy lines that I talked about. So if I pushed the scale here to let's say 50, you won't really notice that sam anymore. On top of that, I'm going to also change the y to zero, and this will give me much better lines. So now I have this additionally. You can he play with the values. You can maybe change the roughness a little bit. Like arity, I'm going to keep as is, I would say. I don't want to mess with that too much. Yeah. And the scale, I'm going to keep it. Let's see. I'm going to push it to maybe something around here. All right. Additionally, I want to add one color here to this value. Let me just get the hex code for it. And let's add the reference right here. All right. So the hex code for instead of the white one is going to be 666559. There we go. I'm going to now push this slightly to add it a bit more color. To get the look closer to here. And now, lastly, we want to add one more noise texture on top of this that's going to help us break apart these lines because these lines don't go, you know, all the way from start to finish. Instead, you can see that they kind of they have a fall off happening around this entrance and other parts. So in order to create this fall off so that these lines aren't as perfect as shown in here, we're going to add another take shirt to help us break that apart. And for this one, it's going to be pretty straightforward. We're just going to use a color ramp again. Repeat the whole process. But over here, I'm going to reset the color ramp and then map it out to see how it looks like. Generate is actually going to be perfectly fine. I'm going to push this all the way to the left, push this one all the way to the right. Well, not all the way, just, you know, until I get something like this is pretty good. Let's play around with the values a little bit. I think this is going to be pretty okay. Now, We want to mix these two together. And to do that, there's two ways you can go about it. The first and, you know, the most common ways going shift A and typing in mixed color, adding it here, and then connecting them individually. But the alternative is also quite better in my opinion that I started to use more often, which is you press control and shift on your keyboard and then right click with your mouse and then drag it down like this. When you see these two highlighted in green, you just release your mouse and it immediately creates a mixed color. Now I'm going to preview this mix, and what I'm going to be using here is going to be color dodge. Now, why color dodge, because again, I experimented and this one had worked best for me because I wanted to get these white imperfections going on. And I'm going to also add another color rem now here to kind of just move these to a little bit closer to get I would say look kind of like this because the next step now is to mix this color rem together with this color rem above it. So, I'm just going to do the same thing. Control shift right click, these two together. And now for my mix, I'm going to preview it Control Shift left click. And for the mixing, I'm going to use here, subtract, and there we go. Now, I'm going to explain to you a couple of things here just so you get a better idea of what's going on, so you can tweak these values in your own preference and how you want. For starters, we have here our noise texture. The purpose of this noise texture is to add a base code you can see of detail that is being on top of all these little smudges. And you can change the colors by going here into the color P. Additionally, below it, we created this brush stroke effect that is used through this noise, and the scale controls how many of these lines we have. Additionally, it also controls the thickness of the lines, and this is by the way, how our highlander currently looks like. We're going to need to change the color later on, probably, but we'll keep it as it is for now. What I was going to say is, if I go here under subtract and I preview it, if you were to play with these values, you can see you can control the thickness of the lines they appear, and additionally, this grudge that's around them as well. So this is what it controls, and the scale again, controls the amount of these lines. Now, if you want to control the grudge here, you can probably go here on the scale, and this will help you control the grudges as well, and then change the color, pushing the blacks more is going to decrease it, pushing the blacks out to the left is going to increase the grugenss you can now play with these values until you get a look that works best for you. I'm going to do that offline, and then I'll show you my result. But mainly it's just going to be tweaking with these things. One more thing before I close off this video right now. If you're interested in maybe changing the color of the scratches, if you want to do that for your own particular reason, way to do it could be just simply by adding another mixed color right about here, connecting it, and now using this grudge grunge grudge. I'm not sure what the exact word for this is. Sorry for that. I believe it's g gruch texture. Uh, I want to use this and then as a mask, to put it into the factor. And so if I preview this texture now, I can change this color on the bottom to let's say, red, and that would change the color of the scratches, if you want. In my case, I'm going to have these scratches be like almost black but not fully, like, something like dark green, blackish, like this. All right. And so if I connect it, this is what I get so far. If I connect this into my base color, preview the base color, there we go. All right. So we have done the first phase of this. Now, in the next video, we're still going to be working a little bit on the base color. I see that we're approaching the 20 minute mark, so I'm going to cut the video off here, and then we're going to continue in the next one. 12. Texturing the highliner pt2: The previous video, I did mention that there's two ways of adding these lines. And so now we're going to add also a second method, but we're going to keep them both by the way. So we're going to have both this one and the other one that we're going to use now. And for this, we're going to use a new texture that we haven't done before. So this one is going to be called a wave texture. And quite literally, what it does is it creates waves of lines. So I'm going to press Control T to add a texture coordinate, add a mapping note. I'm going to press control shift left click on it, and this is what we're getting. But we don't want these text these lines to be I guess, the way they are right now, we want it to go around our object properly to follow its shape. And so for that, we're going to use UV. There we go. And what we can do next is simply just play with the scale and increase it all the way. I'm just going to go crazy up to a certain value that I have here. Make sure that your seam isn't too noticeable over there. And what you can do next is also add a color mp. And the color mp is simply going to help you clamp or make these lines even thinner if you push this all the way towards here. There you go. So we have that now going on, and what we can do next essentially is just combine this mixed texture with the color ramp that we have. So I'm going to go right click on the mix control shift and then move it down. I have it mixed now, and I'm going to use a simple multiply and push this value all the way up. Let's preview this now. And here we go. So this was before. This is after. You can see there's a little bit more lines. You can barely notice it. But if I zoom in and I preview it now, you can see these lines being added. And we can probably increase the amount of them or maybe even let's see, push this a little bit more just increase the amount of lines in there. And if you want to make them thicker, you can just push this backwards, is going to increase the thickness of the lines, but I'm going to keep them somewhat then to around this value that I have right now. All right. There we go. Now, next on to do list is going to be adding another level of imperfections to the front part. And that is you can kind of see one here, which are, I guess, broken pieces of these tiles that are going onto the high Lner and you can also see them here, like these little black dots here. They're a bit blurred more, but they're still visible and especially around these edges, right here, you can kind of notice them even a little bit better. So for this, there's going to be a bit of a different way that we're going to do this so far. We've done everything procedurally. We've used noise textures to create all of this here. But for the next step, we are going to use a simple image texture, this one here. Now, this one is going to be included in the resources file for you as well, if you want to just use the exact one. But I'm going to show you how you can create it for yourself if you're interested in that. So, way back, I'm not sure how long ago, but there was this tool called JS placement that you could easily download online and use it. And it would allow you essentially to create these really crazy, interesting patterns. You can then use in your height maps in your normal maps in your displacement, image sectures and so on. And it came also with different templates. So for instance, stuff like this, or you can play around It was the possibilities were quite literally endless because, you know, it's like a random generator of these templates, and it was very, very useful. You can use this in so many cases. But the person that created this, they decided to, I guess, take this out from the Internet. Luckily, through the powers on the Internet, it is still available to download. So you can find it in a couple of ways. One of them is simply by going here to displacement x page pages do dev, and it's going to quite literally allow you to, you know, play around with these values, create something and then you press render, and it creates it. It is not as good as the one that I showed you, but it is the fastest one to get because you just go to this link. The alternative to it is by going, I believe, here on JSPlacement. On the archive.org. Again, all these links are going to be available for you, so don't worry regarding that. And simply just going to this link and then clicking here under the zip. You can download it and install it. And then there's a third one. I haven't used this one. I've seen it. It is also displacement x, procedural displacement sifi maps generator on GTHub so you can just go here under code, download zip and install it as well. The same way that we've kind of like pretty much installed everything. Anyway, so now that you know how to install it, I'm simply just going to drag and drop this exact one that I have created. And so if you want to use the same one, you can do the same. I'm going to drag and drop it here. I'm going to press Control T, and then I'm going to control shift left click on it to preview the texture. So this is how it looks like right now. A couple of things. We are going to be playing with the scale here, so I'm going to be probably making them way way smaller and then also pushing them way more like closer together. But the issue that you might notice is that the ones that are roughly around here, they're starting to, like, stretch out a little bit more. And the reason for that is if we go under our overlays, and we go into the edit mode is that we can notice that we don't really have that many cuts here. These faces are quite elongated. So we need to add a couple of cuts on each side. I'm going to add like three loop cuts on all, so it gets a bit more proportional and even. And so from here, I'm just going to press A, you RP one more time. I'm going to need to go into my UV editor to just check the way that was unwrapped and then press A, go under UV squares, two grid by two square grid, and then just place it one more time here. Like this, and there we go. So, this should pretty much fix the issue. If I go under rendered and I take a look now, they're not so elongated anymore. Perfect. So what is how are we going to do this now from here? Well, the next step that I want to do is, let me just go into my view and put it in here is I want to tell Blender essentially to know if we were to mix these two together, and let's just do that so that it kind of makes more sense. I'm just going to press control shift, right click with my mouse. Drag this down. Now I have put it in here. I'm going to use, let's say, multiply factor increase, and let's preview it. And we can also add here a color ramp to kind of increase the brightness, so it is not so, you know, aggressive. And, you know, this isn't that bad, but it stretches out all throughout the high Lner on both sides, both the inside and the outside, and I don't really want them. I want this only to affect the inside of the highlighter. So in order to do that, we need to give it another mask that's going to tell it, like, where to map out these values. So, In order to do that, we're going to now use a gradient texture, and this is the third one that we've used so far. So for this gradient texture, I'm going to press control T again and just preview it how it looks like. So right now, it doesn't do much, but if I put it under UV, and then I put the rotation, I believe, let me see of the z axis into 90. And start playing with the location while holding shift. Now I have a mask of both the inside being black and the outside being pure white. My location is, I believe, 0.6 0.66, something around here, it doesn't matter if it doesn't go all the way. As long as we make sure that this inside is black and the outside is mostly white, that should do the trick for us because now from here, I'm going to add a color ramp, and this color ramp is just going to help me clamp these values up to make the white more white and the black essentially more black like this. I'm going to mix these two values together. Control shift click with my mouse. And under the mixed properties, let's just preview how this looks like right now. This is how it is. Under the mixed properties, I'm going to not use multiplier. This is what we've done before because the multiplier would essentially just make everything inside darker, as you can see, and then everything outside white, which, you know, not bad, but instead, I'm going to use lighten. And there we go. And so now we have them only in the inside. So this, again, gives you a lot of creativity and flexibility. You can play around with the strength of them, how strong you want them to be seen, how much you can clamp down these values, clamp down these ones. And then this is kind of what you get. Again, if we now preview this altogether, here is how it looks like if I go into the actual color. It is getting pretty dark, I would say. So I'm going to go here under my overlays and play around just with this to make it slightly more brighter. But we can now see all these little tiles. If the tiles are too big for you, you can play with the scale, make them smaller or bigger. It is completely up to you. Additionally, if you want, there's another texture that I haven't mentioned before that you can also use, and this isn't really necessary. This is more like an extra detail if you want. Which is called the Voronoi texture here. So if I preview the Voronoi texture and I press control T, and I make it, let's see into the object. I play around with the scale by increasing it to something around here. You can see that the Vorony texture gives you a little bit of these dots. But if you change it to, I believe, F two and from Euclidean into Cebchev we are starting to get something somewhat similar. Let me just add a color ramp here and clamp these two up. Something similar to our image texture that we use. So it's not exactly, but it is somewhat similar. And so that I can also add a little bit more detail. And we can play around with this detail here. Play around with the scale to get a little bit more of these smaller dots. And then on top of it, we can just use, let's see, another lighten like this. And so for this lighten, I think they should do the trick if I move it all the way to the left. Mmm. I guess I need to add separately another gradient texture here. So I'm going to use this gradient texture, move it into here, move these two together. And now just pretty much repeating everything that I've done here, so gradient texture, Lighten. And then pushing this up. There we go. We have these little dots and now moving it into here. And if I use, let's see mix multiply. There we go. We have now a combination of small little dots. Let's just see how they're performing. There they are. And also the bigger ones caused by our image texture. Let's preview everything together, and there we go. Again, as I said, quite a lot of things. I think in the next video, I'm just going to spend some time to start organizing this to make it a little bit cleaner so that you guys, you know, so it doesn't get too messy. I'm just going to organize all of these little things a little bit, give them a bit more space and such. And that's pretty much it for this one. I'll see you in the next video. Es. 13. Texturing the highliner pt3: I say that things were slowly start to get messy. And in light of that, for this video, we're going to do two things. We're going to organize our nodes a little bit better so that it doesn't look too much like a messed up spaghetti. And I'm hoping if we have enough time, we're also going to work on our roughness and our normal maps as well. So to begin with the organization is going to be fairly straightforward. We're just going to scroll over here. And so for these four textures here, which are going to be called our base coat. We are just going to select all four of them and then press Shift and P, and this is going to create this little frame for us. And then you can press F two on your keyboard to give it a label, or you can just go here, and type in a label if you want. Once you type in a label. I'm just going to call this one base coat. You can go and under properties, change the size and make it a little bit bigger so you can see it from here. Additionally, if you want, you can also give it a color. I'm not going to go that much into detail. This is not yet that complicated. But for now, I'm going to do this same thing for all four of them, and I suggest you do the same. So I'm going to go here under this noise picture. This one, I believe, is my brush strokes. I'm going to go Shift B, F two, my keyboard, and then brush stroke. Increase the size. There we go. The lower one is my grunge. That's how the texture is called. There we go. Shift P. And then F two grunge. These or are my wave texture. So let me just move my frame for the grunge just slightly below it. Let's make more space here or our PBR textures and the rest of them. So this one here is our wave texture, Shift P, F two, call it wave. Label size. Perfect. Move it a little bit here. And then what else do we have? We have let's call this one. Let me think quickly creatively. This is our PBR texture, quite literally because it's an image texture. So I'm going to call it PBR. Shift P F two PBR. And then the bottom one is our Voronoi Shift B two Voronoi. There we go. All right. So we have all of these things for our base color. And we have our principal B as DF over here. We can push these guys just somewhere around here so that they don't get too messed up. I did want to keep them separately because these are the key ones that we're going to need versus the one that's over here as well. And so right now, I think the next thing that we can do and add is going to be our roughness. The way the roughness works, if you're not familiar with the roughness map. Essentially, a roughness is almost like a value 0-1. And in our images, whatever is zero is identified as black and whatever is one is identified as white. And so when something is pure white, it's not going to be really rough. And then when something is pure black, it's going to be very, very reflective, almost like it's wet. And so what we can do here is we're going to be using This, I believe, texture. Let me just preview render. So this is going to be a texture that we're going to be using for our roughness. And I think actually we can combine or let me. We're actually going to use this one for now, and then maybe we'll try to go a little bit back and forth, but we'll see. So I'm going to add a color wrap because I want to translate this texture into a black and white value such as this one here. And now, for instance, I'm just going to push everything to make it a bit blacker, darker so you can see here. And I'm going to connect this into my roughness right here. So I'm going to preview to show you what this is going to do. As you can see, now, everything is very glossy and shiny, you can kind of see it. There we go, we can see all the lights. But then if I start slowly pushing this and then clapping on the other value, you can see that that roughness is slowly starting to come in because this is how architecture currently looks like. So everything that's black is going to be reflective, everything that's white is going to be rough. And so, for instance, now the roughness is kind of working in this way. But we don't want any blacks as a matter of fact. We want this to be almost purely white. I'm going to push this all the way like this right now. So it's almost pure white. I would just say maybe very, very subtle, very, very small hint of dark values. So I just pushed it very, very low, and we might even change it. So for some reference, I think I put I'm going to put 0.8. Then we can clam these values a little closer together. And I would say this is pretty much it right now. So it's still very, very rough material. And where material is really going to start to shine and you're going to start noticing things is when we add our height map or actually know. That's the normal map. Then this is what's called the bump map and the height is actually the displacement, I think, I think. So we're going to now add our bump map. It's going to connect into the normal. So what we can do is let's just go here Shift B so that we know, and then F two, this is our roughness. And I'm going to go right below here. When I press control C control V this time. So I have it separately outside of the frame. I'm going to reset these values, reset color rep. And then let's see, for the bump, I want to do two things separately. So I want to take everything that we have in here, so I'm going to push it into the color mp. And the reason why we're pushing into the color p is because the bump map is, again, a value 0-1 versus a normal map is like colors between I'm not even sure, like purple, red and blue, something like this, if I remember correctly. But, yeah. So from here, I'm also going to now duplicate this value, and what I want to connect to it is this J classic. So everything from here, I don't want to use this one nor this one because I want the entire highliner to be covered, not just the inside of it. So I'm going to go like that. Let's connect it. There we go. Perfect. Now, usually, so I've been told that what you want is not to have two, let's go like this bump maps. What you want is not to have two bump maps, but instead have one, and you would just mix these two together and then plug them into that one bump map. But in my trial and error use cases, I've always had more and better success at having two bump maps and then controlling them individually than having to play with the slider for the colors, to be honest. So I can't vouch and say 100%, this is, like, the best or most correct way or the best practice because some people have told me that it's not the best practice, but it has just worked for me the best way. I'm not sure how else to explain it to you, honestly. So what I'm going to do is just connect this one into the height over here, connect this one into the height. And so instead of mixing these two and plugging them into just one bump map, I'm going to mix these two like this. And then plug them into the normal. And let's preview our texture. And so right now, we can't really see much. There's something going on, but very, very little. But the reason why I wanted to have these two pumps is now I can control here the pump strength, for instance, so the top one is the lines, and then the bottom one is this PBR texture. And so, for instance, I want to have the lines be a little bit stronger. I'm just going to press number two. I want these things here. Uh these dots and squares to be a bit more expressive. I can press them number two here, where I can maybe completely re reduce them, increase them, and now we're getting all these little scratches and nice details onto our highlighter just like that. So I would say, let's go view camera, and let's press control and space and to see this in a full screen view. And this is looking, I would say, pretty good overall on our highlighter. Awesome. So in the next video now, I would say, actually, let's just first organize this, so this is going to be Shift B. And I'm going to call this two to two. This is going to be called normal map or bump map. Let's call this F two bump map. And I'm going to increase the label size. So now we are a little bit more organized and increase the label size here. We have the I forgot to add an H here. Rough N. We have the roughness. We have the bump map. We have all of those textures here that go into our base color. We can even, I guess, call this one here. Si f two base color. And there we go. Next on the list is going to be displacement. And so I'll see you guys in the next video. Cheers. 14. Adding displacement: This part, we're going to be adding displacement to our textures. So that means we'll also be adding new nodes into our node editor over here. Now, for the displacement itself, there are a couple of prerequisites that we need to do in order for it to make it work. I'm just going to start with the first two. So the first two are in our render properties, we need to have feature set to experimental because if we don't have this set to experimental and then we go under our subdivision here, we won't see the adaptive subdivision option turn available for us. If I go here, turn off this, put it to support it, go down, you'll see it's gone. Okay. So I'm going to turn it experimental, scroll back down here, turn an adaptive subdivision on. Now, the reason why we need adaptive subdivision, essentially is because we're going to be running displacement. And for displacement, we need to have a high poly mesh and more vertices in order for our displacement map to tell where to move those vertices, essentially. So I'm just going to go here under rendered view. And so when I have this enabled, and one more thing, you need to make sure that your subdivision is at the very bottom because if it's right above it or if it's right above an under modifier, you won't have the adaptive subdivision option available. So again, put the p adaptive subivision all the way down, and there we go. Now, these are the two pre recodes. There's the third one, but we're going to talk about that one once we add our displacement here under our shot. So I'm going to go here, Tepin shift Tepin displacement, and I'm going to use the very top one where it says, displacement. So this one here. All right. Now, for the displacement, the same rules apply, as I've explained in the previous video for the bump map where I've been told it's better to use just one bump map and then run multiple textures and then mix them kind of like if you had something like, let's say, this, like a mixed color, and then you would take this one, take this one and then just run it through one bump map, and then this one here wouldn't even exist. And so the same kind of rule that I've been told is for the displacement because it takes less resources. But in my case, I've had more luck simply running individual displacements, individual bump maps, and having more control over their individual strengths this way. While not suffering that much, I guess, to my resources. Anyway, what I'm going to do here and what I want to first connect to my displacement is if I go all the way here, I don't want to take this texture here because this one also has the PBR that is inside, and I don't want to take the next one because the following one also has all these lines going here. Instead, I want to take the third one from the right or the second one from the left, however you want to call this one. So I'm going to take this mixed texture, and I'm going to drag it all the way down to my displacement and put it into the height. And this one is going to be called F two. I'm going to press displacement details. I'm just going to give it that name. And I'm going to connect this displacement into our displacement right here. And so if I go out and preview it, let's press control shift and left click with our mouse. There's really not much almost nothing going on with our material. And the reason for this is because we haven't done the third thing. The third prerequisite. And that is going into our material settings and going all the way down, scrolling until we see settings. So not this one, where it says blend mode. There's the settings right above it. This here. It can be a little bit confusing. Sometimes, I always mistake them. And here where it says displacement from bump only, we need to change this to say displacement and bump. So now, you'll immediately notice that we are getting some extra details on our highliner. So if I were to go and increase this to, let's say, scale three, it is going to start to change, and then put the mid level to one. And again, you'll see the changes. Now, I don't want to go crazy with this. I'm just going to go with the value of 0.15 for now. I might tweak these values later. I just wanted them to be somewhat visible, maybe 0.35. For now, something like this is fine because onto this displacement, I am going to now add another thing, and that is the PBR texture. So I'm going to add actually a mixed color. And so this is technically how you're supposed to be doing it. What I was just explaining with the pop map where we add one mixed color here, and now I'm going to run this texture. All the way into here. And then I'm going to add let's see, a color ramp. To just help me clamp down the value. So let's just preview how this mixed texture currently looks like. So this is what the mix texture looks like right now, but I want it actually to go here under another color ramp. So it's not this color. But instead, it's gray and white value because a height map or displacement map is always a value 0-1 being black and white, and it goes a little bit into shades of gray and such. So this is how our displacement map looks right now. And what I want to do is essentially everything that is white is going to be pushed outward, and then everything that is darker is going to be pushed inward. So all these darker parts are going to be pushed inward, or these lighter parts are going to be pushed outward. So I'm going to be able to control now, for instance, if I were to push clamp down the upper part, which is the detailed part. I'm going to call this one again details. And this one is going to be called PBR that we know. And this is what we get. I want to make the PBR a little more clamp down, a little more expressive, something like maybe this, and I don't want it to be pure black, so much like that, and I'm going to push this slightly upward. We're not going to be doing too much tweaking now. We're just going to be creating a setup. And then in the next video, we are going to be tweaking everything to try to get it as close as possible. So don't worry at this point now, too much about the right values. Just make sure that we have the entire setup here created. So let's just preview how this is looking right now. All right, we can slowly start seeing some of the leftovers from these squares and shapes. So there right there. If I were to hypothetically even go here under multiply. We can see how that would react. Let's push this all the way. Now, it's a bit too dark for my taste, I would say. Maybe we maybe push this a little bit more, push this a little bit to the left to get something like this. There you go. So there's a lot of things that we can do once we start messing around with this, but I am going to keep it more or less like this because the third thing that I want to add now is going to be the lines. So the wave lines that we have over here. And this is where I'm going to be adding another displacement because I want to be able to control the strength of those lines and how much they're being pushed outwards and inwards. So I'm going to shift the add an displacement right here, and then I'm going to go for these lines and then just connect them into the height. And I'm going to connect this all the way into the displacement. All right. And here we have the lines. I can see that it's already pushing a little bit outward, but we need to be careful with the amounts that we add because it slowly we'll start breaking up our scene with these artifacts. So we need to be careful with the amount that we go with. So for instance, I'm going to let's see here, drop this down to somewhere around 1.15. There we go. So we have a little bit of them bumping out, and this is what we have so far. Now, all that really needs to be done is just connecting these two into one. So I'm going to press control shift, right click with my mouse, move it downwards, and there we go into our mix, and then this is how it currently looks like. You can also use different blending modes, for instance, you can go with add and then push it all the way to the right. And so now it's adding one on top of the other. And we can preview it one more time to just see how it looks like, and you can see it's quite quite different. So there we go. All right. One more thing now. I do want to organize the displacement part here, so I'm just going to go here, move it a little bit downward, press Shift B. And from here, I'm going to call this one, this placement. So it's a bit easier to recognize what everything is. Perfect. Last but not least, before I close this video, I do want to do one small thing. And that is, I want to add a little light that's going to bright up this outside part of the entrance here, because right now, if I look at my shot and if I go into my camera view, it is a little bit too dark for my taste. So I'm going to go into my three D viewport. I'm going to go into the top view. And what I want to do here is just press shift right click with my mouse, so that when I now add a point light, which is what I'm going to go point light right here or you can just sip in point and then choose the point light. It is going to add it right at this point where I set up my three D cursor. So for the point line, I'm going to use a value of roughly 20,000. And that is going to give me just a slightly brighter entrance right here, and I can even push this a little bit more. You can go, let's say 25. That's not bad. I might even push the point light slightly a bit backwards. Let's just see if I move it a little bit, maybe closer, I guess something around this point isn't even that bad. And what I want to do now with the point light is just push it into the highliner collection right here. And additionally, for it, I want to let's see, da da, for the point line, I want it to go under the highlier apply itself. So I'm going to drag hold shift with my keyboard and click with my mouse, drag it on top of this. And so this way, if I move the high liner, the point light also follows the high liner that way. Perfect. So I'm going to drop this value to maybe 22,000. So just a little bit of light, maybe 25 26. I guess I do need to want to push it a little bit more. But you can also play with the radius of it, increase the radius, And that should give you a different fall off for the light itself. I might keep it somewhere around 25. Maybe push this value. Let's see 30. And there we go. It is definitely looking brighter. So the next video is going to be a little bit different, and I'll see you guys in there. Cheers. 15. Adjusting the textures: The reason why this video is going to be slightly different than all the previous ones has to do with the way we're going to approach this part. And so in this part, the goal of it is to play around with these values individually to help us at least me help me get to this look as close as possible. If you don't want if you're already happy with how your highlander works, you don't really need to do anything. Additionally, if you don't want to kind of go through this process, you can just skip to this part, and where I'm going to go kind of like what I've changed individually here. So just more like a quick overview. But as you remember way back, I did talk a little bit about the creative process and how it is completely different from what you see here in this course. And so I thought that this was a great opportunity to utilize that because there is going to be a lot of back and forth tweaking values and seeing how each value impacts it differently. And so you're going to get a little bit of an idea of that kind of working on it individually or working with somebody, me in this case together as well. So without further ado, let's begin. And the first thing that I want to change on my highlander, aside from the obvious, which are like these black squares that are being way too strong. They're way too intrusive on our look. And so what I want to change is the actual color of the highliner a little bit, because I think my highlander is a little bit too warm in comparison to the material that is used here. So I'm going to go under my base coat, and I'm just going to change here under settings, the saturation to something slightly lower. And then this one here as well to slightly lower. And this should help me get a much colder look for a highlander. I'm going to push it even more. So even more saturation. And I would say even more in this part here as well. And I would say, now we're slowly starting to get there. I'm going to push a little bit more color somewhere around 0.0 0.75, it looks like it is the value that I'm going to go with. Then we have the brush stroke. And what I like to usually do is I like to kind of, like, go to the extremes of each value to see how it's going to affect it. So in this case, if I push the brush stroke all the way to left, it makes our highlander look a little bit darker. If I go here, you can see all of this grudgs that also here appears. So if I just push it, maybe I guess maybe even keep it as is more or less. Maybe just push it a little bit more to the left. This one clamp it a little bit more. Just to give it something closer to this. This isn't pretty bad at all. I would say. Next, we have the grunge itself. And so the grunge, we can just preview it to see how it looks like, and then go back to going here. What I can do here is just let's push it all the way to left to the right actually. And if I push it to the right, I think it makes it a little bit brighter everything versus if I push everything to the left, it makes everything darker and here. We can take a look on the side here as well, see how it affects everything. Everything going on here. We can push now this, make it slightly brighter, I would say. Let's go view camera, and here we go. So I would probably keep it a little bit brighter and maybe clamp down these values a little bit more. Next, we have the wave. And for the wave, I want to just change the amount of waves that we have because I think right now they're too far apart. And so in comparison here, the lines are much more thinner and much closer together. So I'm going to change the number to roughly 200, and that should give me a pretty decent amount just looking at it right now. All right? And here if we zoom in, we can also see all of the other details that we want to change as we go on later on. Next, we have the PBR. And for this one, again, I think this is way too aggressive. And so what I want to do is just make this black value and push it all the way up until it's like something grayish. And so now it is still there. You can still see them, but it is very, very, less noticeable. And if you want, you can go somewhere in the middle ground where you just push it, I would say, something close to here, and now they're still kind of visible, but still slightly a little bit less. So this is pretty good, I would say overall. Then we can do the same thing with the Voronoi, which are these little small dots every once in a while that we see here. We can just change it to be slightly brighter somewhere around, I would say, midway I think this looks more or less pretty good. I'm going to push this a little bit more and then zoom in here as well, so you can get a better look. So what is next on the repertoire? I would say the pump map. And the goal with the bump map is now going to be, essentially, again, play around with these values. I'd like to go again all the way to the extreme, just to see how it's going to impact it. And if you're not sure what this part does, if you forgot about it, up until this point, you can press here control shift, and left click with your mouse to get a better idea. So this one has the lines, has all of these, like smudges and etcetera from before. And that's what this bump met does. So I'm obviously not going to have the strength B 100, but I'm going to change it maybe to let's see five or two. Maybe something around two isn't really that bad. Next, we have another bump. And this bump, I believe, is for our PBR. So we can even rename it here, so just in case we don't forget bump PBR. And for this, we can play around with the strength as well. Maybe let's see if we make it weaker. What does it do? I can't really tell much because we still have the displacement going on. So what we can do here is actually going into our displacement and just push everything to zero for our displacement. And let's just see now how this strength is going to impact our PBR. Let's go 101 more time, just go into the extremes, and we can see some of these details showing up over there. I'm going to keep this one I would say maybe five with a strength distance strength of 24 now, maybe even lower. I would say 2.5. There we go, so it's a bit cleaner now. While we still have and maintain some of the details. Excellent. Now, these lines here maybe a bit also strong, so what we can change is affect their color. And I think these are coming from the base color itself, at some point, so let's just see which one. Here we have these lines. I guess they are coming from this one here that is going all the way. Let's check up to here. And this is going all the way in here. And so we could probably change the strength of them by adding a color ramp right here in between these two. So I can go here add a color ram. Okay. I'll preview this here. And for the color ramp, I can just slowly start increasing this here to brighter, and this should start affecting it, as you can see, slowly making it less and less strong. And let's preview how it looks like. All right? It is definitely weaker. And I'm going to keep it for now. I might go back to it later and change it because right now we're heading into our displacement and displacement is going to do quite a lot of work here. So we have the displacement for the details, and here we have, I believe, the displacement for what is this one here? For the waves. So I'm just going to call this one displacement. Waves. I'm going to start off with the waves first, actually. So for the waves, I'm going to go and change this to like 100, just go crazy. And this is way too much obvious. I'm going to go maybe one. Is already not bad. And so what we can do here now with the scale and the mid level. The mid level is essentially going to push this inside while the scale is pushing everything outside. And so I can change the mid level to maybe 1.5, and this is already looking pretty good. But I think these cracks here that we're getting are still a bit too strong. We do have some cracks going on in here, but they're not as strong. And I think it's also going to help us if we reduce the let's just go here under render film print payer and take it out because this gives us in a much closer realistic look to what we're trying to achieve. And so while it is temporary, it's still going to help us quite a lot, I would say. So I think the scale is still too strong. I'm going to go 0.5, and then maybe 0.25. Let's see now. This is looking a little bit more interesting. I would maybe go even lower or maybe increase the mid level of 2.5. Let's go one. Okay, one is looking very, very interesting. Maybe reducing the strength here with the scale to 0.25. 0.25 is not bad at all, I would say. We get some imperfections every once in a while. We have the lines and everything. It is looking pretty interesting overall, I would say. And on top of this, let's see, maybe 1.25. What if you go to five? And this is way too much, obviously, two. Two isn't really that bad, actually. I would say two is pretty good as well. I think two almost gets us there. Maybe 0.35. Okay, now is slowly starting to break here around the edges. I'm just going to go back to 0.25, but then for this one, maybe 1.70 51.95. I think 1.95 works best for me. So this is the value that I'm going to keep. 1.95 is looking pretty good, I would say. Okay. Then we have this other displacement, which is for all of our details. So I increase here, let's just go with one. You can see it starts to go really crazy here, I would say, let's have a much lower value. I would go with maybe 0.1. Mm let's go mid level also one for now and then go here 2.5. Let's just experiment 0.75 or let's go here 0.5 as well to little. Let's go 0.25. 0.15 0.15 is not bad but my limit level is way too up so I'm going to put it to 0.25. Let's go zero. Zero is also. 0.1. Let's go a bit again more to the extreme. So one is way too much. 0.5 is still way too much. 0.25 as I would say, not bad, but I think it's a bit too aggressive. So let's say 0.15 is not bad at all maybe just slightly more 0.1 with the mid level of maybe 0.15. That is not looking bad at all, I would say. Yeah. This looks overall pretty good. I'm going to increase the temperature here just a little bit because I do think this one is slightly more brownish in comparison to my one. So it might have overdone it over there. So let's just take a quick look right here under the base coat. I'm just going to push this slightly more saturated. And let's just go here with this one, which is also just slightly more saturated. That's not bad. I think this part here is a little bit sticking out maybe way too much in some of these scratches. So I might just go let's go here into our bump. Let's check what's going on here. All right. We have this and we have this. So I might reduce this bump map here just a little bit lower to make it maybe one. All right. And I'm going to increase now here, the darkness of these just to add a bit more variety over there slightly. Let's do that as well. Just a very, very tiny, not too much. So if I go all the way down, we're going to start getting them way too much. Way too expressive. I'm going to go maybe around 0.5. Los maybe still a bit too strong, so maybe 0.597. This is a little bit too strong 0.638. All right. That's not bad. I'm going to go now into my grunge. Here, I'm going to play around with these two values, trying to get a decent clamping of them together to add a little bit more dirt coming inside. This is not looking much better. Look at this little all of this messiness coming inside. That is pretty good, I would say, overall. Yeah. This is a bit too aggressive now, but just slightly tiny, tiny, tiny a little bit. Does pretty decent job, I would say. Let's go here for our Voronoi. I think my Voronoi is maybe still a little bit too dark. So might just push it a little bit more up. To get something like this. Pretty good. Excellent. I'm going to keep increasing the saturation over here as well, because I am noticing it maybe it's a bit too cold. I'm not sure. Maybe I pushed it a little bit too much. Let's see. Now, is it getting a bit warmer. If I go all the way, now it's way too much. So. Slightly less. Still a little bit more. And this will depend also on your monitor as well. I think this is as close as I can get for now, so I'm going to keep it. So this is looking pretty good. I am going to now go back into these grudge details, make them slightly less noticeable. So just push this a little bit more to the left. I go all the way. It's going to actually make it darker, so that's not good. I want to push this to the right as a matter of fact, then. It just pushing the slightly more to the right, push slightly more to the right. A little bit more to the left. Okay. I think this is pretty decent sweet spot for it to be there. Excellent. And so what else can we do here? Well, I would say we could also mess a little bit more with the displacement here. Let's just check around what we can do if we push the waves to 0.5, one more time. Okay, that was definitely too much 0.35, then lowering the mid level 2.5 or 0.75. One. Ooh. This is actually pretty good. I would say, one and maybe 0.5. Let's now Zoom we're going to press control space just to get the clear look of everything. I think this is these lines are too extreme. And I'm wondering whether these lines are being caused by the displacement. I would say they are being caused by the displacement. I'm going to say 0.35. I'm going to close it there, and then use this to 0.75, close it in here. Maybe slightly less or more. Let's see. 1.5. 1.5 is looking good. All right. I'm going to close this at 1.5. This is my final number for this placement. And let's see, I would say this value here is also fine. We have a lot of details going on. And so now we have our highlander. All right. Let's do a quick summary of what I've pretty much accomplished here. So essentially, I did do a slight changes to the color here. So if you want to get the exact values, I'd only change this one here, put it to six fd68. Then this one here, I changed it to 898580. Over here for the brush stroke, I believe I just moved a little bit of positioning, so you can change the position, and you can see the position for this one is 0.422 for this one here is 0.553. Then for the grunge, I moved also deposition in here, 0.47 30.625. For the waves, I increased the amount of waves to 200, and I also added one more color ramp here that goes into the base color to essentially reduce the amount of the visibility of the lines that are coming here because they were a bit too intensive before. And so I made this color ramp that goes in here and connects all the way into this multiply. Additionally, let's go into our PBR. For PBR, I reduce the dark value here to D one, D one, which is like 80% white, I would say, just so that it's a little bit less intensive as it goes inside. Then additionally, for the Vorono I kind of like did the same where I just reduced the amount of blacks to put it somewhere here in the middle. Let's see. For the bump map, I rough and is kept the same as is. For the bump map, I changed the values, as you can see here, strength to distance one, and then strength 2.5 distance one. And additionally, with the displacement, I played a little bit in order to get these values where mid level is 0.15. Scale is 0.1, and mid level is 1.5, and scale is 0.35. I would say this pretty much concludes everything that we needed to do here. One more thing that you can tweak around if you want to play with it is the strength of the light that we added in here. So if I go under my three D viewport and I select this slight, let me just go back to my soli view and select this slight. And you can maybe play around with it with the strength. So if we have it right now, as you can see it is completely dark. And then if I turn it on, it is definitely brighter, but I think it's a little bit too bright. So am I going to 20,000 realm, which is slightly darker. Then if I change the radius to be a little smaller or actually even be zero, and then I move it to be more to the outside. It will also affect this altogether. So I think having a smaller radius does help me with this shadow entrance over here. Maybe if I push it even more a little bit more inside. Let's just take a quick look, pushing it a little bit more. If I were to change the radius to 100, again, I'd like to go into the extremes just to get a better idea of how it's going to affect the scene, and then just changing it here to zero. I don't really see much of a difference. Soft fall off. We can keep the soft fall off at one. But yeah, maybe change this then 215,000. All right. So this is After we turn it off. This is when we have it on. We get a little bit more of a light coming in. And I think that is overall pretty good. So yeah, this is pretty much everything that we need that I did to the highner to get this kind of look. Again, if you want, you can go into the more extreme values or not. This is up to you. And in the next video, we're going to be doing something slightly unique and different from before that is also going to be very interesting. So don't miss out. Cheers. 16. Texture painting: If you've been paying very close attention to this highlander in our reference image. You might notice that there's still one small detail that we haven't added to our whole texture. That has to do with these little red lines going on here. You can see this one here. There's a couple of more of them going all the way up to here. And I believe if I look very closely, there's still one more right around here. I don't know if this one is like some kind of a damage artifact or if it's another red line, but I'm going to assume that this is still one more red line. And so in this section of the video, we're going to be adding this. And we're going to be using a very similar technique or actually exactly the same technique that if you watch my previous Spirited Away tutorial where we recreate the famous train scene from the anime Spirited Away. We're going to use the same technique that we did over there. That's for texture painting. And so in order to do this, I'm going to just move everything all the way a little bit down so I can make still a little bit more space for you guys here to see. And then I'm going to go here under my shader editor like this. I'm going to move my principal BSDF little bit more to the left. Somewhere around here. I'm just going to move it now a little bit more up to give it some space. And so this area around here is going to be where we're going to be adding that. And so it all essentially is going to start by creating a mixed color node and adding it in here, because essentially, we're going to now tell blender to mix between two colors because this here essentially is just a color. We don't need to do anything else. We just need to add a new color. And so in order to do this, I'm going to connect here the B dot into a color gram. And for this color ramp, I'm going to use a set of colors that I have here on my side. I'm just going to paste them here. And I'm going to let you know the values once I've pasted them. But in reality, anything close to this should be pretty much fine. So the value that's on the left is I think this is 430,000. And then the value that's all the way on the right is 321210. So these two values, again, doesn't have to be exactly perfect. You can use your own if you want. Actually, why not try. And so from here now, we need to tell we need to create a mask for Blender to tell it to, you know, use this red color only in these certain spots in comparison to everything else that we have here on the left side. I I use move by factor. So in order to do this, we're going to go here in the factor, move it all the way to the left and then type in image. So we're going to create an image texture that's going to then be painted on as a mask to drive this red color along with the previous thing that we have going on here for our base color. It'll all make sense in just a second. I'm going to press here new to create the new image texture, and I'm going to change this value here by two, so it's going to be a two k image texture. For the image texture, I'm going to call it, let's see, highliner mask should be pretty much fine. Once you create your image texture, just make sure that for the color space, we use a non color because a mask is usually, you know, spread between the values of black and white. So once we have this mask, let's just go now into texture painting, and I don't think we ever use any of these other we use for UV editing, but we haven't used texture paint. So we're going to go here now into texture paint. Just make sure that your highliner here is selected. And this mask here is also has this, like, white overlay stroke, and then go into texture paint and let's find our highliner here. I might have some difficulties finding it. There it is. Be sure because if we scroll a little bit, we're going to have that clipping issue that you might be familiar with. So I'm going to press N. Go here under view, type here one, and then add two more zeros over here. Press in one more time. And now, press tab, let's just make sure that everything for our highliner is selected as it is, which is great. And so if I were to now, let's say, go with this. Right now we have this brush. And so if you press F, it's going to increase the size of the brush, and you can paint like this. I'm going to press control Z now to just undo what I did. But if I move the brush a little bit to this side, and if you press Shift F, that's going to help you control the strength of the brush. So if it's going to be much weaker versus it's going to be much stronger. And so I'm going to now go somewhere around here, which is left of this square area that we have created. So roughly around this part, I'm just going to press with my mouse and start slowly drawing. Now, you might see it also being drawn in here, and that's basically because of the way that we we unwrapped it, but don't worry, it's not going to affect us at all. It should be perfectly fine. So I'm just going to draw over here like this, trying to slowly get also a little bit inside. And then trying to kind of like recreate this line that goes I guess, a little bit further up to somewhere around here, I would say. So this is like our first line that we've just created, You can also shrink it F, make it smaller, and then if you want to make it a little bit more sharper corners or not. But yeah, this here is now our first line. And then I'm going to now go and add another one. But now that I look at this one, I would say, this one is a little bit crooked, so I'm going to press control. And then while holding control, I'm going to draw, and that's going to start erasing everything here on the side. So I'm just going to try to correct it a little bit because as I can see, it's a little bit crooked. So now I'm going to go back into drawing and then just push a little bit more on this edge here. So it's a little less crooked. And there we go. It doesn't have to be perfect, by the way. Just something like this should be fine because we can go back and forth later on. I just want to now show you how this is going to look like once we draw a little bit more of these. So right after this big one, we have two thin small ones. So I'm just going to press F to make it smaller. And then we're going to start drawing one right around here, maybe slightly bigger. But yeah, something like this is going to be fine. Then another one right next to it, roughly, make it smaller F, and then put it right in here. I would say this is okay. And then a couple of steps upward. Like somewhere around here, I'm going to add another one. There we go. And then one more step upward. I'm going to add a little bit more thicker one. Something like this one is fine. And if you if you notice that you kind of went all the way there, you can press control and click with your mouse, and that should also erase the previous colors as you can see. All right. So I think this is a good one. And then we can also add this small one that's all the way on the right side in the corner. Barely visible, but let's just add it for the sake of it being there, so I'm going to put it, t's see. I'm going to put it somewhere here in the middle. Click. Make sure it's also inside here so that it can be seen and it goes just a little bit outside. It doesn't really need to be disbic so I'm going to race a little bit. But something like this line should be, I would say, more or less fine. All right. So let's see what this is actually going to do now to our color material. Let's go into our layout, and let's wait here for the render, and there we go. We can immediately see that it has affected our texturing here by creating these red lines. Now, I'm not 100% happy how these look like. So I might actually go now a little bit back and then clean them up. But I will speed up this part of the video so that you don't waste time. So I'm just going to go into texture painting here and maybe just erase this one here, the big one. And then redraw it one more time. All right, I'm going to try with these ones now, let's just go into layout. Take a look quickly. And I think here I need to push them. This one, I need to push a little bit more inside, including these two smaller ones. I'm going to push them as well, a little bit more inside. Okay. We go. Now, you might be good with how this already looks like. But as a matter of fact, we can even improve this a little bit more by controlling the blend of it, almost like improving this mask that we have. And before we even move forward, one thing that I would definitely suggest is if going here under texture paint and clicking here under the highner mask that you have created, let's see, there should be image save as. Make sure that you save this mask. And so because if you turn on the blender file later on, without this mask being saved, without having this mask at all, then this is going to be deleted. So be sure to save this. I'm going to do just that right now. There we go. And now I'm going to go into my layout. And I'm going to work on this image texture now that I've created by improving this mask that we have over here, and it's all going to start essentially with a simple mixed color. Being added right here. And so now, what I want for this mixed color is to add another color mp that's going to combine this mix with another mask in order to clamp it down and add a little bit more of that, I would say, dirty effect and just in general, improve the blend of it. And so in order to do this, I'm going to inside this color p use one of these colors that we have over here. So let's just check this one out here. This one, this one, and then we have this one here. I would say that we should probably use the one here, which has pretty much everything except of these squares inside the high liner. So what I'm going to do is just use this multiply and connect it to this color b that we have over here. And now from here, I'm just going to play with these values until I get to something like a really dirty mask effect that's really strong and clamp down between these two values. Let's see. Let's move this even more to the left. I would say something like this is a good starting point. Now let's go into our mix here. And so for our way of mixing right now, we just have mix. And if we go, let's say darken, we just don't get really much But if we go under, I would say, color burn, this should start giving us pretty decent blend going on right here. Now, if I push this all the way to the right, it should improve even more because it's now using also this mask that we added on top of this one. And this is starting to look really, really nice. If we go here under preview, we can already see how well it is being blended. And so additionally on top of that, we can go here under a one more color ramp. To kind of help us clamp down now this value that we have created here into this one here, to make it even more stronger just by moving these values closer together and make it just more sharper overall. Additionally, if you want to, let's say, increase the opacity, you could just go. Let me just even show you in real time. So if I were to take this white value and if I were to make it slightly grayish, you'll notice that the opacity of this red color is slowly starting to decrease as well. In my case, I'm going to keep it as is. But as a matter of fact, I'm pretty happy with how this looks overall. I'm going to press control space here to make this window a little bit bigger, so I can take a closer look of my highlighter right here. And I would say this is not bad at all. I might actually increase only the thickness of this lower red line. And I would say that's pretty much it for me. So that's exactly what I'm going to do now now. You may want to do that as well, or you might be already done with your highlighter and you're pretty satisfied with how it looks. I'm just going to slightly more increase the thickness of this one here. Let's take a look now, one more time. Let's see if this has changed has definitely become slightly thicker. And I would say this is overall pretty good. Sometimes if it doesn't update for you, you can just go into solid and then go again into rendered and it should update as well. So this is pretty much it, I believe, for the texturing process of the highner. We are now slowly now starting to move into animation camera movements, and we also need to add those small ships into our scene. So all of those things are weighted us in the next videos. Cheers, guys. 17. Starting the animation: We've done the modeling, we've completed de tecturing and in this video, we're going to jump into animation. Now, when it comes to the animation, there's really three key things that we need to do. First, we need to tilt the movement of the camera to slowly go upwards and then reveal the planet. And as the camera is tilting upwards, the second thing that we need to do is animate the highlander also moving up in the z axis, but with a little bit of an offset. Lastly, the third part, which will be safe for the next video is going to be using geometry nodes to create those small ships that are coming out of the highliner itself. So with all that, let's just start changing our layout here. The first thing I'm going to do is just make sure that your frame rate is set to 24 because we're going to be rendering this in 24 frames per second. Additionally, I'm going to now also move this window bottom window all the way down, and I'm going to use it for my timeline. In the top window, I'm going to change into three D viewport, I'm going to split it in half like this so that the left part is going to be for my camera, and I'm going to control middle click with my mouse and then slowly zoom upward, so I can get as much real estate as possible. I'm going to press T to hide the window on the left, and I'm going to also hide the overlays and everything else that I have in here. And then this left side is going to be used essentially for managing my animation, et cetera. Well, this side here is used for preview. So the left side is for preview, the right side. Sorry for that. The right side is used for managing the animation, looking left and right, et cetera. All right. Let's change the duration of our animation. Right now, we have it set to 250, but I think the one that we want in total is going to be 15 seconds. And so 15 times 24 is going to give us roughly 360 frames per second. Additionally, I want to add a couple of markers here on my timeline in order to help me time some of the stuff better. So, for instance, the the time when the ships are slowly starting to come at the highliner, I want them to come at a three second mark. And the reason why I'm using a three second mark is so because in the song that is going to be used for that part, three second mark, there's like this very eerie sound that comes, and so that kind of amplifies the reveal the small ships that are coming out. So I'm going to type in three times 24 that's going to give me 72. I'm going to press here. Actually, don't use it here under the start. Change that here over there. So that was 72 we said, and I'm going to press M. All right. Make sure that your start is one and your N is 360. And now here you have 72 M. I'm going to press. Again, on this market that we just created. I'm going to press F two on my keyboard, and this is going to allow me to rename the marker. You don't need to necessarily do this, but just for kind of like remembering seeing organized and a good practice, I'm going to call this one ships. Additionally, there's the second marker I need to add, which is when I want to planet to slowly start revealing, and that one is going to be at Frame 240. So at 240, I'm going to press another M, and I'm going to press Whole clicking this marker F two and rename this one to planet. So now I know at this point, the ships are supposed to show up at this point, Lana needs to show up. And that's pretty much it. We are ready to start animating our shot. And I want to start off with the first position. That's going to be essentially all the way to zero. You can also press shift and then left arrow on your keyboard, and that's going to bring you all the way to the frame one. And so for frame one, I'm just going to move the camera to a certain value. And I'm going to press N to kind of see the location and the rotation. Because for the location, I'm going to move the camera in the z axis to negative 31.68. And the reason why I'm using this value is because I was like experimenting and trying to figure out what was the best one. And so going back and forth. And this was kind of like the number that I ended up using. And this is going to be esthetic. We're not going to be changing the z value, but we are going to be changing the rotation. And so right now for the rotation, I'm just going to put it to 90.481. Again, experiment to try it out. This was the one that kind of worked best for me. And the reason why I'm using these two values is, I'm just going to show you right now in a second, is when I go to my highlighter, And now I start moving the high Lner slightly down, G Z, and then shift and slowly moving down. This kind of gives me the closest look that I'm trying to get in relation to this reference. Let me just show you this one here, more or less because the camera needs to be slightly below the highliner and then also looking at it upwards. This is what we're doing. The camera is at the 90 degrees, the camera is completely straight, but here we have 90.481 because we're so far away, that distance kind of adds up onto the angle itself. And so now the camera is just slightly looking up into the highlander similar to how we have it in this shot. And so this is going to be our starting positions for the camera and for the highlander. So that means that we need to also add our keyframes. They're going to let Blender know that this is the starting position. So because we're going to be when I have the camera here selected. We're only going to be animating the rotation. I can just press here the right click and set Insert single keyframe. So this is my starting position for the camera. My n position for the camera. I'm going to go all the way here to 360. Make sure you're at frame 360. And I'm going to slowly start tilting the camera upwards so I can see here on the left side when is the planet revealed. So I'm going to press R to rotate and then x to rotate it in the x axis, and then I'm going to hold shift and move my mouse slightly upwards until I get a decent amount. And I would say this here, Right around here, it looks relatively close to what I am looking to achieve because I'm trying to get to this here, as you can see, my PRF, where it's the blue highlighted stroke. This kind of proportion where the planet is going to roughly be taking I would say, similar amount of screen space. So once you have this, I'm just going to click K here. So let me just click K. It doesn't work. Let me just try one more time. Click the camera. Press K. There we go. And then inside keyframe menu. You can click on available, and this should add the next keyframe that is needed. And so now we have this movement. Let's do the same now for a high Lner. For the high Lner we need to add a keyframe by this time. This one needs to go inside the Z axis. So for the highlaner, let me just go to it. And because we're going to be animating it inside the z axis, let me also just change this here. Let me just double check. The values are correct, 271.68. So let me just make sure it's negative 271.68. And then I'm going to go right click Insert single keyframe. And so from here and now, we want to move the highlander up. So as the camera goes, highlander is going to come to frame 360, and B, let's see, somewhere close to this position as we see on this frame. But we're going to be doing some minor tweaks additionally to the highlander once we get it to this position. We're going to be doing also minor tweaks to the key frames as well as we now move to the second phase of this video. Okay. So once you're kind of happy with the position of the high Lner. I think for me, this is going to be pretty good. Just repeat the same step where you press k and then we'll click available, and this should add another key frame to the highner. What I want to do here is you might notice it is barely visible, but you might notice that the highliner in this position, this lower part, the end part of the high liner needs to go slightly more downwards. So it needs to be a little bit more tilted. And so what I'm going to do here is simply going into my lattice modifier, click these two points and press G z z twice, so I can get it aligned to the high Lner position, and then just slowly start moving this down until I can kind of hide a small portion of the highlander like this. And what I might do as well is also select these 24 points in front and just slightly increase them a little bit more. So the highlander is a little bit more present in our shot. Okay? And this is pretty good. Let's go back now all the way to the first scene for the first shot. So shift left click with our arrow just to see how everything is looking. And I would say this also relatively well matches our scene that we are trying to build in here as well, where we have the highlander. This part is a little bit more tilted up. This is tilted up. And let's press Z just to check rendered view how everything is now looking. Light. So this is our starting position, which is similar to this one here. And what I can do, maybe with the light is just move the light just a little bit in order to achieve a thinner left point of this rim part over here. So what I can do is just go under my key light. And I think if I press R z and then move it a little bit more to the left. So just rotate it and you can see the values here that I'm using. This is going to make it slightly more thinner. There we go. Additionally, you may want to maybe change the fill light and also the rim light, if you want for now, I'm going to keep it as is and then maybe in the final phase of this video, I might do some minor tweaks. All right. This is pretty good so far. I'm going to go into my solid and then just preview the animation because right now we need to do the second phase of this video, which is tweaking the offsets. So if I were to press space, it's going to start animating and you can see as the highlander is moving. This is right now the ships are slowly starting to come out, and then planet is supposed to be revealed right around here, which is pretty decent. Overall, it doesn't look that bad at all. But you can notice that there's the scene starts very slow, and then it slowly starts progressing in its speed. And then as it exits, it again starts to slow down, and we don't want this kind of interpolation. So what we're going to do starting off first with, let's say, our camera is, I'm going to go and select the camera over here. And instead of having it under timeline, you can go to the graph editor or you can press Shift and then F six on your keyboard, and this is going to immediately give you the graph editor. I'm going to move this a little bit more up because I do want to be able to see the graphs here and the key key frame. So I'm going to press here to check my uler I'm going to collect the Tilda key and then frame all. And this is going to show me how the current interpolation is. So as you can see, it starts off very, very slow, and then as this line starts progressing upwards, the camera speeds up the movement inside the x axis, and then again, you can see it slowly starts to go lower. On the left side here, we have the angle of change, and then on the right side here, we see the frames as they are moving. And so you can see from here to here, this is the amount of degrees that the camera angle is going up, and we want to change that. So I'm going to click on this I'm not sure how you call these points. I'm just going to call this one points. I'm going to click on this point right here of the bezier curve, and I'm going to press S to scale it. And this is essentially going to make this line much more straighter. And so there's a very continual movement. Essentially, what we're doing now is we're telling Blender to move the camera upwards in a very similar speed up until here, roughly, and then as slowly as it comes to the end of the scene, it starts to slow down with the movement. As you can see. So we start off with a very fast movement right here, but then the movement starts to slow down as it goes, and we don't want to go even this fast. We might even want to change that. So what I'm going to do next is I'm going to go to my final frame right here, and I'm going to move this even further away. So outside the scope of what are we going to be rendering. And I'm going to press Z to move it even a little bit more up to get something closer to here. So let's now test this out. And I'm going to maybe also push this slightly more maybe more like, let's just keep it around here. Let's just preview it now. All right. I still think that this movement is a little bit too fast for my taste. And then this is way too slow. And so we are going to need to also change the outset of the highlander as well. So I'm going to push this slightly lower. Let's preview it one more time. All right, is slightly better, I would say. I would push this line a little bit more inside to increase the speed from here, so it doesn't slow down so fast. There we go. I would say, overall, this is pretty good because now we also need to work on our high Lner. So for the highliner we're going to start off with a very similar movement. I'm going to click on the high laner so don't click on the lattice, click on the high Lner then till that key frame A. I'm going to push this one all the way to the left. So S and then just push it like this, and let's just preview how it looks like right now. So the highliner is now following the similar movement of the camera, but then it starts to slow down a little bit. And then as the camera keeps going up, plant needs to reveal now. Perfect. And this goes like this. All right. I think this is pretty good overall for me. Let's see one more time. So there's a very subtle movement. Everything is going very, very slow. Planet starts to get revealed. And here we move a little bit more. This is our final shot right around here. I might want to maybe have a little bit more of the planet revealed. And so if you want that, you can just go click on the camera, frame all one more time. And then push this either up if you want the more planet revealed or down if you want more of the high learner. So this is going to be now your personal preference. For now, I think I'm going to move it somewhere around here. And maybe I'm going to push this a little bit more outward, and then just push this slightly more like this. Again, this is now tweaking at your own preference, but pretty much we have everything set up and ready. Let's just preview the shot one more time. So it goes. Ships are slowly starting to come out right here. So ships are coming out. They go up up up up. And now at this point, the planet starts to get revealed. There we go. We have the planet revealed. Just like that. Perfect. So, I believe this pretty much concludes our animation. And then in the next video, we are going to jump into using geometry nodes to also add those small ships. Once we're done with that, we might do some minor tweaks to finalize our scene before we get into the render settings. All right, guys. Cheers. 18. Adding geometry nodes: In this lesson, we're going to continue working our animation, and we'll start off by creating the small models of the ships that are coming out of the highlander. Now, luckily for us, because they're so small and you can barely see them, the modeling itself really shouldn't take too much for it. So let's begin. I'm going to rearrange my work space a little bit here and I'm going to move my graph letter all the way down because I don't need it for now. And I'll just have these two on the side. Now, before we move forward, there's one small thing that I noticed as I was looking over the work file that we had so far, and that is our point light right here that is inside the high Lner hasn't really been mapped out to a collection in terms of light linking. So right now, it would affect pretty much everything, which would also include the ships regardless of which collection those ships will be added. And this could maybe cause some problems down the road. And so what I want to do is just make sure that this point light is only affecting the highliner itself and not anything. And once you have that, we can pretty much continue with the modeling of the ships. Now, I want to reset my three D cursor, which is right here, and I want to put it in the center. So I'm going to press Shift C to reset its position. And the reason why I want to do it is because I want to do all my modeling of the ships right here in the middle. And so I'm going to press Shift A and go inside the cube and go view selected. Now, so I'm going to start from here. And the modeling itself is going to start off with a simple cube. Depending on what you want, like, you can really do whatever. But I would suggest keeping an extremely low poly and just making some slightly different shapes so that we have a different variation of the ships because even though these all look the same, there's a couple of them, maybe a little bit smaller, a little bit wider, maybe a little bit rounder and such. So for the first one, I'm going to start off by simply selecting its top face, going into my box select, extruding upwards, scaling a little bit down, selecting the bottom, extruding downwards, scaling a little bit down, and that's pretty much it. I would additionally, now you don't really need to if you don't want to, but I think maybe this will help us with the way that the light interacts and hits them. So I would probably avoid maybe having sharp edges and instead just add a very subtle bevel, suppressing control B and adding maybe just three lines of bevel like this, and then going shade smooth. And there we go. All right. This is going to be our first ship pretty much. For a second ship, I'm going to go again, shift A at a cube, and then I'm going to move this cube in the y axis. And now I'm going to make it just like a small alteration of the current existing idea where I'm going to move this up, scale it, and then maybe move this one down, scale it a little bit, more, and maybe this bottom edge, scale it even more. So it's a bit more of like a triangle shaped here going on upwards like a pyramid almost. And again, pressing a edit mode, A, and then control B, making a very small bevel, it in D edit mode, right click and then clicking here, shade smooth, and this is going to be my second ship. I'm going to move it a little bit downward, and then just scale it a little bit more. So it kind of matches it, but it's still a bit bigger. And if you want, maybe you can make it slightly slimmer. It doesn't necessarily need to be, but it's on your own. Pretty much, this is our second ship. Let's now start with the third one. And the more restricted you are in the creativity of creating them, the harder it is actually, at least for me because right now for the third one, I'm kind of losing an idea of what I want. Maybe something reverse of this one here where I would have it being extruded upwards and then selecting this edge here, scaling it. So it almost looks like a coffin at this point, and then scaling this one down, scaling it like this. So yeah, I don't know if there it would ever be a ship similar to this, but this is what I've come up with. And I'm going to take this face and then just scale it one more time. But, yeah, it's kind of like a coffin at this point, but, you know, I think it's going to work fine. I'm going to press it, select everything, and then make it a bevel, shade smooth. And this is our Third one. I would say let's make two more. This other one, I do want to make a little bit more longer. So I'm going to go shift a cube, then scale it into z axis like this, and let's maybe add one in here subdivision. And then scale this one, cut. And let's see what else, maybe make this one slightly smaller. This one here, also slightly smaller. And from here, I'm going to select everything and then control B and make it maybe like this, shade smooth, and then scale it a little bit more. And this is our other ship, but I'm going to also make it slightly thinner, S x to match kind of like thethickness of the other ones, and there we go. We could add one more ship, I would say that's going to be a bit more rounder. And so I'm going to go shift a cube, G, we'll ship right here. And this one, I'm going to just stree upwards from here, maybe strewed One from here, Strued one from here. Move it a little bit more, and then take the bottom one and extrude it, and then just scale everything. Again, it's a weird looking ship. I know. But just so we have some variety going on, and then maybe scale it in the z axis. So I have something like this, select everything. Control B, belet, shade smooth, There we go. So these little ship variations. Again, you don't need to necessarily use the bevel. You can have them all low pale. You can have all the same ships if you want, as well. This is going to be your choice. But what I want to do next is now just group them all inside the same collection. And I'm going to press new collection. I'm going to call this one ship instances. And it will make sense later when we jump into the geometry note, why we call this one instances. But I do want to also create one more collection. So I'm going to press here click new. And I'm going to rename this one actually ship instances. And then this one is going to be called ships simply. So there we go. We have the ship instances and the ships, and we're going to take these ships, and put it inside the ship instances. And the reason why we have two collection instead of one, how we have it for our highlander or our planet is because we're also going to be adding the lights, and we don't want to have the lights beam inside the same collection as the ship instances because of our geometry notes set up that will happen in the future. All right. Once we have this, the only thing that I would say remaining is just adding some kind of a material that's going to be used across these ships together, and let's just make this one a little bit maybe bigger. There we go. Slightly bigger. And so for the material, it's going to be pretty straightforward. I'm going to go here under material properties, select new, call this material here shifts. And I'm just going to maybe add a little bit of just a little bit of metallic property to it, so it gets some shine happening. We'll see later on again in the final phase where we tweak all of our settings necessary and we do our final checkup before rendering if we want to keep this exact properties of the material. All right. Now we want to just assign the same material to all these guys, and you can go one by one individually, or a quicker way would be to simply select all of them, and then make sure that the last one that's selected is the one that has the material itself. You can also tell that by looking at this yellowish while all the other ones have an orange stroke around them and simply press Control L for link materials. And now all of them are sharing the exact same material like that. So So far, so good. Now we can pretty much close this collection here. We don't need to see the ships for now. But one thing actually remains before I move forward with that. If we pressed here, we can look at our scale being all over the place, and it would make sense that all of these ships are sharing a scale that is one. So can control A, apply to scale, and let's just make sure that all of them have scale one as they do, so that's pretty much good. All right. We're done with the ship instances, and we can pretty much close it off from here, exclude it from our viewer. We don't need to see it. We can move on to the next step. We created the ships, and now we need to tell Blender essentially the direction in which the ships are going to be distributed and moving. And for that, we're going to be using a simpler curve. So if I go into my top view and I click here Shift A, add a curve, I click bezier. I'm going to scale this curve now S 100, and this is going to give me a curve. I'm going to go into the edit mode and then press A, make sure the whole bezier curve is selected like now. And I want to basically flatten this curve out instead of it being kind of like bend it off right now. So I'm going to do S, y, and then flatten it to zero S y zero inside the y axis. And now I have a pretty straight curve. I'm going to move this curve all the way here to kind of match the direction of the highliner. So I'm going to go G and then r to rotate it and then move it a little bit more, and this should pretty much match it. And now I want to drop it down, so G z now the curve is going all the way down. And then r like this. And there we go. Additionally, now we're going to go into the edit mode of the curve itself and just do a slight rotation, push it maybe upwards. And let's just take a look here and compare it to our reference. I'm going to push our reference roughly here. Take this space right here that I have, and then maybe move it up so you guys can still see my screencast keys. So I would say that the ships are coming not exactly from half, but they're a little bit lower somewhere around here, like lower half of the ship itself. So if this is, let's see, angle. Yeah, I would say there, this kind of matches where they're coming from. The only difference is being the angle would be probably slightly smaller to maybe something like this and then slicking the other one. There they are. Additionally, you can control the bend here by just pressing S and scaling it. And if you want, you can maybe even go let's go under a meser curve. If you want to add or make it longer or add another point, you can either go press, and this will allow you to add another point and then you can scale it and change the direction that it goes. For now, I'm just going to keep it under two points right now. Additionally, if your curve is maybe bending a little bit more to one side like this or the other side, what you can do here under your top view is select both points of the curve or pressing A, and then pressing S to scale it and then pressing y, is until you get this axis right now, and then zero, and this should pretty much straighten the curve out so it's fairly straight as it comes out of the high liner. So for now, I'm going to keep this as is. This is pretty good. We have the curve added. But if I were to press space and look it into my animation, you can see that the ship is going up, but the curve isn't. So in order to fix this, we need to either we need to make this curve the parent of the high Lner. But we can't use the same method as we did for the lattice, where the lattice goes directly under the highliner itself. And the reason for this issue is because if we were to add the curve inside the highlander, then all of these lights would also affect the small ships that would be distributed on the curve. And we want a separate lighting system that's going to be under the ship's collection to affect them. Specifically. So we need to keep this bezier curve inside the ship's collection, but still have it be parent to our high Lner in the applied sub, this one here. So to do that, just click on the Bezier curve, click on the high Lner press Control P for parent settings, and then click Set parent to object. And now we have the curve still inside our ships collection, but it's moving inside the highliner sub. And so if I press space, we can see that they're both being animated. Additionally, I can probably rename this bezier curve to call it, let's see, ship. Let's call it pass or curve pass. And there we go. We can pretty much now move on to working on our geometry node setup. So to do that, I'm going to move this window all the way up. I don't think I need this prep for now. I'm going to keep this view on the left being for my camera view that I have, and then the one on the right, I'm going to keep to move around. Inside the graph editor, I'm going to change this now to be a geometry node editor. I'm going to make sure that have the curve selected and I'm going to click new. And so now we are starting to build off our geometry node setup. And for this setup, we need to do a couple of things. We need to essentially tell it to distribute ships that are inside our ship instance. Onto this curve. We need to add some random movement to them so that they're not all positioned one next to each other. We need to add maybe some difference in their sizing. Additionally, we could also let's see animated, obviously. We also need to animate the ships that are inside that curve. So all of that is going to be done with this fairly simple geometry node setup. So to begin with, I want to change this curve into a point system. So I'm going to go shift A and type in curve two points. And the reason why I want to change it to points is because now from here, there's another node that's going to allow me to change these points into the ships that are inside this collection. And that node system is called instance on points. So instance on points. And if at this point, you're wondering, well, you know, if this is like your first or second time seeing geometry nodes, like, how am I supposed to know which ones to use and There is no way of knowing unless you've already tried it or learned it or researched it. And so my personal suggestion would be, yeah, you can watch videos where, you know, learn all the whatever how many you have nodes here, like, learn all the geometry nodes, but I don't think that that's the best way to know it because in my opinion, the best way to know it is by learning them as you need them. And so even in my case, I didn't know all of the nodes that I needed for this system, even though you might recognize this one similar to the spirited away one in the previous tutorial, but there are some small tweaks to it that are slightly different. So, yeah, I didn't know it, so I'll have to, you know, Google, Okay, I've, you know, done this, but how do I animate, for instance. So, if anything, from this small little rent that I'm going off right now, just remember this. Google is your friend. And so whenever you're in doubt, whenever kind of, like, you don't know how to do something, just Google it, ask on forums, ask on discords, try to figure it, you know, do it like that. And pretty much the answer is going to come. So yeah, learn by doing and Google a lot, and that's how you're going to learn pretty much a lot of these nodes as well. So now that we had sorry for that, and, I hope you didn't die by listening to it. But what I want to say, now that we have our curve two points and we have instance on points, we have pretty much lost our curve. And because the reason for that is we haven't really add anything here to the instance. And that's why also we renamed the ship instances. I mean, you can rename it to whatever you want, but for organization's sake, this is why I renamed it. This way. So if I drop the ship instance right here, and I just make some little more space, and I connect now the instances to the instance here, we'll see that the ships are being added, but they are ginormous. And the reason for that is actually simple because I forgot to go here under end settings, and we see that our scale for our curve is still set to 100. So we need to control a lighter scale of the curve, and now our ships are pretty much the more or less right size, but we're still going to need to continue doing some extra work on them. But there's another issue, and that issue is essentially that the ships are right next to each other instead of it being differently distributed. So for this portion now, we're going to work on the distribution itself. And in order to do this, we need to basically tell Blender to only pick one instance of the ships. We need to separate these ships, and we need to reset the children. And so once we do all of that, now the ships are distributed one by one. But again, one issue solves. Another one comes. And in this case, we can see that all of the ships are pointing upwards, and they're not really following the direction of the curve. And so you might also wonder, well, where did my curve go? The curve got transferred into the points and now it got transferred into the instances. And so we really can't see the curve unless we bring the curve back into our shot. And to do this, there is a node called join geometry that allows us to by literally then combine both. So we can take this input, which is our curve and put it into the joint geometry, and it's going to show the curve back again so we can still see it. Now, you didn't necessarily need to do this. You can kind of, like, go through this entire process without having the curve. I kind of like it because we're going to be animating, so do we want to have the ability to, you know, select the curve and move it around. And so now we need to essentially tell blender geometry node set up to rotate these objects to follow the direction of the curve, and we can just go under our curve to points and just take user rotation information, plug it into the instances here, and now they should all be following the direction like this. Perfect. So far, so good. Another issue though, now that we have, for instance, is that they're all following one after another. So if I were to increase the count right here, as you can see, The ships are just one behind another, and we need to now add that random distributions that we talked about a while ago, like we have it in here where some are up, some are down, some are left, some are right, pretty much. So to do this, we need to play around with the position of these objects, and we need to add a node that's right in between the transition from instance on points and curve to points. So somewhere here. So this node needs to essentially allow us to change the position. So, there is a note called set position. And inside that note, there is also an offset that we can control. And so if I were to now add let's say a value to each of these individually, it would help me now move them around, because right now, if I just change this, they all move together as a group. So if I go here under offset and I type in let's say random value, like this one. This will give me an option to assign a random value that is between x y and z of zero and between a max value of x y and z of zero being one. So this would assign, let's say over here 0.1 or 0.5. If I were to reduce this to let's say 0.1, this will be now a value 0-0 0.1, so it might be 001. But as you can see now, if I move these numbers around, it basically starts to distribute them differently. And so this kind of helps us in that. On top of that, we can go even further and add another random value right here. But this one doesn't have to follow the X Y and Z xis. Instead, it can just be a float value, which is something 0-1, which would then be assigned to those three points. Additionally here, I would go and do the same. Well, actually, we can duplicate this one by pressing Shift D and plug one right here. And so now we have the ability to control two random for max, and this is what we're getting. We're not going to be dealing with too much tweaking right now like getting the perfect number so that our animation works great. This is only going to be now getting our set up correctly. But so now that we have the random value here for our control of our position. We also can add maybe a random value here at the bottom, that's going to allow us to control the scale as well, because right now, as you can see, all of them are way too big in comparison to how small and tiny they need to be over here. So to do this, I am going to assign another random value like this, and this one is going to be quite different. So let's go like maybe 0.15, and then the other one is going to be maybe 0.35, maybe 35 is too much, so maybe 0.25 for now. Then if we go inside our count, increase it, there we have it. We have our small ships coming out. So if I were to go here under the rendered view, we still won't be able to see our ships that well. So let's go take a quick look. Control space. As you can see the ships that are coming out are barely visible, and the ones that are in here are lit up essentially by the light that's bouncing off of our highliner as it goes. And so to light up these small ships, what we need to do is add another light. Right in here. So I'm going to go shift A at a light. I'm going to use a sunlight. Let's go into my top view. I'm going to move the sunlight right around here, and then just rotate the sun to pretty much match the direction of the ships that are coming out of it to something like this. And then I'm going to increase the strength to make it maybe let's see, 15, and additionally, the sun, only I wanted to affect the ship itself. So I'm going to go Shift A and go here. Ship ships. There we go. So now the sun is only affecting these ships that are in here. And again, we don't really need to tweak too much now. Over here, we might change the strength of it. I would say maybe 15 is too much, maybe five, three, two, one seems to be a decent number. And again, D ships are still too big so we can change their size by going into our geometry nodes setup like clicking on the curve, and then just going maybe 20.1 and 0.15. Now it's slightly better and more realistic to what we have in our reference image. There we go. Correct. This pretty much does that. And now the last thing that's really remaining is animating the ships coming out. And again, this is the one this is what I knew how to do up until this point, and then I had to figure out, well, how can I animate the ships along the curve because I didn't know it, so I had to go online and try to figure out. And the solution that I found was simply using a trim curve because this would allow me if I place it right here in between the curve and the curve to points. So before I transition the curve into the curve to points, I'm now able to basically trim the curve, either from its start position, which is the one that's all the way here on the left. Or it's end position one where it finishes right here. So if I were to move the end position, As you can see, the ships are now slowly being animated following the end, and this is what we're going to be using to animate our ships later on. And to help us now kind of like package this all together, this is the final part of the lesson because, you know, we could work pretty much here and teakll the values inside our geometry nodes editor, but a better simpler way to do it and more intuitive way user friendly would be inside here, our modifier tab where we have the geometry nodes. And so if we were to just take this input here, group input and plug it into the end, you'll notice that the end appears right here on the side. So now I can control this without having to be in this window of the geometry note editor. Additionally, you can just go in here under the interface, and if you don't see it, you can press and then press let's call this one animation. To be a little bit more organized. From here, I'm going to now change or add another one, which is going to be for my curve to points. So to count the amount of ships that I want to have in my shot. Let's just add that one? There we go. Then from there, I want to also add the seed, which is the distribution of the ships using the random value. Like that. Let's now change the seed, as you can see. And now, additionally, we can also create groups. Now it's slowly starting to get messy. So I'm going to move it a little bit more to the left. We can also create groups, and by groups, we can just go here, less less type and panel. And then for this panel, this is going to be my position. So I'm going to call this one position Max. And this would basically be for this top to bottom value. Actually, I'm going to call another one, called position Mn. And so the first one is min, which is this one that is plugged right in here. I'm going to move that one before, so clicking, dragging it upwards, and now I'm going to connect this one here and this one right there. So if I were to now take this min of the position min and then just drag it inside, and then take this one, drag it inside here, you can see that we have now min and Max and I can go drag it upwards, insert before, Position Min. I'm going to do the same thing now for the Max one. And there we have it. We now have our position min and our position max that we can basically tweak around the values and move as we would like, which is pretty much more user friendly than going in here. Additionally, we can also let's see add our random value for our size. So let's just go here, type in another panel, call this one size and then add men and add a max And if you want, you can also add maybe a seat, but I don't think I will in that case. And so this concludes, I would say, our geometry no setup. Now we have everything that we need here on our right side. We don't have to be in this window anymore. We can just go here and play around with these values. All right. This was a bit longer video, but I hope that the noise that was coming from the background didn't disturb you. I will probably know better once I look into the video itself. And I'll see you pretty much, guys, in the next one where we're going to continue or tweaking our scene, improving it, and animating it. All right. Cheers. 19. Animating the ships: It seems that in my hastiness to save up time in the previous video, I forgot to connect the min and max of the size to the size panel here that we've added. And so to quickly just fix that. Let's just go into our geometry nose layout here on the top tab, click it, and then press the key on our keyboard to open this interface. And from here, we can simply just take the max click it, drag it into the insert into panel of the size. Click the Mn. Drag it while the insert into panel appears, and here we go. Now we can continue working on the animation of our ships. So in this video now, we're going to be animating our ships by basically playing around with this value, which should be pretty straightforward, and we're going to be tweaking the position of min max and the size here to kind of like get the look to get the look, whichever you want, or if you want, like myself, to try to get something close to this. Now, luckily, for the purpose of saving time and not spending like 10 minutes trying to figure out what value works best, I did save up some of the numbers here on my right side, and so I'm just going to start adding them over here. So for the count, I'm going to go with the value of 53 for now. I might change it later. Then for the seed, I've used the value of 30. And then for the mint here, I use 7.64. And again, you don't need to use these exact values. You can try something on your own. And here I use negative 6.64. From here on the position Max, I use negative 13.53. And then the Max, I've used 20.83 that's pretty much it. And as you can see, we already have a look that kind of looks similar to here where there's this one ship that's slightly isolated from the rest of them and it's going upward. And we could assume that in this final ship only in this first ship, we have the House of trades members. And so now what we need to do is simply animate the ship. One more thing before we even go into the animation, I would suggest probably moving this line slightly more upward because if I now take out this left window because we don't really need it, and if I press, let's see, shift and click with my keyboard and go Tilda view camera, so I can preview it. We can see that these ships are not really reaching to close to the planet. In comparison to over here. I would say this first ship is slightly closer like somewhere around here, I would say. And so to fix this, there's a couple of ways you can go about it. But I would just say that we can tap into our curve. And then instead of expanding it like this, which I guess could also work. Actually, let's expand it. You know what? This looks pretty good, I would say. So we have the ship going like that, but I'm going to move it maybe slightly more up here. Let's see how this looks. Let's just take a look at our rendered view. I would say this is pretty good overall. We might add the numbers maybe just a little bit. Let's just see if this is going to work. 60 65. For now, I'm going to go with the number of 65. This gives me a pretty decent density of the ships that are coming out of the high liner along with this one ship here that is isolated the first one in line. All right. Now, let we can go back into our solid view. And for this bottom part, I'm going to change this into our timeline because we need to animate it. So at frame 72, we want our ships to become visible, which also means that up until Frame 72, we don't want our ships to be visible. So I'm going to drag this all the way down to let's see frame It looks like 0.159. Let's just take a look. We can see that this one ship is right here ready to come out, but it is still not out yet, and I think this is perfect for us. I'm going to press insert keyframe. And then from here, I'm going to just drag this old way to the end and just move this keyframe the way here to one and press insert keyframe one more time. And that's pretty much it. We have added the animation. If we zoom in, we can now see our ships starting to come out. A, but wait. They are coming a little bit late. Additionally, you might notice they start up very slow and now they're speeding up going really, really fast. And then all of a sudden once they pass the 300 mark here, they start to slow down again. So this looks like another thing that we need to fix. And what is happening right now is that by default, blender is creating a is it called busier interpolation or easy ease. I'm not sure. But if we go into our graph editor, we can kind of get a better idea of what's going on. So I just went into the graph editor. Make sure that you have your curve path here selected, I'm going to go frame all. And here is the culprit of our issue, essentially. Ah, interplation is set to Bezier here, it says. So what's happening is at frame 72, our ships are starting very, very slow and you can see it by the way that the curve is being bent. It is rising very, very slowly. And then somewhere around frame 120 s up forward here to like 130, 140. I'm not sure which one this is 140, they start to pick up speed because the curve starts going slightly more rapidly upward. And then as they enter the frame roughly 280 here, they're going to start slow down because the curve is now back to normal, almost getting horizontal instead of vertical. So what we need to do essentially is just select the entire curve by pressing A, right click and our interpolation setting to change this to linear. And so now there's going to be a constant uniform speed. And if we click, let's just go back to frame 72. No ships are showing. If I click, first ship come comes out, and we have all the other ships moving as well within the same speed. That's pretty much it. Alright, let's take one more look. I'm going to lower this down. Go to my camera view. I'm going to press T to hide everything on the left side. And let's just preview this one more time. We have the ship. One comes out. And then the rest follow. And then, We can barely see them over here how small they are, and they get all the way to this. Let's look at our final frame. I'm going to press shift right click. So I can move all the way to the final frame. I'm going to press Z render. Let's just compare the final frame with the frame that we have here. Now it say this is really looking good. Let's go to a couple of frames down like maybe frame 191. Everything is looking pretty good. Let's try frame 260. Looks even better. Frame 72. Nothing is showing. Frame 76. Oh, we have our first ship showing right here. So that's pretty good. All right. This pretty much concludes the animation part. And so the next video is just going to be dedicated to doing some individual tweaks. And again, personally, if you're already happy with how your animation and everything is looking, if you don't want to fix or improve anything else, you're pretty much even good to skip that video, I would say. But if you want to improve your animation, improve your composition, your shadows, your lights or anything else, join me in the next video, we're going to be doing some slight micro improvements to our scene and get it ready for the render. All right, guys, S there. Cheers. 20. Scene final checkup: The goal of this video is to just make sure that we are happy with how our scene looks like. And if there are any changes or any fixes that we feel like are necessary to make, we can do them now, because after this, we're going to jump into the render settings and then render out scenes. So you can think of this one as being that moment where in the middle of the wedding, they say, speak now or forever hold your piece because it is pretty much right now. Speak or do changes now, or once we click render, there's really not much changes that we can do unless we go and re render again. So to begin with, what I want to do next is just go into my render view for this top window here. I'm going to push the lower window a little bit more up and then control, middle click, move this one, slightly zoom out. I'm going to keep this one in my render view so I can always see how my scene is looking. Whereas for the bottom window, I'm going to go into my three D viewport and just use this one to navigate around my three D viewport, just like that. The first thing that I want to change that has been bugging me from the time that we created it, but I wanted to save it for this part here is this square size here. I think we can make it slightly smaller, so it's not so much noticeable. So I'm going to press control and click on the face and then a couple of times plus with my numpad while holding a controlled button. And then I'm just going to press S and slightly scale it down to roughly like this. So around 20, 30% just smaller, so it's a little bit less obtrusive into the eyes. Once I have that completed, I want to do next is like, change this light over here because I don't like this little fall off. I want it to be much sharper around this line that is going. So I believe that is actually, if I go into my camera view and I click here for the rim light, I think that's being caused by my rim light. So that means I need to do some small just little alterations to my rim light itself. Let me just select the rim light here. I'm going to press R z and then rotate it in the z axis towards the right side so that I can close it pretty much like this. And this mitigates that issue and solves it for me, and I would keep everything else as is. As a matter of fact, I think everything else here looks pretty good. All right. Next on the line is something that I forgot to do. And that is if I go into my planet key planet main light right here. And we see that levels in viewport and render are two right now, and this needs to be four, because if we were to render it, our planet would look much different than what we expect it would probably be a little bit of polygons, we see the vertices around these edges. So I'm going to push this to number four, so it stays the same. And then once we completed with that, for me in my case, what I want to do next, let's just take a quick look what do we have going on. I like everything around the highlander here. I like now the size. We can see this one a little bit, but I don't mind that it doesn't go all the way. It's kind of very similar to how we see it over here. We can maybe change the strength of our key light. We might experiment with that one. So if I go to my key light right now, I have the strength to ten, let me just see what happens if I push it to 15. It is definitely a bit brighter, and I would say kind of closely more matches to the look right over here. Let's just go a bit crazy and experiment what happens if we go to 25. I think 25 is not bad, but I think it's a little bit too much. So maybe 20, I'm going to just comparing it again. Let's go to I'm looking at the reflections essentially of the material. I'm going to go somewhere in between, so I'm going to put like 17.5. And then later on in the post production, we can maybe push it more upwards if we like. For now, this looks pretty good overall. And so we have our planet. We have the highliner. Let's go to This is our start scene. This is our end scene. Let's take a look at the end scene over here one more time. This all looks pretty good. I'm going to do a quick test render. You don't need to do this if you don't want, and I'm going to also change my render settings here to max samples 400. Let's just do a quick render image just to see how this is looking. And here we have our final shot of the highlander ship. I would say this is really nice overall. One thing that I do want to add onto it is probably the strength of the flight that we have here on the side because right now, our highlander is completely shut off. So I'm going to increase the strength of the flight just a little bit to maybe point. Let's see. 0.146. There we go. And I'm going to also move the rim light just a little bit as well so that I can see a bit more of this top edge right there, so I'm going to move it in the y axis to R y, and then just very subtle small rotation so I can see this little line that separates it from the background. As we have a line also over here, you can barely see it. There's a little fall off, but it is there. It is visible. Let's go back to my start frame. So shift left arrow. One more time, shift left arrow. I should move to the start frame. And I'm going to do the same thing here when I'm just going to press render image. Again, you don't need to do this if you don't want and if it's taking too much time for you to render. Again, I would probably the recommend maybe using less samples instead of 400. But here we go. We see the final shot in our case, and I'm going to use full screen just to take one closer rook of the highlander. And this is looking pretty amazing, I would say. I'm very much happy with everything. We can still see some small details over here, the same as we can see maybe some small stuff over here. And then in the post production, we can also blur that out and make it darker, et cetera. That's going to leave us a lot of creativity for the post production to play around with. So I would say, in my case, at least, I am very happy with how everything looks like, and this turned out to be a much shorter video than I expected, which is great. So in the next one, we're going to start with our render settings and prepare our shot there. Cheers, guys. 21. Render settings: This is going to be the last video that takes place inside of Blender's interface. And before we jump into the render savings, I want to take a quick second just to do three things that I forgot in the previous video. Luckily, as I said, this really shouldn't take too much time. If we go here under our ship instances and we go under individual ship. We need to disable the shadows that these ships, as you can see, right here are leaving because something that I noticed once I render this actually is that these shadows can be quite distracting around this outer rim part. So we just need to tell blender not to have these ships cause any shadows. So going under object properties, simply scrolling all the way down under visibility. Here we have array visibility, and we just need to untick the shadows for each of them individually. And like I said, luckily, because we only have five of them, this won't take too much time. Just double check that everything is done, and then we can now uncheck ship instances and one out of three is complete. Alright. The second one being, we want to also add some tracking data into our after effects from blender here that's going to allow us to do some post production additionally. And so what I want to do is go Shift A, add an empty, and then I'm going to S 100. So just want to shift here, Shift A, empty, plain axis, added this one right here. I'm going to go into my top view. And then just move all the way here. Then G, z, kind of like align it relatively similar position to my light. Doesn't have to be exact perfect. As a matter of fact, it doesn't have to be perfect at all. As long as it's somewhere around here is pretty good. And now I just want to push this ship empty inside the highlander collection, and then inside the highlander applied subdif. So shift left liq with your mouth, drag it inside. You can also rename this one to tracking data, if you want. And now we just want to have it selected. And then also click on our camera, selected camera as well, and we want to go under File, Export. And here you would click Adobe After effects JSX, which has been added once we installed that plug in very early on in the beginning. And so if I click here, now you can just export it, but I already have one. So I'm not going to be doing it again. You click on the Export to Adobe After effects. You wait a couple of seconds because you've seen my freeze up a little bit. But once that's done, you're good to go to the next step. And the next step being something that's more of a personal preference, something that you maybe not even need to do. And that is going here under my light settings for the key light of the highliner. I'm just going to reduce this instead of 17.5, I'm going to have a B only 13, this should give me relatively a more flatter light going on, which should give me then a bit more creativity and flexibility versus it right now being too much over exposed in the post production process. So now we're done pretty much with this, like I said, I didn't take too much time. Let's jump into the render settings. I want to just explain some time just talking about D three up here, which is what we're going to be playing with. I'm going to go under the first one. Just make sure that everything here is set to cycles, experimental, GPU compute. For my renderer settings, I'm going to be using 400 samples under 0.01 noise threshold, and I'm not going to be using any D noise. I did a quick render test, and essentially for me, this was rendering this scene around I think 10 seconds per frame, which was fairly okay. If this is rendering it way too slow for you and it's spending too much time, you can lower the max samples to maybe 200 and then turn on Denise. And depending on what kind of GP you have, if you have an Nvidia GP, you can go with optic x, which is, I believe, a little bit faster than open image Denise. So be sure to check one of those two options up if it's rendering too slow for you. But in my case, I'm going to go without any Denise. All right. Everything else here is pretty good. But under film here, we need to turn off transparent because we will be adding a separate background inside of after effects. Then scrolling more down, everything else here is good. You could play around maybe with the looks, but this will depend whether you're going to be rendering this as a PNG, and I'll talk a little bit more about the file outputs in a quick second. So for me in my case, I'm not going to be using any looks. I'm going to go to none, and I can jump into my output properties right here. For the resolution, 1928 16, that is good as it is. Everything else is good. Frame rate 24 important. Keep that as 24, I would say 360 frame in total, as we set it up initially. For the file output, this is going to be the file output that's going to contain everything inside one file. So both our highliner and our ships and our planet as well. So for this, we're going to choose somewhere in a different folder. So I'm going to click here under folders and go to one of them. Let's just check here where I have my tutorial files. Dune. There we go. And inside render, I'm going to create a folder called beauty. This is how it's going to be called. And inside the beauty, I want to create files that are going to be called beauty as well. And so just make sure that over here you have beauty as the name of the folder and beauty as the name of the files because it's going to help us a little bit with organization to save up time inside of after effects. So we're pretty much done with our output here, but we need to choose what kind of file format we want. And so by default, blender sets it as an RGBA Alpha with an eight bit color channel. And that is fairly okay. If you don't plan to do a lot of post production color grading and such, you know, that is usually okay as a default. If you want to have more color information because eight bit is not that much, you can go with 16. But the downside of using a 16 bit PNG is that it does leave relatively big file sizes. So if you go, I think I did a quick render test, and for me, this shot right here was around 1.3 megabytes as an eight bit PNG for one frame versus a 16 bit, which was around 3.37, so more than twice its size. Luckily, there's another format, which I'm going to use called open EXR, and this is very commonly used in the industry as well, especially with VFX. And it comes with two color depths. You have either 16 bit or 32 bit. 32 bit is a bit of an overkill for us, and that would have way bigger file sizes. So we don't really need that one. I'm going to keep it as float half, but this is still going to be a very large file size. But if we change the Kodak from Zip lossless to W AA, it's going to be even smaller than an eight bit PNG. So for me, it was around 400 500 kilobytes, actually. So more than two times less than the PNG that was eight bit while also retaining 16 bit color channels. And let me just go quickly here into after effects just to show you the difference between the three of them. Right over here on top, I have a PNG that is eight bit. Below it, I have a PNG that's 16 bit, and then I have an open EXR file that you can see has been rendered out a little bit flatter. But if I go here under the eight bit PNG and I crank up my exposure and let's see contrast, you'll see let's see what we get like this. Then if I go under my 16 bit, you'll see that it pretty much remains the same, if I crank up both of them. But if I go under my open XR and crank up both of them, we see that we have much more color information in terms of the way that we can expose it, for instance. And if we even take it out and we balance out everything in here, let's say, click reset, we can still play around with the exposure and contrast and get very quickly to the look that we want. So in my case, I am going to be using an open XR and be doing a little bit more post production color grading in the next steps. All right. Now that we have our output selected, we need to tell blender to separate these three into individual files as it's going to be rendering, because right now we have one that's going to be containing everything, which is the beauty layer. But if we go here under our view layers, we can enable cryptomts and enable object material, and I don't think we're going to need asset, but let's just keep it for now. And now we need to just do one render of this image that we have in here. Just make sure that it is using the frame that has both the planet, the highliner and the small ships. Otherwise, it's going to be a little bit tricky for you because you're going to need to be selecting what to render individually. So once you have all of this, go render image. And as I said, this took me roughly around 10 seconds, which is pretty good. I'm going to close this node, and I'm going to go inside my compositing layout right here. We want to use nodes so that we can now add a viewer node right here, so shift a viewer node and connect the image into the viewer node so that we can see what we have just rendered. Now we need to tell Blender essentially to separate these individually. And for that, we're going to be using a crypto node right here. We can plug in the image inside the cryptomt and now inside the Mt ID. Right now, it is set to selecting the objects. We need to tell Blender which object to select. I'm going to start off by selecting applied sub diff here at the highliner. And so if I plug this inside the viewer to see what does this here now contain, we can see that it doesn't have the planet. We have some parts of the ships here, but it doesn't have any of the ships that are leaving the scene. And so there we go. Now we want to also tell Blender where to essentially render this in here as well. Let's just turn this off. There we go. Ops. There we go. And so now we want to tell Blender where to render this one in. And so we need to add what's called a file output. And so for the file output, I'm going to connect this in here, and then go under node settings, properties. And in here, I want to make sure that the file output is going to be rendered inside the previous folder here. So render, so not inside the beauty. But just in here. And then I also need to go here, tell it to be called. Let's call this one high Liner. And then I'm going to call this one high Lner like this. So what it's going to do is it is going to render inside the renderer where we had it like this. So it's going to be rendering inside this folder. But then it's going to be creating a folder called the highliner and inside the high Lner the files will be named high Liner themselves. So this is what it does, essentially. Additionally, we're also going to be rendering Mat files, which are going to be used as our masks. Now, if you're using open EXR, I don't think that you need to render them. I don't think we might use them, we might not, but just in case let's render them as well. So I'm going to go add another input. And then for this input, I'm going to click here on the MT plug it into the image, and now change the output of this one here. It's going to be called Hiner Alpha, and it's going to go into high Ler Alpha. So now we're creating a folder called Hylaner Alpha, and inside the folder Helener Alpha, we're going to be having files called Halener Alpha. The reason why you name them is going to help us again, like I said, inside the pros prodox organization a little bit more. Okay. Now we need to add another crypto mat. And inside the cryptomt we need to remove the highlander applied sumptf and we need to tell it to select essentially the planet. So we need to go back into the render layer, Control Shift, left click with my mouse, and now so I can see all of the files. I'm going to go click Pick and apply the planet main. And now if I go control shift left click on this one, I should be able to see also the planet once I connect this to here. And there we go. Perfect. Now we just need to add two more inputs. I'm going to press twice for two more inputs. The first one being the image one. I'm going to go in here. This one is going to be called, let's see. Planet. Let's just go leave everything lower caps, planet, planet. And then the bottom one is going to be for our Alpha. So I'm going to go like this and this one is going to be called planet slash Alpha. I forgot to add the slash here as well. Planet. Underscore. Did I change the languages. There we go. Planet, underscore. Alpha. And so now we have higher alpha planet planet Planet Alpha Planet Alpha. And the last one that's remaining is going to be the small ships. So we just need to do cryptomat one more time and then delete everything from here, and we can plug in this image right inside the cryptomat and then click Control Shift left click to preview everything. Let's just take a second, but it's not showing because we don't have anything in here selected. And so we need to go one more time, preview everything here. And so we need to tell this crypto mat that doesn't have anything inside of its Mt ID what do we want to pick. So far, we've used crypto object. But over here, we have five different ships that we've used to disperse over here. So we need to technically go, you know, like this and select all of them individually, and because they're so small, that would be, you know, a very tedious task. Luckily, we can go and choose material because remember, all of these ships are using one single same material. So, whichever ship I click, it's going to select all of them. And we can even preview this by going now into image, connecting this image to the viewer, we can see these little ships that are coming out of here. And so this kind of solves that small issue that we just encountered. Now we just need to connect the ships also here under add input. Let's do twice more. Log this one into here. This one is going to be called ships. I'm going to rename this one ships and inside ships. So inside folder ships, they're going to be a file side called ships. And then again, one more time. Inside folder called ships. Alpha, there are going to be files called ships Alpha. And now we pretty much have everything set and ready. This is how this should look like for you. You can do one quick double check if you want to make sure that everything is inside separately, and we're pretty much good to go on all fronts. Now, all you really need to do is click on Render Animation, and I will see you in the next video when we will be working inside of After fx. Cheers, and good luck. 22. Preparing files in AE: Now that all of our files have been rendered, we can jump into compositing. And as mentioned very early on at the beginning of this course, I will be using after effects for that. And so if you've got the trial version, maybe, and this is your first time in after effects. Once you open it, you'll be greeted with this kind of window here. We can simply go under new project, and this should open the main working layout where we'll be doing most of our compositing, all of our compositing as a matter of fact. Additionally, you could click here under Default. Just make sure that this is your default layout. Here you have some additional layouts as well, but we'll be mainly using the basic one called default right here. Lastly, on the left side, this is where we need to add all of our sequences that we just rendered in Blender. I'll start off by right clicking in here, going under import, and clicking multiple files. Now I need to go under my render folder, and here is where our file output and blender created all of these folders for us, and this is why it was also nice to name them because it's going to help us stay a bit more organized once we import them as well. So if I simply open one of these ones, I'm going to start off with the high liner because we won't be using the beauty layer in here. But if you're doing some very, very simple compositing either in after effects or in blender, you can pretty much go with the beauty layer and disregard the rest of them individually. In our case, we're going to be using them individually because there's going to be a quite decent amount of compositing in the next video coming. All right. I want to add the highliner. I'm going to click here, and I'll make sure they have open EXR sequence selected and go under import. All right. I'm going to go out another window. It's going to be opened automatically. I'll click back and go into a highliner Alpha and add that one. It's going to open another window, and we just now need to repeat the same process for all six folders that we have for our files and the Alphas themselves. So there we go. I'm just going to quickly do the rest of them. And there's only one more remaining, which is a ship Salpa There we go. And lastly, the last one that we need is also under your resource folder, which is going to be the solar system scope texture eight K stars, which is going to be used for our background of our entire s. So once we have all of that, I'm just going to click here Import for the last file, and now I'm going to click here done. Almost completed with this section. But for some reason, after effects also does one thing where if we go right click in here and we click Interpret Footage Main. We'll see that aftereffects assumes that this frame rate is 30 frames per second, and we even rendered this in 24. So our videos will be sped up if we use the 30 frames per second, and we need to just change this to 24. We also now need to do this individually for all of them. But, luckily, there's also a quick shortcut where you press control Alt and G, and then immediately opens this interpret footage window. We can press here 24, so I'm just going to do this for all of them. Additionally, just make sure that you don't miss a single one because it might mess up later on and cause some minor issues. I'm just going to double check that all of them have 24. And we are pretty much good to go. For our solar system scope, this is just an image secture and so we don't necessarily need to do anything because it's not a sequence of multiple images, like all of the other ones above. So now, I'm just going to take the high liner, drag and drop it in here, and here we have our first shot. Additionally, we can also add our solar system scope right below the high liner like this, and this is going to be our working area. And from here on out, I will close this video because we'll be jumping into much more complex stuff in the next one. So we have our scene prepared, and I'll see you guys in the next video. And one more heads up is that once we now jump into the color grading and everything, I will be turning off my camera because these lights are quite distracting and my room is very bright right now, and I'd prefer to work in dark so I can better see all the colors and textures and shadows and et cetera. Anyway, not rambling, see you in the next video. Cheers. 23. Compositing the highliner pt1: I believe this is pretty much where we left off in the last video. And so for this one, we're going to be focusing on our high Lner and also doing some little work as well on our background. And so let's start off with the background itself. If I click here on the background and I press S. This is going to give me my scale settings. And if I push it to let's say 30, this should make the background a little bit more condensed and much more natural and believable and better blended with the scene altogether, I would say. So now we just want to work on blending this highliner to the background as well and playing around with the colors in contrast, and et cetera. So we're going to start off by right clicking again here now and going new adjustment layer. And so now on this adjustment layer, we need to go into our effects and presets and just type in here lumetri. And we're going to be dragging this lumetri color into our adjustment layer. If you're familiar with Premier and in general Adobe products, then lumetri is generally used for color grading correction and such. And so here we have basic correction. We can go under contrast and play around with these values to maybe drop the shadows a little bit more, and this is going to be done at your own preference by trying to realize your creative vision that you have for your shot. In my case, I want to try to get as close as possible to this here. And I might as well keep this reference right where it is because we won't be really using too much of this panel here where we have the timeline itself. All right. So now, essentially, if we were to play with this adjustment layer with our lumetri and we were to crank down this exposure upward down, you'll notice that it also affects the background behind because hierarchically, the adjustment layer is above everything, and it's affecting everything below, kind of like modifiers and blender, if you're familiar. So we need to tell I want to say blender. We need to tell after effects to have this adjustment layer only affect the highlander itself and not the objects below the highlander. So we're going to do this with one of those masks that we also rendered with our files. So if I scroll with my mouse on top here where we have the effects control, you can just scroll and it will take you to the projects, or you can just click here on the left side or you can expand it a little bit if you don't have too much space. We're just going to scroll. I just going to take me to. Project. I want to drag and drop this here. So, high Lner Alpha, take it, put it all the way down. It doesn't really matter whether you put it on top or down because the next step, what we need to do is go under high Lner and here under track mat. And if you don't have this track mat here and as a menu, you can just go over here and press expand or collapse, and it should expand or collapse both of these. The third one, we don't really need the third one, so we can actually collapse that one, so we have a bit more real estate just like this. And under our high, sorry, adjustment layer, we need to go under track mat and tell it to use the high Lner Alpha. Right now, nothing's going to happen because it's taking it as an Alpha mask. But instead, we need to change it into a lumat, which is a value of black and white used as a mask. And so now, if I were to go under adjustment layer, click on the effects and controls here and crank out the value of the exposure, you'll notice that it only affects the high Ler. So I'm pretty good with how these values are so far. I might actually lower the contrast to maybe 30, over here, because in my next step, I actually want to draw manually the shadow line around the highlander itself. Now, if you don't want, you can just play around with these values. Remember, now, this is your kind of time to realize your creative vision that you have for the highlander itself. But in my case, if you want to follow along, the next thing that I'm going to do here is click and go under new. And draw a shape layer. So for the shape layer now, we need to basically draw where we want it to take place, and just make sure that your fill is set here to solid color. You have it to black because we'll be drawing a black shadow, and you can disable your stroke just by going here to none. Then I'm going to press G or you can press on your pen tool right in here and start drawing the shadow like this. And don't go too much into detail, essentially. Don't go placing all of them like this. Instead, just try to make it as simple as possible because we will have to actually redo the shadow, and it will all make sense what I mean by that in a couple of seconds. So make a couple of points. Try to get it as close to it as possible, but don't put too much effort into it. So something along this line, and then going here, here, and then here. And then maybe for this one bottom, I'm just going to scroll with my mouse to zoom in a little bit and then hold space and click and move with my mouse. Then in here, I'm going to add one more point and just make it. So it's kind of like this. And here is our shadow right now. It is not looking very good, but luckily, what we can do is go under effects and presets of our lumetri In here, close the lumetri and type in fast box. So with this fast box blur, I'm just going to drag and drop it into the shape layer. And now inside the settings, I'm going to change the blur radius to maybe five, and I'm going to change the iterations to five as well. And then you'll see that this has made my shadow much softer. If I go under the shape layer blending mode, I can choose and you can go maybe with soft light. Soft light is also not bad. You can try even hard light as well. It's also pretty good, but I'm going to pick as a matter of fact, classic color burn. And then I'm going to change the strength to maybe let's press t so I can see the opacity to roughly maybe 6.5 for now. This is giving me a pretty nice shadow. Overall, I'm going to actually go to seven. So I get a little bit more darker on the sides. So let's press seven here. There we go, even nicer. And now let's just press space and see what happens space. It's going to preview or play our scene. So if I press space, you'll notice as we move along to the four second mark, our shadow stays where it is, but our highliner keeps moving downward, and we don't really want this. We need for our higher essential for our shadow to follow highliner movement. I'm going to press control t and then left click with my keyboard. And then that's going to essentially reset my scene to the starting frame. And so now we need to tell after effects to have this shape layer follow the highlandery position, kind of like parenting inside of blender that we did with the point light that was in here. So to do this, if you remember, very late in the blender tutorial before our rendering, we were also exporting, I believe, our tracking data for the camera and also tracking data for that one empty null that we created as well. So if we go with our mouse all the way here up top left corner to file, and then go to scripts and click on Run script file. You just need to find the script that we exported. So in my case, this is the true Dune tracking JSX and click Open. It's going to give you a composition name. I'm going to call this one tutorial, which was the name of my blender file. And now we don't see anything in here. But if we go under a project, we'll see that the new comp has been added called Tune Tutorial V two. So, double click on this C. It's going to open a new folder here on the bottom. And then we have a tracking and a camera. Select both of them. Control C, go into your high laner and then press control. If I were to plus play now, you'll notice that we have some tracking data going on here that is actually going to be very useful because now we're going to need to parent essentially our shadow to this tracking data. Now, the issue here is though, that if we look at our shape layer, and if you remember inside of Blender, we're working inside of a three D space. Over here, right now, we're in a two D space. And if you see this bicon, if we click here, this is going to enable us to change the shape layer into three D space. Now, yesterday, I was like, banging my head against the floor, trying to figure out why does my shadow disappear. But then if I scroll a little bit more back, you'll notice that our shadow goes actually so far back in here inside a three D space in the z axis. And the reason for this is, if you remember inside of Blender, we use the camera focal length of 500. And so I think this kind of also influences that. Luckily, a friend of mine suggested a very quick and easy, but dirty solution. So what we need to do is go under our tracking here where we have this information and press the letter B, is going to give us the position keyframe. Now, we click on the position right here, press Control C for a copy, and then we press control V under the shape layer like this. And it's going to put the shape layer right in here. But you'll see it's still very small. And the reason why it's very small is because it's so far back right next to the highlander, which is huge. And so we need to essentially press S and then scale this shape layer to try to match. And this is why also we didn't want to put too much effort into the shape layer at the beginning because we can't move it from here, because if we were to move this now, it would affect the keyframe. What we can do though is press on our pan tool right here or press G. And then let's just start moving the points that we've created around here. And so this is what I want to do now. At this point, I quite literally want to make this points match as close to as possible to the intended shadows that we have going on in here. Now, luckily, if you've done it as a P&G and not as an EXR, you would probably not need to do this step. But if you've rendered it like an EXR myself, which has given you much more control in terms of coloring as well, then you need to go through this step or I mean, you don't need to you can play around with the Lu metris as well. But in my case, I would prefer to get it as close to this one, like I said, as possible. All right. I'm going to move these guys a little bit more down. Move this one a bit more here. Then this one all the way here. Now, you might notice also that if we go all the way here, this light as well affects our background. So we need to tell this shape layer only to affect our high Lner. And so the same as with our lumetr of the adjustment layer, we can go here under Mat, choose the high Lner Alpha, and then click right over here, and it will only now affect the high layer. At the very top, I want to leave some space right around here a little bit. To try to make it like this. And then this one over here, I will also press, let's see Alt and then click on it. That's going to give me a bezier curve. And so if I were to press here, this is how my scene is looking right now. It's not bad, but it's still not there here. So there's still work that needs to be done. Starting off, I want to add a adjustment layer between the her and the SolarC because that's going to be for my background. So I'm going to go right click new adjustment layer. And this adjustment layer is going to go right below here. I'm going to type in here. And this try is going to be to control the color of my background. I'm going to rename this one. And as while we're at it, we're going to rename and organize a little bit more of our file because it's starting to get a bit crowded over here. So I'm going to call this one background color. Then this one is our highner. That's fine. Then we have the higher bluet's call this one high Lner shadow. And then we have the tracking. Additionally, with the same fashion as in Blender, we can also change the higher color here to be red by clicking on the square, high ner lumetri, changing it to red, higher shadow, changing it also to red, tracking and camera, as well, all to red. Perfect. And here we have our background color. And so for the background color under the effects control here, I'm going to go under basic correction and change exposure to negative two. So it's a little bit less visible. And then I'm also going to change the saturation to roughly 50 instead of 100 and I'm just going to make everything much nicer. And now, it's really all about tweaking these shadows. So I'm going to change maybe the blur radius to three, which would make the shadows slightly a bit more, I would say, sharper. Then under, let's see, lener shadow, T, we have it currently under seven. I'm going to try 6.5 to see how that's going to look like. Additionally, I might go up top here, and then click the pen tool one more time and try to play around with these values. Get something a little bit more closer to what I want, a little bit more interesting somewhere around here. And this one, a little bit more up. Just a little bit of a light that needs to be right there. And also, if we press play, by the way, let's just move this one before we press play. Scale it up. Scale this busier up. Let's press play on our space. You'll notice that now our shadow is following the highlander, which is exactly what we want. And so that is working perfectly. So I'm going to go on press no space. Control Alt left click. With a keyboard, and there we go. Now, for this top space, I want to add a little bit of this red soft light that's also happening there. And so what I can do with this highlander shadow, I can just control C control V. And so it keeps the tracking data as well. But here, if I click on this arrow and I go under contents, I click on the shape, I can just remove the shape altogether, and I still have the shadow on top, so I can go inside the pen tool and just draw myself a new shape. So I'll click here, one here. Then maybe let's see one roughly up to here, and then maybe one more or less here, and then like that. Additionally, I'm also going to make this track mat. It's going to follow so that's perfect. And now I can change the fill color right here to make it maybe a little bit more of a orange dish. We can also try playing with the soft light here by making it maybe soft light there we go, and then T and increasing the opacity, just a tiny bit. Additionally, we can also try by increasing the iterations and the blur radius. So maybe by ten, and also iterations. Let's try by ten. And then let's go back into our highlaner shadow. We might need to push this shadow just a little bit more something closer to here. I think this is now a bit too aggressive, so we need to go back into a highlaner shadow, two. I'm going to call this one highner shadow red. And just push it closer to something much softer. Almost like a gray orangish color, kind of like that, and there we go. This is doing a pretty decent job. I would probably still increase now the shadow or we can go under our lumetri heel and track to put this lumetri above all of the rest, and that should pretty much change the color a little bit. Let's just compare it, there is a difference. So it's actually better if we keep it below. So let's keep it below instead. I did not know that, to be honest, this was a bit of improvisation. But for the lumetri itself, I might now go into the curves and just try to drop the shadows a little bit more. There we go. You can see if we now drop the shadows, what we're starting to get. This is starting to look pretty good. Then I might push up slightly the mids, or the highlights just a little bit more to get this look. Now I can experiment. So just spend some time maybe experiment with these values. Try to see what you can get and how it works for you. There we go. This was pretty much a very quick time lapse, but essentially what I did was just played around, experimented with these values, and I wanted you to see this creative process. So I will now do a quick breakdown of what exactly I did. So starting with the first one highlight shadow red, I use the soft light with this hex color value of b774 and then used a 17% opacity so we can press T to change here the opacity. This gives me a little bit of that nice following the highner right around here. And if you want, as a matter of fact, you can even lower it to go a bit more down. So it kind of tries to get close to this look here and you can increase it if you want, and this should help you out. But just be sure to watch out with the strength of the color. So, in that case, if you increase it, maybe just make it look this, and there you go. Again, now, this is maybe too strong so you can then drop it. And just play around and tweak to values similar to how I did. The fun is also in experimenting different ways and trying to get different results. I'm going to keep it close to what we have right now. This looks pretty good for me. I might just change this a little bit more to maybe 15, so it's a bit more of a fall off over there and just change this one to 25. And there we go. This is already looking pretty good. And then the highlander shadow, I pretty much made very, very sure that this follows the coroners very, very nicely of the original shadow. And so I was playing and pressing, making sure that all of these corners, some of them had to be really tight, as you can see this part right here, where the bezier curves are really, really tight so we can get this nice cornering where these other ones were very, very long like this one, and then this one here as well. And then for the strength, I used in the end five like this to get this result. And I'll probably play around later on with the final color grading once we get to the last step of the whole tutorial. So this pretty much, I would say concludes the high Lner here for the lumetri, I still haven't touched pretty much anything I only have it to here, but during this time lapse, I didn't do any work. And so I would say as I mentioned earlier, that this concludes this part. We can pretty much control Alt left click and press space just to see how the preview looks like, and there we go. Okay. That looks pretty good. One more thing that I would say is what we can do actually is if we go here onto our let's see, solar planet, solar eight K stars milky way, as a matter of fact, is we want to move it downwards essentially as the higher goes up. So right now, it's currently very static, and we want to change that. So what we can do for starters is just press the letter P to give us the position and then turn on the key framing right here. I'll move this a little bit to the side. And then just let's see this one point of star right here for me. I'm going to use that one as a reference. So what I want is essentially for that one to be also, like, roughly, very, very down. So I'm just going to change the position here, and push it all the way down as much as I can. To get somewhere around here. And so then I'm going to select both of the keyframes, hold shift, click on both of these two keyframes, right click and go under what is keyframe interpolation, right here. Make sure that is set to linear, and then there you go. So if we were to press play right now, we can see both the highlander going up and the stars kind of following versus them being very staticky. And so I would say this pretty much concludes this video for our highlander. In the next one will drop onto the planet itself. So you guys there, cheers. 24. Compositing the highliner pt2: As I stopped recording my previous video and I looked at my highliner. I decided to compare it with my reference image here, and I was kind of dissatisfied. And this will depend on your minder. But mainly when I looked at my highner and looked at the reference image, I was noticing that I can still see some of the details in here in comparison to how it is at the bottom reference image. Additionally, this whole here has a little bit of an extra shadow. In comparison Rs is very, very soft right over here. Then the fall off of the light is much more stronger on top versus our being much sharper. And so these are just some small little details that really make quite a lot of big difference when you pack them all together. And so I'm going to do those extra changes in this part of the video. But if you're already happy with how your highlander looks like, and you really don't feel like doing any additional changes to it, you can more than happy skip this video and move on to the next one. We'll be adding the planets to our shot. But for now, I'm going to continue editing my highlander and you're more than welcome to join me in this journey as well. And so what I want to start, or what I want to do first is actually I'm going to change the way that my highlander shadow is being blended, and I'm going to use actually soft shadow soft light instead. And here, I'm going to then crank up the value all the way until I get something close to over here. And then maybe just maybe make it slightly weaker up to 60 or so. And then I'm going to copy paste it actually, control C, control V into another one, And this other one, I'm going to slightly adjust by basically going into my pen tool and then pressing control clicking on this one, so I remove it, clicking on this one, to remove this one as well. Then just pushing this point right here, a little bit more down while also pushing this one, slightly a little bit more down, but also maintaining it right around here, I would say. Now from here, I'm going to go into effect controls, and I'm going to push this all the way probably let's see, 30, and then the bottom one, I'm going to move around ten ish to get this look right here. Once I'm done with that, I'm going to jump into the bottom highlander one more time and just play around with this value to make it maybe 70 ish as I have it right now in here, and this is already starting to be much, much better altogether. Additionally, I might actually in this highlander that I have at the bottom, slightly increase these values to maybe five and five to make the shadows slightly even more softer, especially here at the bottom, but I would say this is looking pretty darn good overall. And then on top, with my red light that I have over here, I'm going to slightly increase the color to maybe a little bit more reddish and a little bit more bright over there. And then I might actually, as a matter of fact, also change the strength of its fall off by increasing the iteration to maybe ten, and here, let's try 20. Let's pump it up to 30, so it's even more aggressive. And I think this is now slowly starting to look exactly what I want. So if I try to push this even lower, let's just see what do we get, and if I push this one and then maybe a little bit more here. Does it start to look better. I think it does, but we might need to just slightly more increase the strength right around here to maybe 50 in terms of the opacity, so you can press T to show the opacity settings. And then I'm going to change this to a little bit more brighter. That also a little bit more desaturated. Let's check one more time. Okay, we're slowly getting there. Now I just need to get the angle of this right. So I'm going to click in here, push this one a little bit more up. So it's a bit more angled. Let's see now, and there we go. I think this now is much, much closer to over here, which is excellent. And I can also remember play around with this shadow, even bump it up if I want to make it darker or if I want to make it brighter. But in my case, I think around 606570 is going to be doing the trick for me. So somewhere around 65 70, I'm going to undo a couple of steps back to get to the initial value ahead. I think it looks like it was around 70. And so this looks really good. Perfect. Now, I'm just going to add this one little shadow right here at the very entrance. And so to add this shadow, it shouldn't be too complicated as well. All we need is we can actually just take this part that we have. So shadow of the highliner and let's call it Control C Control V. And now, if I go under this dropdown arrow, I click on contents, I click on the shape. I delete the shape itself. And then I just select the pen tool here and I start drawing. And, luckily, we already have a little bit of an outline of a shadow right here so we can use that. So from here, I click one point and then another point right here. Hold my mouse, drag it so I make a bend curve and put another point right around here and connect it all the way there. For this bottom point, I'm going to push the bezier so I get a very strong. Turn out like this, very nice little angle. And then I'm going to clean this one. Little bit more so it goes inside. Click on this one, click Alt, left click with my mouse, to make it a bzzier curve. Play around with the angle, make this one also sharper by pushing it all the way down. And then at the middle one right here, plus again, Alt left click with my mouse, to make it slightly bzzier. Change the color of the fill, too dark, and here we go. We already have our shadow. And so I'm going to collapse now everything so that I can make more space in here. Just take one more final look, and this looks pretty darn good. This is now my final highlander. And so now if I compare to this reference image, it is very close, and I'm very satisfied with it altogether. So yeah, this is pretty much everything I wanted to do. We could maybe lower this slightly more down to make these extrusions slightly darker. But I mean, aside from that, I'm pretty happy with how this is. And so I'm going to save this file, and I'll see you guys in the next video, where we jump into the planet. Cheers. 25. Preparing the planet for compositing: In this short video, we're going to prepare a planet for compositing. You start off by clicking on the planet right here in our project file and dragon dropping it right above our camera. As a matter of fact, we don't really need right now all of these objects, and they're just going to slow down our scene, so we can pretty much survive with the planet itself. Now, we want to go to the last frame by pressing Control Alt and click on our keyboard, and now here we have it. Now, because the planet is slightly different than from what we did so far, and it has to do mainly because of this global effect that we're going to try to achieve. And what I found out it actually makes much more sense, much more convenient to not use this whole image sequence like this, but to rather use only one single frame, which is this last one as a matter of fact. And so what we're going to do now additionally is going into the folder where we have rendered our planet, and we're going to take this final frame that we have and drag and drop it into our project file. And then from here, we're going to drag and drop it right above our planet. Goal here is going to be now to match the movement of our original planet animation to the movement of this planet single image that we have. And to kind of help us match the movement itself, we can take this brightness and contrast effect from here, drag and drop it into the planet and reduce the planet brightness maybe to negative 50 roughly. And additionally, we can also drop the opacity to maybe 50. Now, lastly, we're going to go and add one keyframe in here, but not the opacity. We're going to press P for keyframe, and then I'm going to press position. And then I'm going to go roughly at the point where I don't see any more the original one that has the image sequence right here. And I'm going to move this one also up around here. And so from here on, now we want to kind of match the movements as we go along. And I'm going to press Control shift right click for a couple of frames, and we can see that right now the movements are pretty much more or less very similar. If I go a couple of more frames, also, we can see that one is falling behind, which is ours. And so we just need to take a few movements here to the right. Click here and drag it to the right side, and then control shift right click one more time. The difference here is very small, so I'm just going to negate it Control shift right click. Over here, it's also relatively small, but I'm going to just for the sake of it, improve it a little bit. Control Shift click. Here, it's also very small. Control shift right click and a couple more frames. And now I'm just going to move it one more time just to improve upon it. Just a little bit. There we go and control shift right click a couple more times, and it pretty much looks identical. So if we were to play it, we can see that the planet movements is quite literally identical one to another. And if we were to add actually our camera and everything else up until from here and we were to play from this frame, we would notice that even if we take out this planet, our shot is pretty much going to look identical to what we intended from the very early beginning when we started to render. So let's just take a quick look as it pre renders. There we go. As we can see, the shot still pretty much remains the same. So what we can do now next is simply take out this planet. In here, we can take out the brightness and contrast, press T to go into our opacity and just increase the opacity itself. If we go to the final frame, this is where we've left off. So from now, we just need to go into our planet right here, right click and similar to how in Blender we place things inside of composition inside of collections. Here we're going to place it inside of precoos once we click this, it's going to ask us to create a new composition name. I'm going to call this one planet. And then here we have our little planet inside. And so we actually don't want to have the animation on this part of the planet. We want to have it inside in here. So if we were to look over here, the animation should be there as intended, which is perfect. So let's just take one more clip. Look, So our precomposition has inherently inherited the animation. While now our planet inside of it doesn't have any animation and its static, and this is actually going to be the workplace there. We were going to be doing everything, all of these facts to achieve this kind of glow effect in the next video. So I hope this was clear a little bit. You will see as we move along in the next video, what kind of glow effect we're going to achieve and how it's going to look like, and I'll see you guys there. Cheers. 26. 24 Planet compositing: Now we have everything set up and ready, let's start working on the planet. As a matter of fact, because we will be working inside of this composition, and it will require us to jump left and right, like this. What we can do is go here under a highlander precomp and then click on these three or this hamburger menu. Actually click on the Blue Highlander. Sorry, and then go NewCo viewer like this. And then once we click on the planet, we'll see our planet here on the left side, and we can see the highlander on the right side and see how the planet actually fits in the whole picture. What I'm going to do is just move this way more to the right. So I have all this space here for my planet. On this side, I'm going to click fit. And then on this side, I'm also going to click fit like this. I might actually zoom in just a little bit to see better how my planet is blending with the whole scene, so I'll just make sure that I see this part. All right. Now that we're here, what we can start off is simply adding a new adjustment layer, and this one is going to be used for our lumetri. So inside of lumetri, I'm going to type in here metric color and just drag and drop it into my adjustment layer. And now, what you'll see is that whatever change I do here on the left side, it should also affect here on the right once I release my mouse. So what I'm going to change is starting off simply with saturation. I'm going to drop it relatively just five points lower 295, and I already save up some of these values to speed up this process because it is going to get quite tricky now with the planet as we keep moving forward. And then the whites and the blacks, for the blacks, I'm going to push them to negative 19, and this is going to give me a little bit of disaffect, which is also, if we look at here are reference image, little bit visible right there. On top of that, also, now, I'm going to go into my curves. And for the curves, I am going to push the shadows a little bit more to the left to the right, sorry. And then in here, I will add a little bit more points just to push the mid tones slightly more up. Once I have that in here on the hue versus saturation selector. This is basically going to allow me that once I select one of these colors in the eye dropper, I can now pretty much change that color in here or increase its saturation to be more specific. So I'm going to push slightly the saturation a little bit more up. I'm trying to get almost like this gold brownish look that we have going on. So I don't need to go that much. But right around here so far so good. We will be doing one last final round of color grading at the very last video. So we don't need to be exactly pitch perfect right now. All right. Then we have hue versus hue, and hues hue is quite literally going to be changing our color. So once we select one of the main colors in here, if I go and move this up, it's going to allow me to change that color, and I just want to make it slightly bit more reddish, which is going to allow me this brownish effect later on. And for now, I would pretty much more or less keep it here without doing any other adjustments so far, which brings us now to the main part of also why we had to use an image versus actual the whole sequence that we rendered. And that is this nice little glow effect going on. And so to start off building this global effect, what we can do is simply take this planet, Control C control V, so duplicate it essentially. And then the bottom planet that we have, we're going to go here under effects and precess and use an effect coal fast box blur. This one here. And on top of that fast box blur, we're also going to be adding another effect that we are already familiar with called lumetri color. Now, to kind of explain what's going to be happening in here with our fast box blur and our lumetri. Let's just make sure it is below as it is. So everything is pretty much set up and ready. The thing with the fast box blur, essentially is, it's going to allow us to create this little glob blur effect that we see right around here at the touchpoints, whereas our current planet has it being pretty, I would say, Well, pretty harsh. Our edges are very harsh as a matter of fat versus these ones being very soft. And so for the first value, I'm just going to type in here number three. You can already start seeing that it is adding a little bit of that blur effect. So if we potentially even hide this planet, we can see that the one below it is currently being blurred, which is also important that the blur effect needs to be only on the layers below our planet that has no effects at all. Otherwise, the planets on top are going to be blurred. So we just want to have it like this for now. And then everything else here should pretty much remain the same. But the basic correction, we're going to bump the exposure up for one. It's going to give us a little bit more of an extra glow. Additionally, now, we can just control C, control V. And then for the bottom one, if we go, we can change the values now here to eight. And this one here of the deerations can change to five, And for the temperature, we're going to raise the temperature roughly up, and that's going to give us a little bit more of a color that matches our planet around the edges, and everything else can pretty much remain the same. Now, we are getting a little bit of this edge here going beyond this dark path. So what we're going to need to do to mitigate that problem is simply go here and add a mask by clicking on the pen tool, clicking here, dragging one right around here, zooming out, dragging one all the way here. Let's go somewhere like this. And for this one, that's fine. And then from here, let's just go here and connect it to this one. So now if we just play around with this pen tool a little bit, we can control where essentially this glow is going to end. And we always want it to end right slightly before we get to this shadow. And we can also preview or uncheck this button here to toggle between, and we can see that we missed just a little bit. So I might need to just click and move it slightly more. And there we go. Additionally, if this is too strong of a break between the glow and non glow, what we can do next is simply go under a mask and change a little bit of the feathering, and the fettering is going to allow a little bit of much cleaner fall off as we go. And again, I'm going to enable the mask just a little bit. Click here, push it slightly more up. So I have it just like that. And I think this should pretty much do the job, even if I move it a little bit more closer, something like here. All right. So we have now one level of fast box blur with metric. We have a second level. Now, we're just going to duplicate this 11 more time, as you can see. But for this one, again, we need to now play around with our mask to make this second mask a little bit cleaner. So I'm going to press left click shift. So shift and left click and then just move it a little bit more. We can also increase the path feathering and then move it even further up to get something like that. And now we pretty much have I would say, one, two, three levels. And so for the next one, we actually won't be adding that, but we will be copying the planet just like this, and then we'll take off these effects. And instead, we'll be adding a glow effect. So we're going to type in here glow, and here under stylized glow, drag and drop it into the final planet that's on the very top of the rest of them, which is this one here, and we can actually take this one off which has no effects right now. And under the one that has the glow, let's now do a couple of changes. So we'll start off simply by changing the glow threshold to 38.1. Which is going to make the whole planet pretty much glow. And then we also need to change the global radius. If we change the glow radus is going to start giving us this effect, and this is going to be used to achieve right here where I'm hovering with my mouse. But you can see also that we're having issues with the color, but don't worry, we'll be fixing that in a quick second. So I'll make the glob radius around 160 right now, and then the glow intensity, I'm going to drop 2.4, which is going to be perfectly fine. Now we need to deal with these colors. Right now, it is using colors that are based off of our object, but we don't want to tell it which color specifically to use. So I'm going to enable my planet one more time, and I'm going to use the colors that I have on it. So I'm going to be clicking here for color A, something maybe around here. And for color B, I'm going to click maybe one or around here. And now for glow colors, instead of originals, we want to tell it to use A and B colors, and there we go. And now, really, once we have everything, it's really just going to be a matter of tweaking with these settings to try to get close to what we want to achieve here. So maybe this is too strong, so we can play around with each of them individually in terms of their opacity. We try to get a much better result, for instance, I could maybe lower the opacity of one of these, and you can see the brightness, how it affects it. I can lower the opacity of my glow. And you can see how that affects it. Additionally, here, under adjustments in Lumetri, what we can do is go into our let's see, where is the creative, basic correction creative. And usually after effects comes with its own set of presets for lots. And so what we can use and you can think of these as filters is let me just see I believe it is Kodak clean B. So this one here, and we just dropped the intensity to something lower like maybe 25. And this is now starting to look very, very close to what we have over here, but we just need to reduce maybe the intensity of some of these lines that we've created. So let's just play around with these values a little bit. I might actually increase one here to ten, and then I might just drop it slightly a little bit to 44. This one here is the sharp line. So for the sharp line, I will drop it definitely, to something lower, but I might also increase it slightly to maybe six and six. And then we have the glow effect, which we can also slightly play around with, decrease it just a little bit. And so play around with these values, get the result that you're trying to achieve. For me, I want to get something very subtle. The same with blender. We always want to start off with a much more expressive effect. And then as we progress, we just want to lower everything down to make it incredibly as subtle as possible. And so this already is starting to look very good, but I would say we do need one that is mostly noticeable of all of them. So maybe something here, but we need to lower this one down to maybe four, and then this to even lower. And let's just take a quick look. Let's close this window here and let's go into our main window and take a look. And I would say this is already pretty, pretty amazing. So if you want now, what we can do is just preview our animation from maybe somewhere around here, not the entire part, but somewhere where we can see our planet. And we can right now see that our planet is still visible in this shot. We can see from here. So we need to add one more keyframe into the position. So I'm just going to move this slightly here. And I would say, right around here, we can move maybe a keyframe that goes a little bit over here. So, as our shot goes, I'm going to now speed up the whole video until this whole thing pre renders, and then we're going to play it one more time to see it together. And let's press play now. I would say this looks pretty awesome altogether. You can always now continue doing some minor tweaks. So if you want, you can join me in some minor adjustments where maybe I just want to, let's see, reduce the saturation just a little bit right here to make it a little bit more flatter, and then maybe right here. But if you're already happy, you can it off and move on to the next step where we'll be doing some extra clean up on our scenes and adding our ships as well. All right, guys, I'll see you in the next video. Cheers. 27. Adding imperfections and rendering: This is going to be the final video of this course. If you've got this far, congratulations. And without further ado, let's just get straight into it. I want to start off now adding camera imperfections. And to do this first, before we even begin with that, I think it makes sense also to add our little ships that are coming out of the Highlander. We've been avoiding adding them very long. So let's just put them right below our planet, and that's pretty that's pretty much it. We can go now into our effects. We can maybe use just exposure. In order to crank up their brightness just a little bit, maybe. So I would go here under exposure and just use maybe one that's going to give them a little bit more color coming out. But they're blending also too much with our stars. So what I would do is go here under my, let's see, background color, and just drop the exposure maybe to negative three to make the stars even less visible and also maybe just increase the contrast slightly and drop the blacks a little bit more. So there is still some stars, but it's a bit darker. And so these small ships are coming a bit more into first play as a matter of fact. And this will also depend on your monitor how well it handles black values. So I might actually just do right above negative 2.3. This works perfectly good in my case. So, let's go now right click here, New Adjustment layer. The first imperfection that we're going to be adding is called CC Light burst. So I'm just going to call this layer CC Light burst, and I'm going to go into the effects. And without having the need to explain, let me just show you what it does. The light burst is quite literally going to create this almost like light burst effect. And if we drop the values all the way down to maybe ray length, let's say one, and then we use the intensity of 150, we're going to get a very subtle over here on the edge effect that almost resembles a anamorphic lands. And if we push this a little bit forward, maybe 1.25, it's going to go even further, and you'll notice that our planet has also become a little bit of a blurry. If we enable and disable, you'll be able to see the exact difference. It's very subtle, but it's also pretty good. I'm going to keep it at 14 now, and I might also drop the intension to maybe 135. It's the subtleties that really matter. Additionally, while we're added, I'm going to make the planet here color orange just so it stands out like that. And I'm going to continue now with my new imperfections. The next one being simply depth up field. So the depth of field is actually going to be pretty cool the way we're going to add it. This is something that I learned way way back, even when I was doing Sema for D as a matter of fact from one of YouTube videos. So what we're going to start off is simply by adding a new solid. And we're going to make it white. And I'm going to call this solid DOF mask. So for this solid, we're going to add a gradient ramp. So let's just find a gradient ramp this one here, and add it onto our depthofield mask. And we're going to go right click and precompose this deptofield and make sure that you have moved all attributes into a new composition, because unlike before what we had here when we were doing the planet, once we click this, it's going to also move this effect into the new composition. So make sure you have that checked. And so now if I go into the depth of field mask in here, we're going to see this, and we're just going to duplicate it one more time. What we want to do now is simply go under the gradient ramp that we have on top. Zoom out a little bit, and you'll see this button right here on top. I'm going to move this one down, and I'm going to move the one that's below here up. So this way I create this gradient coming from down to top. And additional, I'm going to change this one from normal to multiply. I'm going to go now at the bottom one. Click on the gradient ramp, find this button right here, and just move it up. So this way, I have this black part right here. And then for the one over there, I also have this white part right there. So basically, everything that's going to be inside our white is going to have no effect of the camera lens blur. But everything that has darker value is going to have a lens blur effect. So you can tweak it right now as you wish, but it's better to first see how it's going to take effect rather than tweaking it here because it won't make much sense. So let's go into our highliner. We can actually hide this mask. We don't need to see it. We can add a new adjustment layer. And this one is going to be called camera lens blur. Like that. And we can go into our effects and presets and add camera lens blur, like this. And now you might see everything has been blurred out, but not too long because in here under our layer, we can select the camera lens blur depth of field mask composition that we've created, and then we can click Invert. And now it's using this depth of field mask that we've created as a mask. As you can see here, we have this blur effect and over here on top. Right now, for me, I would say this is maybe too much, so I'm going to reduce the blur radius to maybe around two. I'm also going to change the aspect ratio here to maybe 2.35. So it also matches the lens that we've been using in Blender. And as you can see here, there's quite a lot of it happening, and we can press control alt and left click to go and see how our first frame is looking. I will say this is way too much. So what we can do is simply go into our deptopel mask, push these black values a little bit more up, push the black value from here also, a little bit more down. Let's just do that. And so now make it also this one a little bit here. I believe it should look a little bit nicer. There we go, it is looking much better. Let's compare it to our shot in here. I would say this is getting pretty close overall. And so what we can do next is go back to our final frame. So control all right click. Take a look over there. Perfect. So far, so good. We've added the depth of field. And now the last part is going to be chromatic aberration. We can see some chromatic aberration happening right around here on these edges where this is blue and this is red. So to start off, we're going to add a new adjustment layer one more time, and this one is going to be called chromatic. I'm just going to call it chromatic like that. And to start off, all we need first is what's called optics compensation. And then below the updis compensation, we're going to add three D glasses. And again, this is something that I found by going on YouTube, searching, trying to figure out what is the best and easiest way to add or fake chromatic aberration. And so under left view, we're going to choose chromatic layer. And then in here under three D view, we're going to select balance colored red and blue. So now if we increase, let's say the fill view to for instance, 15, you'll notice at these edges, we're starting to get some chromatic aberration happening on our high liner, which is exactly what we want. I'm going to make it slightly smaller to roughly around ten. I might also go into my camera out lens blur and just slightly deduct it to maybe 70%. So it's not so super strong, I might even go lower to maybe 50%. Let's compare it before and after. That's pretty much good as it is right now. More or less, this kind of concludes the main amount of the surface imperfections. There's still a couple of things that we can do. It mainly has to do with the stars that are visible close to the planet itself, and I want to do some changes to the planet. But first, the stars themselves. Essentially, there shouldn't be because the planet is emitting lights, there shouldn't be any stars visible from here because the light from the planet itself should be strong enough to cover those stars. So what we can do essentially is by going maybe to the let's see, first frame all the way here. And then adding here a new adjustment layer right above and below our highliner. Let's just go new and let's choose a shape layer. Let's put it right below our highliner. And what we can do is simply click on the rectangle here and zoom out a little bit, draw up until here. This should be pretty good. And then choose here, let's see, make sure that you have under fill linear gradient. And then for the color, I'm going to go with pure black. On top, I'm going to go with opacity of 100 and here on the color, I'm going to go with pure white. And then on opacity, I'm going to go zero. As a matter of fact, I'm actually going to go with pure black. That should be better. And now from here, if I press, let's see, V, I should be able to control this. And so if I zoom closely, I shouldn't be able to see some of the stars that are there. It's going to cover them. Perfect. But we can also see that our planet, as a matter of fact, is still visible from this frame. So what we need to do is we need to push our planet a little bit more upwards, so it doesn't bother us in this frame. And so we can just move it, let's say, roughly around here, and that should be pretty fine. And so let's just preview our planet. I'm going to hide all of these effects up until here. I'm just going to go to preview the planet quickly to just make sure that everything is as is supposed to be. So we don't see the planet. We don't see the planet. And now we're on this frame. Planet should show up along with the lights and there we go. All right, so everything is pretty good as a matter of fact, so we can enable all of this stuff that we had from before. And we're pretty much good to go. Additionally, now, because we've added our background color here right above it the shape layer. I'm going to call the shape layer dark color. We need to push this maybe a little bit more down and a little bit more up to scale it. Do something around here so that we don't see any of these guys. We might need to go here under a rectangle rectangle path and then just make it slightly bigger. Now by making it bigger, these lights here shouldn't be visible at all. Let's just take one more look by just hiding all of these elements clicking here, and there shouldn't be any stars, and we're pretty much good in that regard. Perfect. Let's just go fit. And we can actually take a better preview but just by hiding everything to see how much is being hidden. In terms of the darker color, we can see right up to this point the black values are doing their job, so that's pretty good. I'm just going to now make everything visible again one more time. And then take out the depth of field mask that we don't need. So from here, I would say we are 99.9% almost done. The last thing that's remaining maybe what I would like to do personally is adjusting here adding one more glob effect. So if I go here under my planet and I go right around my glow effect that I have over here, and I just take another one and go on the one that's below. What I would do is play around with the threshold, crank this one up, go all the way up on my strength here. Boost, let's see, reduce my radius roughly, boost my intensity, very crazy, not too crazy, but relatively crazy. Big, let's say, this color, this color, and then just play around with the threshold a little bit with the radius so I get something close to this look, and then let's just change these colors to make them a little bit more relevant to what I want. Okay, this is way too white, so I'm going to probably change it to closer, trying to get it roughly over there. But what I can do actually to mitigate this is just lay around. There we go. This is what I wanted to get just a little bit more of an extra bump right in there. So, what it would make actually sense wouldn't be a bad idea to actually go all the way white here. Then just reduce it. Let's just see it before and after. I would say, this is pretty good. I'm going to add just a little bit more of a ish color like that. And then here I might do the same d push this a little bit more and I add a little bit more of that color like that. And you can see just the huge difference, even though it's so small, it makes a pretty big difference, and we can just play around with threshold a little bit to make it blend better like that. If I go into the highliner, we have a little extra line right that goes here. So this now is, again, 99.5%. There are a few more things that we could add, for instance. I would say that this whole scene, when I look at it one more time, is a bit more blurry, for instance. So we could add one extra layer of blur on top of everything where we could just go right click here, new adjustment layer, very, very top. This could be a very small blur. We can use maybe a camera lens blur. And just make everything like 0.1 blurry, very, very subtly or maybe 0.5. Let's see how much is 0.5 0.5 is maybe too much, I would say in my opinion. And so I would go maybe 0.15. In terms of blurriness, maybe a little less. Let's see. 0.1 0.1 seems to be close enough to what we see in here. I would say. Yeah. That seems pretty good. And then additionally, we could also add some noise. So I'm going to also make this blurrings maybe 50%, so it's actually 0.1, but it' 0.5. And we're going to add also some noise. I'm going to call this one global blur. And then I'm going to go new adjustment on top of everything, we're going to add some noise. So we can go here and just pick in grain, I believe. Add grain. And just put it in here. And so here we get a preview of how that green is going to look like. We don't want to have it that big. We want to reduce the size, so we can go size maybe 0.1. Let's see, it's much smaller intensity 1.5, even less 0.1. Maybe 0.2. Luckily, we also have these presets that are pretty good, so we can try and see with them. I would say usually Codex are pretty good, so Kodak vision 320 t's try vision 200 T. This is pretty good, but we do need to make some small changes to it. I would say, definitely not so strong intensity, make 0.150 0.35, maybe. 0.3. I think 0.3 seems pretty good. Softness is good. Let's just now instead of preview, say final output, so we can see the shot, and this is pretty much it. So if I go from the first frame to the middle frame now to take a quick look, I would say, everything is done and ready. So this is pretty much it. We have completed this tutorial. All that's remaining now is to just render this scene. And to do that, you can go here under file and then go port A to render Q and simply once you have it here, choose which folder to put it. I'm going to go output two inside my render file here. I'm going to call it her MP four, save and click render, and you're good to go. So thank you so much for watching this. Really appreciate it. I'll be continuing working on the next two videos, and so I hope to see you guys there there as well. Take care and cheer.