Blender 3D for Beginners: Create a Black Hole Animation

1. Introduction: I Have you ever looked up at the night sky and wondered what's up there? I know I have. Things like black holes and nebula and asteroid belts have always fascinated me, so I wanted to recreate some of this wonder and Blender. Hello, and welcome to this cosmic Blender class. I'm Harry, a seasoned three D artist with over a decade of professional experience and the privilege of being recognized as a top teacher on Skillshare, specializing in Blender tutorials. In this class, we'll be creating a subtle space animation complete with sound effects of a black hole surrounded by a nebula and an asteroid belt. While I can't promise that this animation will be scientifically accurate, I can promise that it looks pretty awesome, and it's easier to create than you think. Better yet, we'll be creating this animation and adding sound effects entirely within Blender. No additional software needed. Whether you're brand new to stylized rendering or you followed some of my previous classes, there should be something for everyone to learn. You'll find my classes are easy to follow due to my focus on relaxed pacing and crystal clear instructions. This has made them popular with both beginner and intermediate artists alike. We'll start our animation from scratch with some optional models to import if you'd like to follow along with me. I'm also providing all the video assets and sound effects that you'll need to complete the animation. Please note that Blender version 5.0 or later is required to access the provided Blender files and follow along. You can download the latest version of Blender completely free from their website. By the end of this class, you'll be amazed at how easily you can create these mind blowing cosmic objects. So if you're ready, I invite you to join me in class. Let's jump into our first lesson together. 2. Setting Up the File: No In this lesson, we'll begin the class by setting up our Blender file. Let's begin. If this is your first time taking a Blender class, I'd highly recommend you start with my complete beginners guide to Blender first. This class was designed for the absolute beginner to Blender and three D art in general. We cover every single necessary topic in order to get you up to speed and running and Blender. We'll accomplish this with short and focused lessons that cover each topic from a beginner's perspective, utilizing a well organized starter file. We end the class with an easy project where you set up and customize your very own cozy campsite. With that out of the way, let's continue with the lesson. While it might not seem like it at first glance. This animation is actually pretty simple and doesn't require too many different objects or complex render settings. We're going to start the class by getting the file set up so that we have some of the basic settings out of the way, and then we can focus on the more fun parts. Before doing anything inside Blender, though, we do need to make sure that we have all the necessary files downloaded and unzipped on our computer in a logical place that we can find later. I typically recommend a folder somewhere on your desktop or in your documents folder if you aren't sure where to put them. Most important thing though, is that you don't leave these files inside your downloads folder as we don't want to forget that the project is in there and then delete it a month from now when we forgot about it. You can find all the files that you'll need inside the project resources for this class. After downloading the class assets dot zip file and the Blender cheatsheet dot zip file, we need to unzip the folders. On a Windows computer, you can simply right click on the folder and choose extract all like this. Just right click and then choose extract all. If you're following along on a Mac, however, you might need to use a program such as the unarchiver if the default extract doesn't work for you. Now I can choose extract A and then I'll do that one more time over here for the Blender cheat sheet. Then before we look at the class assets folder that we just unzipped, I did want to point out that we have a Blender cheat sheet right here, which just has some key binds on it that you might find useful if you're not familiar with Blender. Feel free to use this throughout the class if you'd like to. Otherwise, you can just leave it in the folder. Is just an additional supplement if you'd like to print it out and leave it on your desk if you'd like to. But I won't be skipping any of these keybind, so you don't worry about having to print this out if you don't want to. Now if we go back to the class Assets folder that we just unzipped here, we'll see that it includes a few different files that we'll need throughout the class, as well as a final file that has the entire project done for you. This file is primarily meant just if you want to open up a completed version of the project and check your work to the project that you're working on during the class. Sometimes it helps to see the entire project completed if you get stuck at any point. With our files extracted, we're ready to move on to Blender. This class is built specifically with Blender 5.0 or newer in mind, which means if you're working in Blender 4.5 or earlier, you're going to find it hard to follow along with some of these steps as we'll be using things that are unique to Blender 5.0. I highly recommend that you download Blender 5.0 or newer, whatever the current version is when you follow along with this class. With that disclaimer out of the way, once you open up Blender 5.0, we're going to choose the general file type found here on the left side. Believe it or not, we're actually going to be using all three of these starting objects, including the default cube. Speaking of the default cube, let's get it set up and ready for the next lesson. So first, make sure you have the cube selected by just left clicking on it, and then hit S to start scaling and then type in 10 to scale it up ten times larger than it was before. By default, it's a two meter cube. Now that we've scaled it up ten times, it's a 20 meter cube. You can also use your mouse wheel now to zoom out a bit so you can see the whole cube again. Let's also name this object something a bit more descriptive. Over here in the outliner list at the top right, we're going to double click on the word cube and then rename it nebula, space, C, underscore foggy FoggY then head answer. This name will make more sense in the following lessons. Now let's head over to the Render Properties tab and adjust some settings there. We can find that down here by clicking on this tab that looks like the backside of a camera. First adjustment will be to increase the quality of the volumes in the scene slightly. Let's scroll down until we see the word volumes found here. Then we'll click on this arrow to twirl down those settings and then we'll change this resolution from one d eight to instead one to four. You won't notice any changes in your scene as we haven't added any volumes yet. Don't worry if you're unfamiliar with the term volumes. We'll be explaining them in the very next lesson. All you need to know is that this setting improves the quality of the volumes by increasing the resolution. Next, we're going to adjust the contrast of the render and the viewport by changing the color management settings. We can find these settings at the very bottom of this list down here where it says color management. So we'll twirl those open now and then scroll down a little further. Before we make any changes to these settings over here, first, let's change this viewport so we can see what the setting is doing a little bit better. So we'll go over here to the very top right, and we're going to click this far right button here to switch the viewport to the rendered mode. Will get us a bit better look at how this color management setting affects the image. Now again, back down here at the bottom right, we're going to change this look drop down. We're going to switch it from none to very high contrast right here on this list. You'll notice right away that the viewport looks a lot darker and higher contrast thanks to this adjustment. When you think about it, outer space is really a realm of extremes, extreme darkness, extreme light, extreme hot, extreme cold. There's no room for a washed out and muted image in space. So we're going to set up our color management to a very high setting to mimic this extreme in our image. One last change in this color management area is adjusting the exposure value. We can find that here just below the very high contrast setting. We'll click on this and then type in 0.5 and then hit Enter. By increasing the exposure, we'll uniformly increase the brightness of the entire scene. This is a useful tool to make sure that you don't need to use super high values for your lights and materials to make sure everything is bright enough on the screen to be seen. With that last render setting changed, now let's head over to the output properties tab. We can find that here just below the render properties, and it looks like a printer printing out a photo. Let's scroll up to the very top so we can see the first setting. Be leaving the resolution for our animation at a standard full HD, which is 1920 by 1080. I'd recommend that you do the same as you follow along for now as it makes it a bit easier for you to match what I'm doing. This is something that you could change later on when we're done with the class for your own custom animation, though. Next, we'll adjust the frame rate found here 24-30 instead. This will add a few more images per second of animation and it makes the motion feel a bit smoother. Just below this, we're going to change the end value 250-240 instead, just ten less. Will make our total animation 8 seconds long overall. This is because 30 frames per second times 8 seconds equals to 40 frames. We'll adjust these output settings down here in a later lesson. For now, you can leave them as they are. Lastly, let's save our file, so Blender remembers all of these adjustments that we made if we close the file. To do this, we can go over here to file. Then choose Save or you can hit Controls. Now in this new option window, navigate to the location that you saved all the class assets we downloaded and unzipped earlier. This will make the file easier to find if you lose it in the future. Down here at the bottom center, we can name the file. Let's name it Black Hole, nebula NEB ULA, underscore animation, underscore 01. Or you can name it something else as long as you know what the file is in the future. Just make sure that you don't leave the file untitled and then not know what it is a month from now if you want to come back. Underscore 01 we added to the end allows you to create new versions of the file without overwriting the old ones. All you need to do is save the file again and increase the number by one, such as underscore 02 to differentiate it from the previous versions. Once you have your name set up down here, we can just click Save Blender File. All right. That's the last of the preliminary changes that we needed to make before we start on the fun stuff. And the next lesson, we'll start creating the first nebula material for our animation. I'll see you there. 3. Material: Foggy Nebula: In this lesson, we'll start creating the first nebula material for our animation. Let's begin. Before we begin working in our file, let's do a quick rundown of what volumes are in Blender. This is an important concept, as the nebula we create will be entirely built out of volumes. Without getting into all the technical aspects, you can think of volumes within Blender as fog. Fog on its own has a visual presence. It becomes really obvious, though, when we see it illuminated by a light source. While the nebula isn't physically similar to the fog that we find here on Earth, it does bear a similar visual appearance if you imagine it as being fog in space, being illuminated by colorful stars. We'll be using this visual similarity to mimic a colorful nebula in Blender, utilizing volumes, essentially just fog and colorful lights. Another difference between volumes and a typical three D material is that they inhabit the space inside of an object rather than just its surface. A typical material such as brick or fabric, sits on the surface of the model and leaves the inside of the model essentially a hollow shell. Volumes, however, have an opposite approach where they will instead fill the object with fog while making the surface of the object effectively invisible so you can see the fog within it. This is why we only need a simple cube to apply our nebula materials to, as we don't really need to have a complex shape to fill with this fog. We just need a container for it, so to speak. The camera within our scene will look through this cube of fog to replicate the look of a cloudy nebula. With that quick explainer out of the way, let's get to making our first material. First, we're going to swap to the shading workspace found here at the top. Now at the top right of this viewport, we're going to go over here and select the far right button found here to turn it to the rendered mode. We can also zoom out this viewport a little bit so we can see the entire cube. All right. Now we're ready to begin creating the material. One thing to note is, I won't be covering every single aspect of creating materials in this lesson. However, you should be able to follow along just fine if you're unfamiliar. I won't be skipping any steps during my explanations. I just won't be going over every single detail of every setting as we go. I will explain any settings that we use, though, so don't worry about that. If you'd like to learn more about the ins and outs of material creation and Blender, I'd highly recommend my magic of materials class found on Skillshare. Over all the basics of material creation and Blender from a complete beginner's perspective while texturing a premade wizard study file. With that out of the way, let's begin. Our first step is to select the cube up here in the viewport, just by of clicking on it. You should see an orange highlight around it to let you know that you have it selected. Now down here in the bottom viewport, you can see the word material here at the top center, and that's the name of this material. We're going to rename it to something a bit more obvious. We're going to call this nebula, space, foggy, just to give it a name that's a bit more accurate to what it actually is. Now we can navigate around in this bottom editor by using our mouse wheel. We can scroll it up and down to zoom in and out and we can also click it in to slide the view back and forth. Our first step here is to select this principled BSDF node, this large green square, and then we're just going to delete it. We won't need it, so we can just hit the delete button to remove this node. We're not making a normal material, so that node won't serve us any purpose. Now with our mouse hovering over this bottom editor, we're going to hit Shift and A to bring up the ad menu. Then we'll click Search. This time, we'll type in volume VOL. And then once you type in those three letters, you should start seeing a list below. We want to choose principled volume here, the third option from the top in my case. So we'll just click this, drag it over here and place it to the left of this material output. Now we're going to click and drag on this volume green dot next to the word here on the right, and then we'll drag it down here to connect it to the volume here on the material output. And just like that, we can already see that the cube is now essentially made of a really thick fog. We can even see this light that's inside this cube, illuminating it from the inside. Now that we have our basic volume material set up, ready to begin customizing it. First step is to adjust the color of the fog and make it white. Right now, it's set to a very light gray, but it'll react to the light a little bit better if we make it completely white. We can go down here to this principled volume node. Click on this block of color next to the word color, and then we can make it pure white by dragging this value slider all the way over to the right to make it pure white. Or we could also use this slider here on the top right and slide it up to the very top. The next setting that we'll adjust is the density. Here on the third option below the color. The density does exactly what it sounds like. It changes the density or how opaque the fog is. You notice if you just click and drag this density slider to the left and make it lower, that the fog becomes much, much thinner and the edges of the fog become harder to distinguish. We won't be using just a simple number for our nebula, though, as you can actually use an image to control the density instead. This will allow us to make the fog cloudy and swirly just like a. First step is to add two new nodes. We're going to add a noise texture and a color ramp. So first, over here on the bottom left, we'll hit Shift and A to bring up our ad menu again, click Search. We'll type in color, COLOR, space R to start the word ramp, and then we're going to choose color ramp from this list. We'll place that here to the left. One more time, shift and A, search. This time, we'll type in noise NOIs and choose noise texture. Make sure you choose noise texture and not white noise texturing as those are two different things. So we're going to choose just noise texture and then place that here to the left of the color ramp. Now let's connect these nodes together. So first, we'll drag from the color socket here to the bottom of the color ramp, attaching it to the factor, and then we're going to drag from color here on the color ramp down onto the density slider down here to replace that number instead with this image. The moment, it's a pretty subtle difference, but we can start to see some variation in the thickness of the fog in certain areas. This has started to give this cube a bit of a soft, cloudy look. We can now see areas on this cube where the fog is a bit thicker and a bit thinner, depending on where you look on the cube. This has started to give us a bit of a swirly, cloudy look that we're after. We need to make some adjustments to these new nodes that we just added before we see a strong effect, though. So let's start that now. We're going to adjust the color ramp first as it'll make these changes to the noise texture a bit more. The way these nodes down here work is that nodes pass their attributes from the left towards the right. So we can adjust the look of this noise texture here on the left by first passing it through this color ramp node to affect its properties. Then we'll output these new properties to the density slider over here on the principled volume. That's how pretty much all of these nodes work. They move from left to right, and then you add effects between them to change their look. Let's zoom into this color ramp, which we'll be adjusting first. Our goal with the color ramp is to increase the contrast of the noise texture to the left. The way this density attribute works, the way this density property here works when we're using an image is pure black on the image will be zero density, which means it's perfectly see through, and pure white will be completely opaque, so full density. Any gray value in between will be somewhere in a value 0-1. By increasing the contrast of the noise texture using this color ramp will make the cloudiness of the fog more obvious due to a larger gap between the black and the white parts of the texture. We'll have more areas that are really opaque and more areas that are also really making the whole effect a little less subtle and more punchy. To do this, we simply need to move the black slider on the left to the right. And as we do this, we'll be increasing the amount of black in this texture. So we'll see as we move it to the right that this cloudiness becomes a lot more apparent. And that's because we're adding more black and more white to the texture and limiting the amount of grays. So to adjust the specific slider, you have the option to either slide it back and forth like this on this bar or we can use these controls down here. So when it's set to zero, that's the leftmost slider. And if we change it to one, it'll select the right most slider. So instead, we're going to set it back to zero, so we're selecting the the position, we can actually manually type in a number that we want. So we'll type in 0.4, nine, and then hit Enter. This will move this black slider almost exactly in the middle, just a little bit to the left of middle. We can now see that this cloudy texture of the fog is a lot more obvious just with this simple change. Now let's move to the noise texture and begin adjusting these settings. First go through and change a bunch of these settings and then I'll explain what we actually did. First, we'll set the detail to 2.5, and then enter, we'll set the roughness to one, the lacinarty. We're going to set this to 9.9, and then the distortion at the very bottom, we'll set this to five. These changes that we made have given the noise texture a swirly, almost gaseous look. This is perfect for our nebula. If you're unfamiliar with the sliders that we just adjusted, here's a really simplified rundown. The scale value changes the size of the noise pattern, so it makes it either bigger or smaller. The detail slider adjusts how complex the noise pattern is. Can think of this as more or less swirls in this case. The roughness slider adjust how grainy the noise pattern is. A very low roughness value will make very smooth swirls, whereas a very high roughness value in our case, will make very tight and defined somewhat noisy or statiy looking swirls. The acinarty slider adjusts a secondary smaller scale for the noise pattern. And then lastly, the distortion slider stretches and distorts the noise pattern into the swirls that we see here rather than the default cloudy look. That's why we're seeing a lot of these sort of stretched out lines of highlights and shadows within this fog rather than just puffy circular cloudy shapes. We need to add a few more nodes. These nodes will be meant exclusively for stretching and distorting this basic swirly fog pattern into something a bit more interesting and nebula like. We'll start by adding all three nodes, and then we'll hook them up before adjusting their settings. So first let's zoom out a little bit. And then over here to the left of the noise texture, we're going to hit Shift and A, search, and then type in VOR O and choose Voronoi texture. Place that to the left. Then shift in A, search, type in color ramp, choose color ramp from the list, place that to the left, and then one last time shift in A, search, and we'll type in noise again and choose noise texture, and then place that here to the left. Now we can go through here and connect all these nodes together. So first, we'll drag from the color socket on the noise texture that we just added to the left. Put that down here into the factor at the bottom of this color ramp, then we'll go from the color socket here and drag it down to the vector on this Voronois. So we're going to drag it to this purple one down here. And then we're going to drag from position, this purple socket here to the vector on the noise texture that we just adjusted earlier. As soon as we connect this last node, we can already see that we've made some adjustments to the look of this fog. Cloudy look that we had before is a bit more subtle than it was. But it'll be back after we make just a few more adjustments to these nodes. The main takeaway here from these new nodes is that we'll be using other textures to dictate how the original noise texture is distorted and displayed within this cube. So we're using these three nodes here to stretch and distort the look of this original noise texture. Now let's begin adjusting these new nodes. So we'll zoom in first to this Voronoi texture. We're going to set the scale to two, the detail to 15, the roughness to 0.5, six, the lacinarty to ten. We'll leave the randomness set to one. These settings that we changed here change virtually the exact same things on this Voronoi texture as they did on this first noise texture. The only difference between the Voronoi and the noise texture is the look of the pattern that they're adjusting. Voronoi has a cellular appearance, while noise has a cloudy appearance. As a quick tip throughout this class, if you don't notice the changes you're making displayed in this three D viewport above, give it a moment and then use your mouse wheel to zoom in and out to update the viewport, or you can simply click in your middle mouse button and then pan it back and forth. Update the view as well. This will force Blender to update the view and show your new adjustments if it's taking a little bit too much time to show them by default. Now let's move to the color ramp to the left of this Vornoi texture. We're only going to be adjusting the white slider here on the right side. So first, we're going to set this slider down here to one so we select the right slider, and then we're going to type in for the position 0.997 and then had enter. Color ramp has the exact same purpose as the previous color ramp. It's meant to increase the contrast of the texture to the left of it, in this case, the noise texture. Due to this color ramp's location within this material network, any adjustment we make to this color ramp is a lot more sensitive than the first one. So we only need to make this really tiny adjustment here to have an effect on this left image. Then lastly, let's adjust this noise texture here on the far left. So first, we're going to switch it from three D to four D instead, and then we'll move down this list. We'll set the scale to one. We'll set the detail to 15, the roughness to one, the lacinarty to 0.5, and then the distortion to ten. The main difference between this noise texture and the previous one is that we switched it from three D to four D instead. The four D version of this texture adds a new slider called W here at the top. We won't be adjusting this slider just yet, but this is the slider that will allow us to animate the Nebula's movement later on in this class. After all of these adjustments, we can now see the final effect of this nebula. So we can zoom in here and then spin around our view to get a better look at what this did. We have areas of dense fog with swirl patterns in it that also has voids in the fog where it's significantly thinner than other places. So anywhere where you see it's darker, that means that it actually has less fog in that area. That we have the look of the fog that we want, we have one last change to make before we move on to the lighting in the next lesson. While the fog looks pretty cool right now, this isn't the only fog that we're going to have in our scene. So we need to make sure that it's a lot more subtle. This will ensure that when we have all three layers of our nebula created, they won't completely block out all the light within the scene. We're going to lower the overall density of this fog using a math node on the far right side of the system. So down here in the bottom, we're going to zoom. Move over here to the right and then we'll hit Shift and A. Go to search, and we'll type in math, MATH, and choose math from the top. Now if we hover over the line connecting this color ramp to the principled volume node, we can click and place it here, and it will automatically connect it for us as well as space out these nodes to make room for it. Now let's zoom in down here to this node, and then we can begin adjusting it. First, we're going to switch it from add to multiply instead, and then we're going to adjust this value down here to change which number it's being multiplied. We left this set to one, we wouldn't have any adjustment to the look of the fog because one times anything is just the original thing. However, if we want to lower the opacity of this and make it more subtle, we need to multiply it by a smaller number than one. In our case, we're going to set it to 0.03 to make this fog significantly more subtle than it was before. Now if we zoom out and pan around this cube, you can see that we can still see the fog but it's only really located around this light source. Eventually, once we add all of our lights, this fog will be a lot more visible than it is now, but it's important that we lower its overall opacity so that when we have two other nebula laying directly on top of it, they're not all competing and completely blocking out the light. With our first nebula material finished, we're ready to move on to some basic lighting. In the next lesson, we'll add some basic colorful lighting to our world. I'll see you there. 4. Basic Lighting: In this lesson, we'll add some basic colorful lighting to our world. Let's begin. A large portion of the colors in our animation will be thanks to the lighting, rather than the color of the nebula itself. This makes the scene's color palette really customizable as all you need to do is adjust the lighting to change the mood of your animation. To start with, we'll swap back to the layout workspace if you're not there already. You can find it over here on the top left. Now let's switch this view port to the rendered mode found over here on the right side. Our first step is going to be removing all of the ambient lighting that we have from the world, at least for now. If you haven't noticed already, Blender has a soft ambient lighting across the entire world by default. This is useful for making sure your scene isn't completely dark, but it doesn't do your lighting any favors as it tends to make everything look really washed out. By removing this lighting entirely, we ensure that the only light in the scene is what we placed manually. This gives us a better idea where our highlights and shadows are and what we need to add more light to or less light. To remove this lighting, we're going to head over to the World Properties tab found here on the right side. It looks a bit like a globe in red. Now over here on the right underneath the surface, we're going to choose color, andn we'll just click on this color block here to the right. We're going to take this value slider here and drag it all the way to the left and set it to zero. We're going to leave this strength set to one and change the color to black instead to remove the lighting. This strength will be valuable later on when we add a new texture. But as far as Blender is concerned, if we set the color of the light to black, it's essentially as if we set the light to zero anyway. You'll notice that the viewport is much darker now thanks to this missing ambient light, but the grid on the viewport is also a lot more distracting on this dark background. Luckily, this is a pretty easy thing to turn off. So we can go over here to the top right, and we're going to click on this drop down menu here next to the viewport overlays button. Now we're going to go over here and turn off floor. So we'll just uncheck this box here, and that will remove this grid, but it'll still leave behind these axes to help orient ourselves in the view. All right, now it's time for some lighting. We're going to start by adjusting the light that we already have in the scene. Then we'll add two more lights. So first, we'll go over here and just select the light from the list in the top right. Then we can go down to this light bulb icon for the object data properties. And this is where we can adjust the settings for this light. As I mentioned before, the lighting in the scene is what primarily dictates the colors in our animation. I'll be walking you through the colors that I thought looked nice together. But if you really want to change the colors, feel free. You want to follow along with me now during the class and then change them later after the class, that also works fine too. We're going to make this first light a vibrant pink color. To do this, we'll just go over here to this color block and then click on this white box. You can adjust the settings. You have a few different ways you can adjust the color of a light or any of these colors, really. So if you wanted to just pick a color that you like in general, you can use this color wheel at the top by clicking and dragging this circle and then moving it anywhere on this wheel that you'd like. So you can find a color that you like and then adjust the darkness over here to make it darker or lighter. Or you have the option to manually type in these numbers if you know the exact value that you want. In my case, I know the exact pink that I want, so I'm just going to type in values here. So for the hue, I'm going to set that to 0.84. The saturation will set that to 0.2, six, and then I'll leave the value set to one to make it as bright as possible. Now we have our color chosen, so we can zoom in here to see what the color looks like here inside the nebula. We won't need to adjust the power or the brightness of this light, as there will be plenty of other illumination in the scene when we finish setting out the other lights. So for now, we'll just leave this set to 1,000, which is the default value. Then lastly, we're going to name this light, so it's more obvious what it is. So we'll just double click on the word light and then hit space, put a dash, another space, and we'll name it pink. That way we know what color this light is without having to select it to see what color it is. We have our color set up, we're also going to change the position of this light. As usual, this placement isn't mandatory, but I would recommend that you follow along with me for the rest of this class. Then you can customize it after we finished. So with our light still selected, we're going to hover over this view port and then hit N to bring up this side menu. Now we can switch to the item tab found here at the top. Then this will allow us to manually type in values. We'll just go down the line here for the X, the Y, and the Z. For the X, we'll type in negative 1.5. For the Y, we'll type in 5.3, and then for the Z, we'll type in 4.2. As usual, if it seems like your viewport didn't update properly after typing in these new values, you can just mouse around in your viewport a little bit and move the view, and it should update the view. Now that this light is placed, we can duplicate it and choose a new color. So first, make sure you have the light still selected, then hit Shift and D at the same time to duplicate the light. We can just move it over here to the left for now and place it away anywhere you'd like. So I'll just place mine here. For this new light, we're going to change it to a warm orange color. So again, we'll go over here to the right side with this new light selected. We'll click on the color and then we'll change the hue to 0.05, and then the saturation we'll set to 0.63, then it enter. Again, just like the last light, we won't be adjusting the power. We will, however, change the name from light pink to light orange instead. Let's get this new orange light into position. In this side menu again, we'll change the X to negative 80.75, the Y to negative 1.7, and then the Z to two. And then we can just wiggle this view around a little bit to have it update. Alright, so we have just one more light to add. With this orange light selected, we'll hit Shift and D to make a duplicate and then just move it down here to the bottom center. And we're going to make this new light a bluish green color. So we'll go over here to the color bar, click this, set the hue to 0.42 and the saturation to 0.6. We'll leave the power as it is, and then we'll change the name to light green instead. Then lastly, we'll get it placed in the right location. We'll set the X to negative 1.5, the Y to 1.75, and the Z to negative 1.5. Then if we spin around in our view, we can now see the colors all on their correct locations. Assuming you follow along with my colors and placements, you should notice that each light has its own distinct area of influence or it's showing its specific color. But there's also these areas here in the middle where these colors kind of blend together. So we have an area here where the green blends into the orange. The orange into the pink. And then there's an area here in the center where they all kind of blend together in general. Our last task for this lesson will be to customize our viewport slightly and get our camera set up in place. First, we're going to add a second viewport to this layout workspace. This will allow us to have a view of our world, as well as a view through the camera. To add this second viewport, we're going to move our mouse up here to the very top right of this viewport. So we can see as we get to the corner here, it turns into a plus sign. Once it turns into a plus sign, we can click and drag it and move it here to the left, and eventually it'll snap here to the center. So we can see here it'll kind of click to the middle. Gets to the center, we can just let go of the click, and that'll split this view. Now let's hover over this left viewport and hit hen on our keyboard to hide the side menu. And then we're going to click on this small camera icon here in the left viewport to force our view to be looking through this camera. This is the camera that started in our scene over here on the list. In the right viewport, we're going to switch this view to the wireframe mode. This will make objects in our scene a lot more visible inside the nebula. However, you won't likely be able to see the viewport shading buttons anymore after we've split this view. To reveal these buttons again, you'll have to hover your mouse over top of this option bar here at the top and then click in your middle mouse button. So click in the mouse wheel, and that allows you to drag this bar and slide it to the left. After doing that, you'll see that now you've revealed these buttons again. So to set it to the wireframe mode, we're going to click this far left button here, which is a circle with these lines across it. This converts all the objects in the scene into just their wireframe, which is kind of like showing the skeleton of the object. Now we can see right through this cube, and we can see the position of these lights as well as the camera within the scene. Our last step is to move the camera into position. So first, select your camera over here on the right side from this list, and then we're going to adjust it here in this side menu. So first, we'll set up the location. For the X, we'll set it to negative 12.25. For the Y, we'll set that to negative 7.7, and then for the Z, we'll set that to 6.7. Can ignore the rotation values below as we'll be overriding them in just a moment. We can see in both of these viewports that our camera is kind of just pointing out into space and not really seeing anything. That's because we'll be using a different method to rotate our camera rather than just typing in the value over here. To start, let's add a new empty object. Over here in the right viewport, we're going to hit Shift and A to bring up the ad menu. Then we can go down here to empty and we'll choose plain axis here at the very top. Going to tell our camera to always face this new empty object that we just added, regardless of where we move it. First, let's rename this empty object so we don't forget what it's for. Just double click this and then we'll hit space dash camera, target. Now let's change where this empty object is located within the world. We'll do that over here on the side menu. We'll set the location to negative 0.5, the Y to 5.8, and then the Z to 0.5. All that's left is to tell our camera to always face this empty object. So first, we need to select our camera. Then we're going to go down here to this constraints tab, which is this blue icon here, which looks like two wheels with a belt around it. Now we can go up here and click Add Object Constraint. And we're going to choose the option Track two, which is in this third column here at the very bottom. Now all we need to do is tell our camera what to target. So we're just going to click on this word here where it says objects in the target options and then choose from this list empty camera target. And that's it. We'll see right away that this camera now is forced to look at this empty axis that we added earlier. Can also see this updated here in this left view. And then you'll notice just for the sake of example here, you don't need to follow along, but if I select my camera and then I move it around, the camera always points towards this point in space. Doesn't matter where I move it, it's always forced to look at that object. Same is true if I select this camera target and I move that around. Now the camera will stay in place, but it's forced to look at wherever this object moves. One final change that we need to make for a later lesson is to adjust the clip range of our camera. So first, make sure you have the camera selected. Go down here to the camera properties, which is this camera icon, and then we'll adjust the clip settings. And we're going to set the end clip to 1,000 meters instead of 100, which is the default. Will extend the clip range from just 100 meters all the way out to 1,000 meters. This ensures that we don't cut off any of our hard work later on just because the camera doesn't have the ability to display it. This means the camera can now see objects up to 1,000 meters away rather than just 100 meters away. And that's it for this lesson. Now it's time to get the remaining nebula materials created. In the next lesson, we'll create the wispy nebula material. I'll see you there. 5. Material: Wispy Nebula: In this lesson, we'll create the wispy nebula material. Let's begin. It's time to make the nebula look a bit more complex by adding a new nebula material on top of the first one. This process will be largely similar to the last material, using most of the same nodes with different values applied to them to get a new look. Let's swap over to the shading workspace if you're not there already. Find that here at the very top. Now we can set this top view port to the rendered mode by clicking this button here on the far right. And we also want to click this button here to switch into the camera view so we can see through the camera that we placed at the end of the last lesson. Alright, now it's time to make the new nebula. First, over here on the right side in this list, we're going to scroll down until we see nebula, C, foggy, and we're going to select that object. Now we can move our mouse over here on top of the top viewport, and then we'll hit Shift and D at the same time to duplicate this object. And then we're going to right click on our mouse to place it directly on top of the other one. We don't want them to be offset from each other. We want them to be directly on top of each other. And by right clicking, after duplicating, we're telling Blender to just drop this object directly on top of where the old original was. Now before we do anything else, let's go back over here to this list. And we're going to rename this new object, the one that has the 0.001 at the end of it. We'll double click on this name, change the letter to nebula B and then change it from foggy to wispy, WISPY and then head enter. Now that we've duplicated the nebula object, the next really important step is to duplicate the material as well. This is a necessary step as this new nebula object uses the exact same material as the first object. Make any changes to this second object, it's also going to change the first object as well, which is why we need to make two different versions of this material. So first, make sure you have this nebula B wispy object selected here on the right side. Now we can go down here to the bottom view port where it says nebula foggy. And we're going to click on this little two next to the name. This two next to this name tells us that this exact material is applied to two different objects in the scene. However, if we click this number, we'll see that after clicking it, the number disappears, but also the name of this material has changed and it's been made unique. Blender has added this 0.001 to the end of the name to let us know that this is a separate material from the original nebula foggy material. Now we can rename this material. So nebula wispy instead, WIS PY, and then ad enter. Now we have two different nebula objects, and we also have two different nebula materials. So affecting this one won't affect the original. As I mentioned before, this new nebula material will be very similar to the first one, just with different values for the settings. It's actually so similar that we'll just be adjusting this new duplicated material rather than starting from scratch to save ourselves some time. Let's start by removing the only node that we won't need from this material. We're going to select this noise texture here, the one directly next to the Vinoy. We can just hit delete to remove it. This new material won't need this node, so we can just get rid of it for now. We need to reconnect these nodes back to the system. First, let's drag select over the top of these three nodes and move them over to the right to close up this gap. Now we can zoom in a bit and then this time, we're going to connect from the distance on this Voronoi down here to the factor. We'll notice right now that the nebula doesn't look all that great at the moment, that's going to change in a few minutes when we have all the settings dialed. Start on the right side of this material and then work our way left. We'll start with the principled volume here on the far right. Our only change here is going to be the color. We'll be making this wispy nebula a little bit pink. This won't make the entire scene pink. I'll just add a little bit of warmth to the world and make this nebula feel a bit different from the first. To do this, we'll just select on this color block here on the top next to the word color, and we're going to set the saturation 2.24, and then hit Enter. With that small change here, we can now see we have a light pink color for this nebula. Now working our way left, we're going to work on this multiply. Going to set this value to 0.08 instead. This tebula is going to have the most interesting pattern. So we're going to increase its opacity by making the math node value a little bit higher than the first one. Now we can move to the left over here to the color ramp with this black slider selected, also set to zero down here on the bottom. Going to change the position to 0.36. This change won't make a whole lot of difference yet, but it will help see the future changes by making the contrast of the texture a little less intense. Now before we make any more adjustments, let's hide the influence of the last two nodes. So we can zoom out a bit. We're going to drag select over top of these two nodes here on the far left, and then we can hit M on our keyboard to mute these nodes, making them not affect this overall material, but not having to delete them either, because we will be using them later. Now let's adjust this Bornoi texture. As usual, we'll go through here, change the settings, and then we'll go back and explain what we did. First, we'll check on the normalized checkbox here. We'll set the scale to five, the roughness to 0.04, the lacinarty to zero, and then we'll leave the randomness set to one. The main difference between this finoidt exture and the previous nebula material is that we checked on this normalized box. This normalized checkbox forces the values below to produce a texture that outputs a black and white image clamped to zero to one. In simple terms, this checkbox typically makes the contrast of a texture significantly higher. This will work well for our wispy nebula material as we want defined bands of fog in this material, making the wisps that we're after. Now we can drag select over these nodes again if you have them deselected, we're going to hit M to unmute these nodes. We can adjust this color ramp. So our first change is going to be changing the one slider, in this case, white to a new position. We're going to set that to 0.61 and then it enter, and then we're going to set it to the zero slider or the black slider, and we'll set this position to 0.066. Now, this color ramp has increased the contrast of this noise texture to the left. Now, lastly, let's adjust this noise texture. So first, we're going to uncheck, normalize on this texture. Now we can scroll down and we'll set the scale to three, the detail to two, we'll leave the ruspiness set to one, the lacinarty set to 2.1, and then the distortion set to two. Again, we changed the normalized checkbox, but this time we unchecked it. In this case, unchecking this box has the opposite effect of the Voronoi. Unchecking this checkbox actually increases the contrast of our noise texture, making the effect stronger. And now with this final change done, we can see the overall effect of our wispy nebula. We're getting some really great wispy tendrils of fog have a lot of visual texture and interest to our image. We also learned how utilizing our past work can save us a lot of time and effort when creating similar materials. This material followed the same logic as the previous nebula, so it made sense to use that as our base. It's simply a volume node with a texture plugged into the density slider here to control its density and give it a more cloudy appearance. And then that original texture, in this case, Vornoi texture is distorted and warped into these thin and wispy lines that resemble the hot ashes tendrils of a nebula in deep space. We have just one more nebula material to create for our scene. In the next lesson, we'll finish creating the nebula materials with the cloudy nebula. See you there. 6. Material: Cloudy Nebula: In this lesson, we'll finish creating the nebula materials with the cloudy nebula. Let's begin. As with the last material, this process will be largely the same thing with different values and settings. So let's jump right in. First, swap to the shading workspace if you're not there already found here at the top. Next, make sure that this top view port is set to the rendered mode by clicking this button here on the far right. Then lastly, make sure you're seeing through the camera view by clicking on this camera button found here. It's time to make our nebula object. First, make sure you have the nebula B object selected here on the list on the right. Now in this top viewport, mouse over the viewport and then hit Shift and D at the same time to begin duplicating. Then we can right click our mouse to place it directly on top of the original. Let's rename this new object that we just created to nebula A cloudy CLOUDY. Just like the last lesson, we do need to duplicate this material. So we can go down here where we see the number two. We're going to click on that to duplicate the material, and then we'll change this name from wispy to cloudy and then enter. And now it's time to work on our new material. This nebula is going to be a bit less complex than the previous two nebula materials. So we can start off by deleting these far to left nodes. So we can just drag select over these two then hit Delete to remove them. Now we can begin adjusting these nodes from right to left. We'll start over here with the principled volume. Our first change will be to adjust this color. We can click on this color block. We'll set this hue to 0.52 and then set the saturation all the way up to one. Create this really bright blue color. Nebula material won't be quite as prevalent as the previous two. So let's give it a really bright accent color so that it stands out in the areas where you can see it. Now we can move over here to the multiply, and we're going to set this value to 0.1 and then enter. For the same reason as the brighter color, we're going to increase the density of this cloudy nebula slightly as it won't take up as much of the view, so we can allow it to be a bit more opaque. Moving left, we'll start adjusting the color ramp. So first, we'll adjust this zero slider or the black one. We're going to set the position to 0.41. And now we can select the one slider or the white. We're going to set the position to 0.56 and then enter. Due to these sliders now being so close to each other, we're significantly increasing the contrast of the texture connected to it. In this case, the Voronoi texture. This means we're going to have areas of strong density such as this, while also having areas where it's almost completely invisible like this area here in the top right corner. Works pretty well for our more cloudy appearance that we're going for. Now let's adjust the Vornoi texture over here on the far left. We'll be going through quite a few settings here. First, let's go through all the changes and then we'll go back and explain what we did. Just a word of caution, this node tends to slow down the computer for a moment as you're adjusting the settings. If you're worried about this, you can either give it a few moments between typing in each value or you can swap the top view port into the solid view while we work and make our changes and then swap back once you're done. If you wanted to switch to the solid view, you would just click this button here, this fully filled in circle. It will appear gray while you make these adjustments, and then you can swap back to see the full effect. Going to leave mine set to rendered, and then I'll just edit out anytime where it slows down. So our first change is going to be setting this to four D up here at the top. Now we'll switch it from F one to smooth F one. Then we'll change it from Euclidean to Minkowski at the bottom of this list. Now we'll set the scale to 6.48, the detail to 2.2, the roughness to 0.46, the lacinarty to 5.8, the smoothness to zero, and then finally, the exponent to 2.7. Now we can see the final effect of these changes here with these soft puffy blue clouds in space. The softness of these clouds and the blue axin color is a nice balance to the sharper and warmer look of the overall previous nebula. Before we continue, though, let's touch on some of the new settings in this forenoid texture. I won't cover any of the settings that we've already previously explained in other lessons to save ourselves some time. So the first important change is up here, and it's the smooth F one. This drop down shows us the feature outputs. Each of the options in this list changes the look of the Varanoi pattern and changes the options that you have available to you to adjust. F one is to default when you create a brand new Voronoi texture. The smooth F one setting that we chose simply adds this smoothness slider that we have down here. This allows you to control the smoothness of the edges between black and white in the texture. For our purposes, we set this to zero to make the edges as sharp as possible to give our clouds a somewhat defined edge. If you wanted softer clouds with less defined edges, you could increase this smoothness value to do so. Just below this smooth F one, have the Minkowski setting that we chose here, which is part of the distance metric settings. This drop down menu features a few different options that change the way the texture is generated. Generally, you can just pick the option that provides the best look for your material. But one important thing to note is that the Minkowski option that we chose is essentially a universal option that has all the other options baked into it. What I mean by this is that the Minkowski options allow us to adjust the exponent slider down here near the bottom. Each of these other options here in this list has a hidden version of this exponent slider that you just can't change. This means for us is that we can swap Tim and kowski and then type in a specific number to achieve the identical look of each of these other options, or we can have something in between. For an example, the exponent value of two is identical to the Euclidean option, which is the default when you create this node, and an exponent value of one is identical to the Manhattan option just below it. A value of 2.7, which is what we typed in, is somewhere between the Euclidean and the Chebyshev options, but it's closer to Euclidean. You'll notice that if you adjust this exponent value, it makes the clouds dissipate or expand. So if we type in three, we'll see that the clouds are a bit bigger. Or if we type in two, we'll see that the clouds get a lot smaller. For us, we're going to set this back to 2.7, and that's it. Our last nebula is complete. It's really interesting to see how each of these different approaches to a nebula material combine together and complement each other in not only their visual texture, but also their colors. In the next lesson, we'll add distant stars beyond our nebula. I'll see you there. 7. Adding Stars: Yeah. In this lesson, we'll add distant stars beyond our nebula. Let's begin. Let's take a quick break from creating materials and instead focus on adding some randomized stars in the distance. We'll be learning a little bit about a new and improved array modifier as we make these new stars as well. First up, we'll want to be in the layout workspace for the first part of this lesson. We can find the layout workspace here at the top left. Now let's set our left viewport to the rendered view by clicking this button here on the far right. As a reminder, if you can't see these render mode buttons, you likely need to click in your middle mouse button on this option bar here at the top and slide it to the side so that you can see these buttons. Right viewport should be set to the wireframe mode found here on the far left, just to make sure that we have a clean view. Okay. So now let's create the first star that we'll use as a base for the rest of the stars in the scene. In our right viewport, we're going to hit Shift and A to bring our ad menu up. Then we'll go to mesh, and we'll choose ICO sphere found here. Before clicking anywhere or doing anything else after making the ICO sphere, go down here to the bottom left and twirl open these options. We're going to leave the subdivisions set to two, and then we'll have the radius set to 0.0 825. Don't need very many faces on these stars as they're going to be quite small and in the distance. So the default of two subdivisions works just fine. If you're worried that your computer might struggle with this project, you might want to drop down the subdivisions to one instead to make your star a little bit more jagged. As long as you keep your stars far from the camera like I show you in this class, I highly doubt that you'll notice the difference between one or two. My example, I'm just going to leave mine set to two. If you're worried that your computer might struggle with this as we'll be making close to 1,000 of these stars, you might want to set this down to one. We've also made our sphere significantly smaller. We want these stars to be distant points of lights of different sizes. Now that we have our settings dialed in, we can zoom into the star and then right click and choose Shade Smooth. Will remove the angular appearance from the surface and smooth out the shading just in case you notice it in the closest stars. You're not going to notice any change in the right viewport as we're set to the wireframe mode, and as such, we don't really see the surface, just the skeleton. But over here in the left viewport, if we zoom in, we'll notice that the surface of the star looks relatively smooth, even though the perimeter looks angular. So, before we go any further, let's rename this object so we know what it is. We can double click over here on this name and then type in stars underscore array, ARR AY. Now it's time to add the new array modifier to this new star model. So with the stars still selected, you can go down here to the modifier panel and click on this blue wrench icon. Then we'll go to add modifier and in the search bar, we'll type in array, ARR, and then we have two different options. We want to make sure that we're choosing the array option, not array legacy. So we want this one here with this logo next to it. It's very important that you choose the array modifier without the word legacy behind it. This option will only appear if you're using Blender five point oh or newer. This is one of the main reasons that we needed to use Blender 5.0 or newer for this class. As the legacy version of this array and the previous versions of Blender, we'll be missing many of the options we're about to use. So with that said, we're going to select this first option here, array. Array modifier will allow us to add many, many copies of this original star. Then we can use the randomization settings to make the positions and scales of the stars random. These settings combined will allow us to create a huge field of random stars to fill the background of our animation. We're going to start by going through these settings from top to bottom. First, we're going to adjust the count settings found here at the top. We're going to set our account to 1,000, so 10, zero, zero, and then enter. Now if we zoom out a bit on the right viewport, we can see that we have a line of 1,000 stars in a row. This might seem like quite a lot of stars right now. These stars will be really far away from the camera and want to have a lot of them to fill the background. So we're going to need this many stars to accomplish this goal. Our next adjustment is down here on the X offset. We're going to set this to 0.75. By lowering this value, we'll move the stars closer to each other and make them a bit more dense. So if we zoom in down here and then rotate our view slightly, we'll notice that these stars are actually overlapping each other slightly on this X axis. This won't matter in just a minute once we space them out vertically as well. Now it's time to turn on the randomization settings. Is where the field of stars effect really starts to take shape. So first, we'll go over here to the right, and we're going to check on randomize, and then we'll twirl open these options by clicking this arrow next to them and then scroll down so that we can see them. We're going to start with these offset randomizations here found at the top. We'll set the X to 1.2, the Y to 35.5. Then the Z to 28 and then hit Enter. Now if we zoom out, we can see that all those stars that were lined up perfectly in line have now been scattered into this kind of rectangular shape. So each one of these little orange dots were originally lined up perfectly in line. But with these offset values, we've told them to be randomized in both the X, the Y, and the Z directions in terms of their location. So we haven't changed their size or their rotation or anything at this point. We've only moved them in location, so just their positions. This is already looking a lot better than it was before. These values that we typed in here are actually the maximum amount of movement that they can be randomized. Higher values allow the objects to extend farther past their original location, but still choose a random value between zero and whatever you typed. So in our case, we told the X value, so the X distance here this way to only have a choice 0-1 0.2. So not a whole lot of randomization, really. But we've told the Y, the left and right, this way to be quite randomized. So they can choose anywhere between not moving at all from this original line or up to 35.5 units left or right. And then, lastly, the same thing with the Z, which is the up and down, just slightly less random than the Y was. Next setting is down here, which is the scale. And we're going to set the scale to 0.75 and then hit Enter. The scale randomizer that we just set to 0.75 will tell the stars to either not change at all and remain at 100%, which is the original size that they were, or they can be as small as 25% of their original size. Values on this scale slider will allow them to get smaller and smaller. We don't want them to be too small, as we still want to be able to see the stars. So 0.75 will cap the smallest size down to 25% of their original size. This change is relatively small on such small objects as a percentage of their overall size isn't really all that different, but it does add to a bit of realism and variation for the overall stars. The last change we have for our stars is getting the position correctly for our camera view over here on the left side. So to do this, we're going to be using this side menu on the right viewport. If you don't see this side menu, you can hit N to bring it back up on your keyboard. You also want to be here in this item tab on the top. Now with our stars still selected, we can adjust this location. We'll type in for the X value negative 0.75 for the Y, 75.5 for the Z, negative 16.8. And then finally, for the rotation, we're only going to adjust the Z. We're going to set that to negative 41 and then enter. With these changes made, we can see that the star field here is perfectly centered within the view of our camera, allowing our camera to move around a little bit, but still always see stars regardless of where it looks as long as it's looking this direction. With our star objects in position, we're ready to add a glowing material to them complete with randomized colors and brightness. To do this, we're going to need to swap back to the shading workspace found here at the top. Next, make sure that your top view port is set to the rendered mode by clicking this button, and then also make sure you're set to the camera view by clicking this camera button here on the right side. Our stars still selected, we can go down here and click on the New button to create a brand new material. Let's rename this material to stars. Now we can start adding some new nodes to our material. So we can hit Shift and A to bring up the ad menu. Then go to search, type in Color Ramp. Choose color ramp from the list, place that here, and then one more time, shift and A, search, type in Voronoi VORO and choose Voronoi texture and place that to the left. We're going to connect the color on the Voronoi down here to the factor, and then we'll connect the color from the color ramp to the base color. And then for something new, we're going to add a reroute node. Before we do that, we need to twirl open the emission settings, which is what's going to give our material a glow, find those down here at the bottom. And then we're going to hold Shift on our keyboard and then hold in our right click on our mouse and drag across this line. We can see we're drawing this little white line, and then when we let go, we're going to create a new.in the middle of this line. Now we can drag from this dot that we just created down here into the color of the emission slider down here. This reroute node has done for us has allowed us to clean up the view by having both of these nodes power both the base color as well as the color for the omission with just a simple line here, rather than having to drag a line from over here down here as well. This isn't necessary. It's just a way to clean up the view for your materials and make them look a little bit nicer. You can reposition these nodes if they're out of position. And then if you'd like to move this reroute node here, you're going to have to drag select over top of this dot and then hit G on your keyboard to move it. You won't be able to move it like you normally can where you can just click and drag on a node. If you do that, it's just going to try to drag out another wire. Let's continue adding some new nodes before we make any adjustments. We're going to select the Voronoi texture here on the left side, and then we'll hit Control and T at the same time on our keyboard to create two new nodes, the texture coordinate and the mapping node. These two new nodes that we just created change how this vornoi texture is displayed on our object, in this case, the stars. Then one last node for now, we're going to hit Shift and A, bring up the search menu, and then type in Hue HE, and we're going to choose hue, saturation, and value, the second option in the list. Then we can drag this new node on top of the line between the color ramp and the reroute node that we just added, this little dot. We'll hover it over here until the line turns white and then click to place it and we'll see that Blender will automatically connect it and also slide the nodes to the right to make room for it. Now we're ready to begin customizing our nodes. We're going to start over here on the right side by adjusting the principled BSDF node. The only change that we're going to make for now is setting the emission strength down here at the bottom. To one. This will make these stars glow slightly and allow us to see the next changes a bit better. Now we can zoom out, and we're going to go all the way over here to the left side and then start adjusting the nodes from left to right. Our first adjustment is to the texture coordinate. We're going to drag from object down here to vector and replace this connection from generated. Each of the options on this texture coordinate node changes how the textures are displayed across your model. They all have their purposes, but for our case, the object mode found here displays the texture the most evenly across the stars, so we're going to use that. We don't have any changes here for this mapping. This node is created by default when we use the Control T shortcut that we use to create both of these nodes. This node often goes unused unless you have a reason to adjust it. Its primary use is to adjust the location, the rotation, or the scale of your textures. If you have no reason to adjust those things, then you usually just don't touch this node. And now for the Vornoi texture. As usual, let's make our adjustments, and then we'll talk about them. So first, we're going to adjust the normalize by checking it on, and then we'll set the scale to two. And now let's zoom. Main thing to note about this Voronoi node is that we have outputting the color channel rather than the distance channel that we used previously. This fundamentally changes how the Voronoi looks by utilizing different data to generate the image. These larger fields of color work perfectly for making our stars have random colors based on where they fall within this Voronoi texture. The softer, more cellular look of the distance version wouldn't be nearly as useful for us. Important thing to note, however, is that you won't notice any of these colors on your stars due to the color ramp that we have this Vornoi texture plugged into. This black and white color ramp is forcing all of these colors to just be shades of gray instead of the vibrant colors that you see in the example. Let's fix this now by adjusting the colors on our color ramp. Our first step is to switch the gradient type of this color ramp from linear found here on the right. Constant instead. The constant gradient type removes all blending between colors and instead makes hard breaks between them. This allows you to make a few distinct color bands in your gradient without having to worry about the blended colors between affecting the look. Now we can begin adjusting this color ramp. We'll start by adding a few more sliders to our color ramp. First, let's set it to the one slider or in this case, the white slider, and then we'll go over here to this plus button and hit this two times to add two new sliders. Now we can go back down here to the left, and we're going to set this 23, which is now the new furthest right slider, and we'll adjust this position to 0.75, and then hit enter. We have four equally spaced bands of color, even if in this case, we only have one that's white and then three that are black. But we'll be adjusting that soon. Our last step is to adjust that color of each of these sliders to determine the color of our stars. These colors could be anything that you'd like. But if you're looking for a slightly more realistic result, I'd follow along with the colors that I show you here. So we're going to start with slider three. In this case, the far right slider. You can click on this color band, and we'll set the hue to 0.85 and the saturation 20.15. Which you would create a nice sort of pinky purple color. Now we can go down to slider two. Set the hue to 0.52, the saturation 2.78, and then set the value all the way up to one, which gives us a really bright blue color. Next, slider one, click on the color bar, set the hue to 0.12, the saturation 20.66. Then again, the value all the way up to one. Bright yellow color, which is similar to our own sun. Then lastly, slider zero. Click on the color bar, Hue 20.01, saturation 20.77, and then the value all the way up to one, which gives us a really bright, fiery orange color. Now we can see that if we zoom into our stars here in the scene, that each of these stars has one of these four colors. See some red, some yellow, some blue. There's a few pink around here. But you may also notice that some of these stars show more than one of these colors. So in this case, here, we have a yellow star that also has red on it. This is a byproduct of the stars existing on the border of the colors in three D space. So this star exists right on the border between the yellow block here and then the red block here. This really won't be noticeable in the final product, so I wouldn't worry about these somewhat rare situations. Not too many of these stars that share two colors, so the predominantly each star is mostly just one color. At the distance that we're seeing them, these stars that have two different colors will simply appear as a mixture of these two colors, meaning that this is going to be kind of a yellowy orange rather than a pure yellow or a pure orange. It'll be a mixture of the two. And that's completely fine. It just adds a little bit more randomization to the colors of our stars. We have one last adjustment before we add some new nodes. We'll be adjusting the saturation found over here on this last node in the system on the right side. We're going to set this saturation to 0.65, and then enter, which is just going to desaturate the colors that we set up here in the color ramp a little bit to make them a bit less vibrant and more realistic overall. This is a choice for the sake of realism, but if you prefer a more vibrant or colorful render, feel free to leave this saturation value closer to one or even set all the way back to one, if you'd like to have these colors unadjusted. In my case, I'm going to set it back down to 0.65 to mute these colors just a little bit. Now we're ready to adjust the brightness of our stars and give them a bit of randomness, as well. Our first step is to duplicate this color ramp that we just customized. So we can zoom out a bit, then we can select it, hit Shift and to duplicate it, and we're just going to move it down here, just below it. Next, we'll drag from the color socket here down to the factor on the bottom of this new color ramp. So we're just having the same thing put into both of these sockets. And then finally, we'll drag from the color on this new color ramp to the strength in the omission. We've already set up this colorful gradient, so we might as well just use it to control the brightness as well. Our next step is to change this color ramp into shades of gray rather than the colors that they show. We'll start with the zero slider, in this case, the orange. So we're just going to click on this color bar here at the bottom, set the saturation down to zero, the hue to zero, and then the value 0.2, five, and then hit Enter. Now we can hover our mouse over this gray bar at the bottom. Hit Control and C to copy this color. Then we're going to go to slider one, which is yellow, hover over the yellow bar at the bottom, and hit Control and V to paste this gray color into this one as well. Now we can click on this gray bar, and then we're just going to change the value to 0.5. Then hit Enter. This saves us a little bit of work of having to adjust the hue and saturation every time. Next, we'll go to slider two, hit Control and V while hovering over this blue bar at the bottom, to paste the original dark color in there. Click on this color bar, and then set the value to 0.75, hit Enter. And then lastly, we'll set it to slider one, hover over the pink bar at the bottom, Control V to paste it. Click on this bar and then set the value to one, making it white. Now if we zoom into our stars, we'll notice that they each have varying brightness depending on what color they are. So if we zoom out here, any star that is orange is going to have a darker brightness, so it's just going to be dimmer in general, and any star that's pink is going to have maximum brightness. The yellow and the blue stars will exist somewhere between. Our last step is to increase the contrast of this new black and white gradient that we created e to increase the separation between these values a little bit more. So we'll hit Shift and A on the bottom. Go to search and then type in brightness and then choose brightness contrast. We're going to place this on this line here to the right of this color ramp. Now if we zoom in here, we're going to adjust the brightness and set it to nine, making them a lot brighter and then adjusting the contrast to 15 to make the contrast between these shades of gray here significantly higher. May notice now after all these changes that our stars appear to be white again, rather than having the colors that we determined before. While they do appear white in the V port, they are still casting light of their unique colors. So even though they seem to be white here, the light they're emitting is actually one of these four colors. This will become significantly more apparent later in the class when we add glare and lens flares to our render. The lens flares will take on the color of the star, while the small.in the middle will appear mainly can think of this almost like the way that a neon sign appears to have white tubes, while the light cast from it onto the wall is still the correct color, such as pink or yellow or blue. If you're a Star Wars fan, this is also how light sabers are shown to an extent, as well. The light saber itself will be mostly white, and then the glow surrounding the light saber will be green or red. And that's it for our stars. We're ready to carry on now to the black hole. And the next lesson, we'll explore the black hole model with a brief explanation before importing it into our scene. I'll see you there. 8. Black Hole Model Exploration: In this lesson, we'll be importing the Black Hole model into our scene and explaining a little bit about how it works. Well, we won't be building this black hole model from scratch in this class. I did want to give you a quick look at the logic behind how it was created. Our first step is to import the model from the class assets. To begin with, let's head over to the layout workspace. We can find that here, the top left. Now we can set the left view port to the rendered mode here and we'll set the right view port to the solid view with this button here. It's time to actually import the Black Hole model. To do this, we're going to go over here to the top left and click on File, now go down to append, navigate to the location where you saved all of our class assets in the beginning of this class. Then we're going to choose Black Hole, underscore, append. Now we can either click the append button or we can simply double click on this file. Then we'll go to the object folder found here. Then lastly, we're going to drag select over both of these objects, the Black Hole and the Black Hole accretion disk. And then we'll finally click this append button down here at the bottom right. Now we can zoom in on this object in either of these viewports. And we'll notice that it looks a little bit odd right now, and that's because we need to set up some constraints for it to look correct. So let's start by just deselecting this, and then we'll find it in the list over here and make sure we have just the black hole selected first. Now we can go down here to the constraints menu, which is this blue icon with the two wheels and the belt around it. And this object already has the track to constraint. It. However, it doesn't know what to look at. So all we need to do is click on this dark box next to target, and then from this list, we're going to choose camera. This is going to force the black hole to always face the camera regardless of where we move the camera. This is the exact same constraint that we used for the camera to point at the empty camera target object in a previous lesson. We're just using it for a different purpose here. Now we can select the black hole accretion disk, which is the object just below it. And again, we'll see that it already has the constraint applied. We just need to choose the object. We'll click on an object here and then choose camera again. One thing to note about this accretion object that you're seeing here is that I intentionally rotated the model at a slight angle simply to give it a slightly more interesting look. Still faces the camera directly regardless of the slight artistic tilt that I gave it. This just looks a little bit more interesting, having it rotated at a slight angle rather than having it perfectly horizontal. Before we end this short lesson, let's go over this model quickly so we understand what each of these pieces are for. In your right viewport, zoom into the model so you can get a better look at it. You can also hide this side menu here by hitting N on your keyboard to remove it. So first up, we'll notice that this black hole has a sphere here in the center of it. You can see it on the back side as well. The sphere at the center of this object is the black hole of the black hole. This is a visual representation of the singularity or the center of the black hole where all the light and matter are being pulled into. This large sort of half doughnut shape that you're seeing surrounding the sphere in the middle is a representation of light and space warping around this singularity in the middle. The warping effect of this large funnel area will become much more obvious once we apply our materials to it in the next lesson. Both the sphere and this funnel shape around it were attached together just to make the process a little bit more easy facing them towards the camera. The second object is here, and that's the accretion disc. Ring like object is a visual representation of the superheated matter being drawn and compressed into the center of the black hole. As matter is accumulated and pulled towards the center of this black hole, it's compressed and continues to heat up until it glows brightly and then eventually is swallowed up by the center of the black hole when it eventually reaches the center. We'll be adding a glowing, banded, cloudy ring material to this object in a later lesson. This secretion disc also isn't typically depicted as a perfectly circular ring around the black hole, and it often flares out on the sides like this, showing how far it reaches, and that's it for this short lesson. With our black hole model set up, we're ready to move. In the next lesson, we'll create the first two black hole materials. I'll see you there. 9. Material: Black Hole (Part 1): Yeah. In this lesson, we'll create the first two Black Hole materials. Let's begin. With the Black Hole model imported into our scene, we're ready to apply materials to it. Let's head over to the shading workspace to begin with. First, make sure you have this top view port set to the rendered mode by clicking this button here on the far right. You also want to make sure that you're looking through the camera view by clicking on this camera button here. Now we need to select the black hole object in either the viewport or the outliner list at the top right. So if you're using the list, we can scroll all the way up to the top, and then we're going to choose Black Hole, not the Black Hole accretion disk. We're going to be doing that in a different lesson. So with just the black hole selected, we can now go down here and click on new to add a new material. Before we make any adjustments to this material, we're going to go over here to where it says slot one. Click on this drop down menu, and then we can click this small plus button here to add a new slot to this material. With this new second slot selected, we can click on the new button to add a new material into this slot two. We're going to start with the interior black hole material, which we're going to build in slot two. But first, we need to tell Blender which part of the model that the slot two material is applied to. To do this, we're going to go up to this top viewport, then hit Tab to enter our edit mode, then hit three on your keyboard, to enter the face mode. Next, we're just going to drag select off the side of this model without having anything selected just to make sure we don't have any faces we don't want selected. Now we're going to hover our mouse over the sphere here in the very center, and we're going to hit L on our keyboard to select all linked faces. In our case, it selects the entire sphere because it's all one linked mesh. Now with the sphere still selected, we're going to go down here towards a lot two, twirl it open, and then click a sign. Won't notice any changes just yet, but we've applied this slot two material to the sphere in the middle. Now we can go back up to this top view port and we can hit tab text at our edit mode. Our first step is to rename the material. We'll name it black hole, dash, interior. Our goal for the center of the black hole is to make a pure black sphere with a thin glowing line around the border of the edge. This will simulate the last glimpse of light that we see from the matter being pulled into the center just before it disappears from existence. Our first step is to set the color to pure black. You can do that down here on this principled BSDF just by clicking on this color bar and then setting the value all the way down to zero. Center of a black hole has such high gravity that not even light can escape it. So we're going to make it pure black to represent that. We'll also need to remove all reflections from the surface of the sphere. To do this, we're going to set the roughness all the way up to one and the IOR just below it, all the way down to one. This orb at the center isn't a true surface as far as our render is concerned. It's simply the absence of light. So we don't want the surface of the orb to appear reflective at all. You may notice that the orb doesn't look completely black, but that's simply because there's a cloudy nebula between us and the black hole overlapping our view of it. This won't be an issue for our final render. All right. So now we need to add that thin glowing ring around the edge of the sphere that I mentioned earlier. We're going to need two new nodes for this effect. So first, we're going to zoom out, so we can make a bit of room over here on the left. Next, you'll want to twirl open the emission settings down here. This is how we're going to make it glow. Now we're going to hit Shift and A, go to search, and then search for color ramp, COLOR, and then choose color ramp, place that here to the left. Then one more node, shift and A, search. And this time we're looking for layer weight, LAYER, then choose layer weight and place that here to the left. We're going to start by connecting these nodes together. So first, we'll connect from the Fneel this top bubble here down to the factor and then from the color here over here to the color on the emission. We can also zoom in here on our black hole at the center to get a better look. Let's start by changing the emission strength found here on the right side. So we'll set this strength to just 0.5. We want this thin ring to glow, but we don't want it to compete with the other glowing elements that we add later. So a value of 0.5 works just fine. We can adjust this layer weight node here on the left. This node allows us to isolate the faces that angle away from the camera in two different ways. We'll be using the Fornell mode, but facing mode does a similar thing with a slightly different look. The reason this node is useful is it allows us to easily target just the edge of the sphere while leaving the middle relatively untouched. This will make creating the ring around the center really easy. We can see an example of this effect here by how much brighter the edge of the sphere is than the center. So the center is a dark gray, whereas the edge is a pretty bright white. Let's change this blend value down here first. So we're going to set blend to 0.94 and then enter. Blend value changes how far into the center of the object, the white part of the texture reaches. We can see now that while the edge is slightly brighter than the center, it's basically all just white. This is due to the really high blend value that we used. A lower blend value would have an opposite effect, making the center of this orb really dark and leaving the white just along the edges. We're going to be using this color ramp node down here to further limit the reach of these colors. Right now we just want to make sure that most of this orb is even though this whole sphere looks white right now, Blender still knows that the white originated from the edges and moves inward. So we're going to be able to use that data in just a moment to create the ring around just the edge. Now let's go down here and edit this color ramp. Our first step is to add one more slider to our gradient. So first, we're going to select slider one by clicking this over until it says one here, and then we can hit the plus to add a new slider here in the center. Let's adjust the position of the sliders and then we'll go back and adjust the colors. We're going to be moving these sliders slightly out of order to make sure that they don't cross over each other and make things more confusing than they need to be. So first, we're going to set slider one, which we have currently selected to position 0.68 at Enter. Then we'll go to slider zero, and we'll set this position to 0.66. And then, lastly, we'll go to slider two and set this position to 0.7. The position of these sliders is what determines where the ring will exist on this sphere. Now, all we need to do is adjust the colors to complete the look of the ring. We're going to set slider two to pure black just by pulling this all the way down or setting the value to zero. We're going to leave slider zero, also set the black, and then slider one, we're going to make a light orange color. So we'll set the hue to 0.09, the saturation to 0.45 and the value up to one. With these last changes made, we can now see this bright orange ring that hovers just along the edges of the sphere. As I mentioned before, this is our last glimpse of light just before all this matter eventually disappears from what we know is existence into the center of this black hole. We're going to be seeing a lot more of this light orange color that we just use down here, as this will be the primary color scheme for the black hole to help differentiate it from the nebulae and the stars nearby. And that's it for the interior of the black hole. Now we're ready to swap over to slot one. We can begin creating the exterior material. To do this, we'll just go over here to where it says slot two, and instead, we're going to select this top one, which is currently just called material, and that'll take us over to slot one. First up, we're going to rename this material. We'll call this black holes exterior. We won't need to apply this material in slot one to the rest of the model. As Blender already has done that for us when we first applied the material. All right, so now we're ready to begin. This material is going to be a little bit more complicated than the previous material. There are quite a few moving parts that go into this warping space effect that we want. We're going to start by adjusting the principled BSDF node. So first up, we're going to make sure that this color is set to pure white. We can do that by dragging this slider here to the top or setting the value to one. Next, we'll set this roughness all the way down to zero. The IOR, we're going to set to 1.1. Now moving down this list, we can twirl open transmission. We'll set that all the way up to one. Now we can twirl open coat. And we'll set the weight to one, the roughness to 0.085. And then, lastly, we're just going to twirl open the emission settings for now. We won't be adjusting anything just yet. Okay, so let's run through some of these changes that we just made so we understand why we did them. First up the base color. We changed this color to pure white so that the transparent effect that we added with the transmission letter is completely see through and not tinted by any color. We'll discuss the transmission slater in just a moment. The roughness letter down here, we set to zero. Slider controls how blurry the reflections when your objects surface are, but it also controls how blurry the transparent effect is, as well. Higher values would make the see through effect appear like frosted glass. So we set Rs to zero to prevent any blur. Next, we have the IOR blow the roughness. This is another dual use slider when your materials see through. This slider controls how reflective your material surface is, but it also controls how distorted the see through effect is. The way we've constructed this outer portion of the black hole can cause a lot of distortion. So a smaller value limits this distortion slightly and makes it more aesthetically pleasing. Further down the list, we have the transmission setting found here. This slider is used to make our model transparent. By setting it to one, we've told Blender to allow all light to pass through the object so that we can see right through it. You may have noticed, however, that we don't actually see the stars on the other side of the black hole, though. This is because we're choosing not to use the ray tracing setting for this render. Ray tracing is a setting that we can enable in our render settings. This makes transmission more accurate, but it also affects reflections. Its effect on reflections, however, makes the black hole actually look a lot worse, in my opinion. We'll be using a different method to allow the stars beyond to show through in this clear area. The last setting to discuss before we add some new nodes is the coat settings. You can find those down here at the very bottom below transmission. You can think of these settings as a layer of clear coat on the surface of your model. Similar to how a car has a colored paint under a layer of clear glossy paint on top of it. If you've been using Blender for a few years, you probably already know that this setting used to be called clear Cat and not just coat. We're using this coat setting to add some colorful reflections around the interior funnel shape of this large disc surrounding the center of the black hole. If we zoom out a bit here, you can see that we have these colorful pink and orange and green reflections circling the center of this black hole. While these reflections aren't scientifically accurate, we aren't really using them as reflections, per se, and I view them more as light of a star being sucked into the center of this black hole. It's an artistic touch that makes the visuals a bit more appealing without being too distracting. Ultimately, this is a piece of art rather than a scientific simulation. So sometimes we do things just because they look cool. Basic settings explained, let's start finalizing the alternative see through effect that I mentioned earlier. We're going to be using the Alpha setting to achieve this effect. The Alpha slider is similar to the transmission, but it does differ from it in one key way. While transmission does allow us to see through an object, it also distorts the view through that object, similar to glass or water. Alpha setting is different from transmission, however, as it lets us see through the model by making it completely invisible. It doesn't distort the view through the object. It simply makes it completely invisible as if it wasn't even there. We'll be using a few different nodes to make the black hole slightly see through near the middle and then completely see through at the edges. But first, we're going to need a few new nodes. So let's add those now. So we'll start by adding a color ramp, by adding Shift and A, Search, color ramp, place that here to the left. Then again, shift and A, search. We'll type in gradient GRA D and choose gradient texture. Place that here to the left. And then one more shift and A, search. This time, we'll type value VL and choose value from the top. Now select this gradient texture and hit Control T on your keyboard to automatically create the texture coordinate and the mapping node. Now we can move this value node from underneath these nodes and plug this value into the scale down here at the bottom. Lastly, we'll connect the color on the gradient texture down here to the factor, and then the color from the color ramp to the Alpha over here on the principled BSDF near the top. All right. So now we're going to start adjusting these nodes in somewhat of a scattered order to better show their effects as we work. We're going to start with this value node over here on the left side. We're going to do is set this value 0-1 0.3 and then hit enter. This change won't make a whole lot of sense at the moment, but all this value node is doing is changing the overall size of this gradient texture to the right. Technically, you don't really need this value node to make the scale change. However, it does simplify things by making the scale a single number to adjust rather than having to adjust the X, the Y, and the Z scale independently. So by plugging this value in here and then typing in 1.3, connecting it to the scale, we're just saying that the X, the Y, and the Z are all using this exact same number. Now let's move over here to the gradient texture. Going to switch this from linear to spherical instead. This is probably the most important part of this small node system that we just created. This node creates a black and white gradient across the model. By switching it to spherical, though, we've changed the gradient from a left right gradient instead to a white circle on a black background. We can get a quick glimpse of what this actually looks like by connecting this color socket here over here on the surface socket of the material output, bypassing the other two nodes. So now if we zoom, see that we have a black background here and then a white spot here on the bottom right. Currently, this white circle is being distorted and pushed down to the bottom right side of this model. Our goal is to center this circular gradient in the middle of the model so that we can use it to control the Alpha of the material. We'll leave this gradient texture connected directly to the material output for now. Now let's move over to our mapping node so that we can center this circle more appropriately. So for the X location, we're going to type in negative 0.65, then enter, and then for the Y, we'll also do the same thing, negative 0.65 and then it enter. Mapping node simply allows us to slide around any texture it's connected to in any of these three directions. In our case, we moved it to the left and we moved it up. Now that we've moved this circular gradient to the center of the black hole, we can begin adjusting the black and white areas using the color ramp node over here to the right. First, let's make sure that we can actually see the effect of this color ramp by connecting the color socket on the color. Into the surface socket over here instead. Now we can zoom back into this color ramp and begin adjusting it. First, we're going to change the type of gradient that we're using. By default, it's using a linear gradient. We're going to instead change it to the B spline option below that. The B spline gradient type is generally much smoother and softer than the default linear gradient type. It also has the side effect of making sure that neither the black nor the white slider on the far right or far left actually reach pure black or pure white. You can see that here on this gradient. How the edge of this, it says it's a black slider here on the left side, but it's actually just kind of a medium to dark gray. Then the same thing over here on the right side, it's not actually pure. Some situations, this side effect of not reaching pure black or pure white is kind of an annoyance. But in our specific case, this actually helps by making sure that the white part of the gradient is actually a very light gray. The white parts of the alpha tell Blender to make sure that these areas are completely visible, while the black parts tell it to be completely invisible. A very light gray will make it very, very slightly see through. To show stars through the entirety of the material at least slightly. Now let's add one more slider to this gradient. Then we can change the position of the handles before we recolor them. First, we're going to select slider one here on the far right and then we can click the plus button to add a new slider here in the middle. Now we can reposition the sliders. First, we'll start with slider zero. We're going to set the position to 0.063. We'll change slider one to position 0.175, and then slider two, we'll change the position to 0.41. Then the last step is to adjust the colors used for each of these sliders. Slider zero on the far left, we can leave pure black. Slider one, we're also going to set to pure black just by pulling this value all the way down to zero. You'll notice that even though we made these far left sliders both black, there is still a soft gray transition between the two. If we look at this gradient on the black hole model, we'll see that there's a soft transition that creates a blurred edge along the circular gradient, while still leaving the far edge all the way here at the edge of the model, pure black. Center of our gradient appears almost pure white. However, it's actually a very, very light gray, which means that we will let a little bit of the star light through it. And our last step is to connect this principled PSDF back into the surface socket so we can see the full effect of these changes. And now with our Alpha adjustments done, we can now see our stars through the edges of the black hole. A relatively subtle effect, but the stars near the very edge of the black hole are slightly more visible than the stars near the center. The distortion effect of this overall material will become a lot more apparent later on when we add the Milky Way background material as it will have more detail to bend and warp along its surfaces. In the next lesson, we'll finalize the black hole materials by adding new glow effects on the funnel and the accretion disc objects. I'll see you there. 10. Material: Black Hole (Part 2): In this lesson, we'll finalize the black hole materials by adding new glow effects on the funnel and the accretion disk. We've got a good bit of work ahead of us, so let's jump right in. First, make sure that you're in the shading workspace found here at the top. Next, set the top view port to the rendered mode using this button on the far right. Then lastly, make sure that you're in the camera view over here on the right side. Select the black hole object if it's not already selected. We'll be working on the accretion disc next, but for now, make sure it's just the black hole selected. And then also double check to make sure that you're set to slot one so that we're working on the black hole exterior material. Now we're ready to start adding some new nodes to the material. Let's start by making some room for them. So first, we'll just drag select over every node here on the left side, can zoom out a bit and then move them up to make room below. Now we'll be copying these nodes that we already have selected as it's going to save us a lot of work. So with all of these nodes still selected on the left, we can hit Shift and D and then move them down here to make a duplicate of all of place these over a little bit to the left. Let's add one more node before we start customizing anything. So we can click Shift and A, search, and then we'll type in mix MX, space C, and we'll choose mix color. We can place that here between these nodes. Now let's zoom in. And we're going to drag from the color on the color ramp to the factor on this mix node, and then we'll drag from result to the color over here on the emission. Start by editing these nodes from right to left. We're going to start with the emission strength. Let's set the emission strength up to 75, so 75 and then hed enter. This might seem like a really high value. Given the last time that we used this setting, we set it to 0.5, but the glow effect that we're about to add needs to be a fair bit more impactful than the small glowing ring that we added last time. Ultimate impact of this emission strength won't be nearly this bright because we'll be heavily limiting it with textures and gradients. But this gives us a good place to start. Now let's zoom into this mixed node to the left. We're going to click on this color bar next to A, and we're going to set this to pure black by setting the value down to zero. All the nodes that we duplicated above have been plugged into this factor socket here on this new mixed color node. This factor socket serves as a way to mask or limit the blending of the two different colors or textures that we have plugged into A or B. We won't be using this A socket for this system. So we're going to set it to black, telling the Blender to remove the glow from these areas. Black emission is the same as no emission as far as Blender is concerned. So these areas just won't glow at all. Now let's adjust this color ramp directly to the left. Let's start with slider two. And we're going to set slider two to a position of 0.8. Now we can move to slide one. We'll change that position to 0.76. And then, lastly, slider zero. We'll set this position to point. Six, eight. By adjusting these sliders on this color ramp, the circle gradient has been limited to the center part of the black hole. However, we'll also notice that the white part of the gradient doesn't extend all the way to the center and it stops short. We're going to remedy this issue by using the UV mode over here on the texture coordinate. If we zoom in here, we can drag from UV to vector instead and replace this connection. Or for this connection to work, your model does need to be unwrapped already. Due to this black hole being imported already completely finished, I've already unwrapped this for you. It's really just a simple projection from this view, though. If you're unfamiliar with unwrapping, I'll leave you to explore that on your own as it's beyond the scope of this lesson. Okay, so at this point, we've told Blender where we want to see the glowing effect. Haven't made it anything more interesting than just this white circle. So let's fix that now. We are going to need some new nodes to accomplish this effect, though. So first, let's zoom out so we can see this entire section down here below. Now we can add all of our new nodes and link them up. Then we'll go through each one of them one by one, explain what they do and how to customize them. So first, we'll shift and A and add a color ramp. We've seen this before, so COLOR, space R, choose color ramp. Next, shift and A, search, we'll choose layer weight. Place that to the left. Shift and A, search noise texture. Place that to the left. Let's zoom into this noise texture. We can click on here, and then hit Control and T to create the mapping and texture coordinate nodes. Now let's connect all these nodes together. First, we'll connect from the color on the noise texture to the normal on the layer weight, then we'll connect from Fornell to the factor on the bottom of the color ramp. And then finally, connect from the color on the color ramp to the B socket here at the bottom of this mixed color. It's time to customize these nodes to make the globe effect a lot more interesting. We'll start with this color ramp. First, we need to add another slider so we can select the first slider, number one, hit the plus button to add a new one. And now let's go to slider zero. We're going to leave the position where it's at, but we are going to change this to pure white by setting the value all the way up to one. Now we'll go to slider one. We'll set this position to 0.04 for the color, and we're going to use that same light orange color we saw before. Set the hue to 0.09, saturation to 0.4, five, and then the value to one. Then lastly, we'll set the two slider to a position of 0.78, and we'll change the color to pure black, setting the value all the way down to zero. These color ramp settings give the glow a bright white center where it's the hottest, and then it cools to a warm orange near the edges. The following effects are going to help accentuate the orange color a bit more, so it's not quite so pale. So for this layer weight, we're going to set the blend to 0.94 again, and we'll see right away that this made a pretty big difference. So we can zoom in here to see a bit more. It higher blend value on the layer wig node will force the glow to remain closer to the inside of the funnel shape, making the glow a bit less prevalent, but also making it a lot more visually interesting. Also going to increase the amount of orange in the glow due to how it stretches the gradient and causes the orange to extend further out from the center. Now let's adjust this noise texture. You may have noticed that we plug this noise texture into the normal socket for the layer weight. This is because just like the nebula, we're going to be using this noise texture to distort and warp the color ramp gradient that's being ran through this layer weight. This is how we're going to achieve a cloudy look for this glow. So first, we're going to switch this noise texture from three D to four D to add this new W slider. Now we'll set the scale to 8.7 the detail to 15. The roughness to 0.65. We'll leave the lacinarty at two and we'll set the distortion to 0.2. The main setting of note for this noise texture was us switching it to a four D rather than a three D noise texture. This has no effect on the still image, but it does give us the W slider to animate later on when we start animating the elements in our scene. And that's it for the black hole exterior. We're ready to finish the last part of the black hole materials by tackling the accretion disk. First, we need to select the black hole accretion disc object from here on the right side. Next, we'll click the new button to create a new material and then rename the material Black hole accretion disk. And then it enter. Let's start by adjusting some of the settings over here on the principled PSDF note. First, we'll adjust the base color. Again, we'll use the same orange, 0.09 for the hue, 0.45 for the saturation, and then the value set to one. Next, we'll set the roughness all the way up to one. Now we can scroll down here to the emissions settings. And then to avoid having to type this orange color in again, we can simply hover over this color, hit Control and see to copy. And then mouse over the color for the omission and hit Control and V to paste it. Now we'll set the strength to ten. Alright, so now we have a basic glowing disc surrounding the black hole. So now we can use a custom image texture to make it look even more interesting. First, let's start by adding a few nodes, and then I'll explain what our goal is. Let's zoom out a little bit so we can see more of this area. So let's start with shift and A, search, type and mix, color. That here to the right, then shift and A, search, type in image IMAG, choose image texture. Place that here. Now, select the image texture node that we just placed, hit Control and T to make the mapping and texture coordinate nodes. Again, shift and A, search, type in value, and then place that here to the bottom. Then two more nodes. Shift and a search color ramp. Place that below the image texture, and then one more shift and a search. We'll search for a layer weight. Click that and then place it here to the left. Now let's go through and attach all these nodes together. So first, the value gets attached to the scale just like usual. The image texture gets attached from the color socket to the A socket on this mixed color. Moving down, we'll attach the layer weight facing. So the bottom option this time to the factor on the color ramp. Then the color from the color ramp to the B socket, and then finally, the result from the mixed color to the Alpha socket here on the principled BSDF. With everything hooked up, let's get some of these initial settings out of the way. First, the value over here on the left side, we're going to set that to 1.5. Then moving to the mapping directly next to it, we're going to switch this from type point to texture instead and then set the Y location to negative 0.5. The texture type for the mapping node simply changes the method of manipulating the image. Most times when using a texture image, it's easier to manipulate when using the texture mode for this node. One of the primary differences when switching to the texture type is that the scale having a higher value makes the texture image larger, whereas having it set to the point type, having a larger scale actually makes the image smaller. So for this reason, we're going to set this to the texture type because we'll be using an image texture. Now we're ready to attach the custom image texture that I created for the accretion disc. To do this, we'll just click on this open button here on the image texture node. Then navigate to your class assets, go into the Textures folder, and then choose the accretion disc mask dot JPG, and then click Open Image. This image that I created for you is pretty simple. It's simply a seamless texture of cloudy looking horizontal stripes. A seamless texture means that it repeats infinitely both horizontally and vertically without a noticeable seam between the image repeating. This is a very, very common technique in three D art. We can zoom in here on the accretion disc to see this image applied to the disk. These stripes help mimic the different densities and concentrations of matter being sucked into the center of the black hole as it's superheated and falls inward. You'll also notice after zooming in on the viewport, that we can see that the material, which was once just a purely opaque disk is now made up of a much more interesting bands of glowing dust. The reason we're seeing this slight variation in the transparency of the disc is because we've plugged all these images into this Alpha slot. Remember from the previous lesson that the Alpha channel controls the visibility of the material by using a black and white image. In the previous example, we used a pretty simple gradient to adjust the visibility. This time, we're just using a slightly more interesting black and white image to achieve a more interesting effect. Let's adjust the remaining nodes now. First, we're going to go down here to this mixed color, and we're going to switch it from the mix mode to this screen mode instead, and then we're going to set the factor from five up to 0.75 instead. The mixed color node allows us to mix two different images into one complete image. The screen mode that we just switched to will overlay only the white parts of the image in socket B, making the image overall brighter. Then this factor slider gives us more opacity to either the A or the B image. By setting it to 0.75, we've made the image in the B socket slightly more impactful than the A socket. So we're weighting it slightly heavier to this image rather than this image. Now let's zoom out a little bit so we can see more of the accretion disk. You'll notice that the accretion disc has visible bands up here on the upper side, but the lower half appears to be more like a solid color. This is actually an intended effect, and we're going to be adjusting its influence right now. The reason we want the bottom half of this disc to be more of a solid color is because we want the area to look like the glowing matter is visually overlapping, and as such, appear a bit more opaque. This will make the disc significantly brighter in this area, which is made even more impactful by the fact that it's overlapping the pure black part of the black hole. Now let's zoom out so we can see the bottom two nodes. We're going to be using these two remaining nodes to make this effect a bit sharper and less soft. First, we'll adjust the layer weight note, and we're going to set the blend to 0.68. We're using the facing mode this time instead of the Fneel as it accomplishes a similar goal of highlighting the faces turned away from the camera view, while being a bit sharper and less blurry than the Fneel mode. Ti blend slider simply pushes the effect forward or backward like before, and allows us to have some fine tuned placement of where the white versus the black part of the texture. Is what's determining where this hard edge is, where it goes from showing the lines to being more opaque. The last adjustment is fine tuning the gradient responsible for defining this brighter and more opaque area. So in this color ramp, we're going to switch from the linear mode to the B spline mode again. We've used this mode before, but as a refresher, this is simply a softer and more subtle gradient pattern for the color ramp. This effect is going to be pretty sharp. So setting it to B spline will help blend the edges of the gradient a little bit better. Select the first slider down here and then hit the plus button to add a new slider in the middle. Now select slider zero, set the position to 0.28. We can leave this color set to black. Select slider one, set the position to 0.59. We'll also set this slider to black. Then lastly, slider two, we'll set that position to 0.93. Now with these adjustments made, we can see a sharp break between the part of the disc that angles towards the camera and then the part of the disc that angles away. This brighter segment here at the bottom of the disc will be a lot more impactful later on when we add a glowing effect to the render. Lastly, we need to change a setting in the material properties tab. Find that over here on the right side by clicking this tab that looks like a red circle with a checkerboard pattern on top. You might have noticed by now that the edge of the secretion disc material looks kind of grainy. This is due to the way that Blender is interpreting the Alpha channel for the material. This is what gives us the striped cloud look with the transparent areas in between. We only need to make one change for this material to fix this. So over here on the right side, we're going to scroll down to the very bottom. Then underneath the settings area, if we go down further, we'll see render method. We're going to switch it from diered to blended instead, and we'll notice right away that the edges of our accretion disc are a lot smoother and a lot less grainy. This is simply because Blender is now interpreting this Alpha channel in a different way, and in our case, it's giving us a much better result. This looks a lot more like the image that we input, and that's it. That's the final material for our black hole. We're ready to move on to the larger environment now. And the next lesson, we'll be adding a milky way material to the sky. I'll see you there. 11. Material: Milky Way: Yeah. In this lesson, we'll add a Milky Way material to the sky. Let's begin. It might seem like we already have plenty of stars in the background of our render, but space is huge and there's never enough stars. Joking aside, if you've ever seen deep space photography from either the Hubble Space Telescope or the James Webb Space Telescope, you'll know that there are seemingly infinite spots of light showing the countless stars in our universe. We're aiming to capture just a fraction of this effect with a Milky Way material applied to the world environment of our scene. To start this process, we'll need to be in the shading workspace if you're not there already. You can find that here on the shading tab. We also need to set our top view port to the rendered mode, clicking this button here on the far right. Then lastly, make sure you're set to your camera view by making sure that you click on this camera here so that we see a full view of our scene. Our goal for this lesson is to add a material to the world environment. This is different than applying a material to an object, as there isn't really an object to select. We're essentially applying a material to the sky of the scene, which isn't represented by a selectable object. Affect this material, we'll need to switch to the world shader type found down here with this drop down. Currently, it's set to object. We're going to switch it instead to world. This world shader is actually something we adjusted earlier in this class. We'll notice that if we zoom in down here, this background node has its color set to black. We did this a few lessons ago on World tab to eliminate the ambient light in the scene. That change was made over here by changing this color here to black. These settings here are essentially the same settings as we see here at the left. Now our goal is to plug in an image of the Milky Way into this color socket to make the background a lot more interest. Luckily for us, we have an easy shortcut to add this image. First, make sure you have the background node selected here on the left side, just by clicking on it. Then we'll hit Control and Now if we zoom out, we'll see that Blender has made three new nodes for us. It's made the texture coordinate node and the mapping node that we typically see, but it's also added an environment texture here. You may have also noticed that our scene has turned entirely pink, and that's because this environment texture doesn't have an image plugged into it. So this is Blender warning us that we have an empty image texture. So let's fix that now by adding our image. We can do that by just clicking on the open button here on this environment texture. Now navigate to the class assets that we downloaded at the very beginning of this class and then go into the Textures folder, and there you'll see Milky Way underscore color. So we'll select this image and then click Open Image. The effect of this image is pretty subtle, but that's all we really wanted. Now if we zoom into our image here, we'll notice that between these really bright points of light, we can also see an image back here that also has its own little stars plugged into the background. Just adds a little bit more visual texture to our image. It makes space not feel quite so empty. We can further customize this look by adjusting the Z rotation for this image. We'll be doing that down here on the mapping node. First, you can just drag select over top of this Z and just drag it back and forth and see what this image is actually doing as we move it around. You can see wherever you move it, the stars will move with the background. Some of these stars are pretty large, so we want to try to avoid having these really bright stars in the image as we don't want them to compete too much with the three D stars we already added. So we want to find a spot in this image that doesn't have too many large stars, but still adds a little bit of interest. We'll also notice that as we drag this image back and forth, we can see around the edge of our black hole, these stars are kind of warping and reflecting off of this warping effect that we added. This is another benefit of adding this Milky Way image. I know that based on my previous testing, a value of 220 for the z rotation looks pretty good for our image. I'm going to type that in now. This angle gives us a nice assortment of stars in the background, and it helps accentuate this warping effect around the black hole. And before we finish this short lesson, let's not forget to swap back to the object shader type now that we're done with the world. So we're just going to switch back to object, and now we're back to how we're used to it working, where we can just click on an object and see the material applied to it. And the next lesson will create a floating asteroid belt surrounding the black hole. I'll see you there. 12. Creating the Asteroid Belt: In this lesson, we'll create a floating asteroid belt surrounding the black hole. Let's begin. The black hole we've crafted over the last few lessons makes for a great focal point of the animation. However, we still need some visual interest to fill in the open areas. This is where the rocky asteroid belt comes in. We'll be using a few new tools to create the asteroid belt. Our first step is to enable an add one to help us create the asteroid models. To do this, we'll go over here to edit then down to preferences. Next, go to the add ons tab here on the left. Sure that you have enabled only unchecked. You do not want this checked on. Now we'll search extra mesh. Then down here, you should see extra mesh objects, and you want to have this checked on. This add on will give us a few new objects when we use the add Objects menu, one of which will be quite useful. After you have this checked on, we can just close this window. Now we're going to head to the layout workspace. We'll set this left view port to the rendered mode by clicking this far right button. Also, as usual, make sure you're looking through your camera by clicking this camera button here. Now over here on the right side, I'm just going to zoom out a little bit. And now again in the right viewport, we're going to hit Shift and A, then we'll go to mesh, then we'll go over here down to extras, and we're going to choose Rock generator. If you already had this addon installed and it's not as up to date as mine, you might see rock generator outside of this extras option. So if you see Rock generator in this list here, you can choose it there. Otherwise, it will be under extras, and then you can choose it from this list. Let's choose rock generator. Sure you have your right view port set to the solid mode by clicking this button here. And then we're going to zoom into these rocks so we can see them a bit better. So our first step is going to be to customize this rock using these settings here on the left. If you don't see this settings, it's probably because it's collapsed. So you can just click on this box here and it'll pop it open. After we adjust our settings, I'll go through and explain what we did. So the first and most important setting, changing this preset and we're going to set this to asteroid, which is pretty convenient. We can see right away just by switching this preset, it automatically kind of looks like an asteroid. Now we're going to set the X scale to four, so we're going to change the five to four instead. We're going to change the Y scale from 54 as well. And then same thing for the Z, we're going to set the five down to a four. Now at the bottom of this list, we're going to set the detail viewport 3-2 just by clicking left on this viewport. Now at the bottom of our list, we're going to set this 3-2 for the detail viewport, and then we'll set render all the way down to one. And then probably the most important setting here in terms of making sure your stuff looks like mine is by unchecking random seed, and then we're going to set our seed to two. And before we explain any of these settings, let's set the number of rocks up to five instead of one. Make it a little harder to see what these rocks look like, but it's basically making five random rocks sitting on top of each other that we can spread out later. Okay, so what did these settings actually do? So first off, the asteroid preset is just a preset that comes with this add on that will change some of the settings behind the scenes, basically the textures that it's using to create these rocks and make them look a lot more like an asteroid. There are a few other options here that if you needed them for different projects you could use, but obviously asteroid is what we. Of rocks we've already covered. This one's pretty explanatory. It just changes the number of rocks in the scene. So we're telling it to make five different rocks. By lowering the scale on each of these values 5-4, we just told this add on to make our rocks a little bit smaller on average. Two settings that we didn't change, but you might want to know what they do are deformation and roughness. The asteroid preset already handled these for us, but in general, they both just changed the hidden texture responsible for the look of the rocks. Higher deformation makes the rock a lot more irregular in shape and less round. Higher roughness makes the rock have a rougher surface texture while leaving the overall shape of the rock relatively unaffected. Detail view port and detail render here at the bottom, these settings determine how high resolution your meshes. We'll be making a ton of these asteroids, so we need to make these values pretty low to avoid making the scene too high poly overall. In general, you're going to want to use as little faces as possible to achieve the look that you're after for your renders. And this becomes especially important when working on animations as they require hundreds of individual renders to so a single still image that takes 20, 30 seconds to render isn't too bad. But if you have to render that 32nd image 1,000 times, that really adds up. A value of two for the viewport works just fine, and the render value will be unimportant in just a moment, so we can leave that set to one. And then lastly, the random seed down here at the very bottom. This is actually a pretty important setting. Without turning this checkbox off, every time you adjust any one of these sliders, it's going to randomize the rock. Is good if you're just in the experimenting stage and trying to find the right look. But once you're happy with the general look of the rock, you're going to want to fine tune it, and it becomes really annoying having the rock constantly change and move around as you're adjusting any one of these settings. I generally find it a lot easier to turn this checkbox off and then adjust the seed value to one that I can determine myself. This means that as I adjust these settings, the rocks aren't constantly randomizing. I'm seeing the actual rocks that I'm looking at update based on these settings. Also how we're all able to use the exact same rock. I can tell you just to turn off the random seed and then set the seed manually to two. If you'd like a different look for your rocks, simply just choose a different seed here. I found seed two to have a pretty good mixture of different types. All right. So now that we understand what we did, let's move our rocks over here to the right side and then get them off of each other so they're not all stacked up. First we'll switch to our move tool, and we can zoom out here and then just move them in the Y direction back behind the camera. That way, they're not visible. They don't need to be super far away, but they should be far enough back that your camera won't see them off the side. Now we can zoom in a bit and then we're going to separate them so we can see each individual rock. Simple way to do this is just to look over here in our list where we can see rock one through, in this case, four. It's actually five total rocks, though. We're just going to select one rock, push it to the right, select the other rock, and then just keep pushing them down the line until we don't have any rocks sitting on top of each other. Our first step is to collapse all of these modifiers applied to these asteroids by the rock generator. This is going to give us a clean slate to begin lowering the face count even more. So you're aware what's going on here, if I select one of these rocks, and then I go over here to the modifiers panel, we'll see that this rock actually has a whole bunch of different modifiers applied to it to give it this look. We don't really want all of these different modifiers affecting everything we're doing afterwards. So we're going to collapse all these modifiers down so that it's just a regular mesh with no modifiers applied. The easiest way to do this for all of these rocks is to drag select over all five of them. And one thing you do want to be careful of here is that you don't accidentally select the stars as well. So we can see here I have stars array. I don't want to collapse these. So if that happens, just adjust your view. And drag select again and make sure you don't have your stars selected. You just want the rocks. Now we can right click and then go to Convert to and then choose mesh. We'll see after doing that. Now if I select on any one of these rocks, we'll see we don't have any modifiers applied, but the rocks still look the same. This has just made these modifier effects permanently applied to the rocks. Now we're going to use a modifier called decimate to lower the face count in each of these rocks. So we'll select this first rock here on the left, now make sure you're on the modifier panel here on the right, and then we're going to click Add Modifier. Then from the search bar, we can just type in decimate DEC and we'll choose decimate here at the top. This modifier gives us a few different methods for lowering the face count on an object. We're going to be using the option unsubdivide around here in the middle. So first, let's zoom into this rock so we can see what it looks like. The modifier below the iterations, we can see the face count currently is 1,536. 1,536 doesn't seem like a whole lot at the moment, but when we duplicate this rock 1,000 times, that really adds up. Now we can lower this by setting the iterations to just one, so we're just going to click it up one time. And now, if we look at the face count, it's only 786. So we've halved the face count, and the rock really doesn't look all that different. I has a bit less detail, but the silhouette of the rock and the way it catches the light on the larger is pretty much the same. This works really well for our purposes. Now that we've applied our modifier to this one rock, we can quickly duplicate it to the other four without having to go through the same steps. Our first step is to deselect all the rocks just by clicking off to the side so we have nothing selected. Now drag select over the four rocks that we didn't do anything on yet. Then hold your shift key and then click the rock that we did already apply the modifier to, which is this rock here on the left. Selecting this rock last makes it the active object. We can tell it's the active object, one, because we selected at last, which means it has to be two, the object outline here is a little different color. This is more of a yellowy orange and then the other four have more of a red orange. Now that we have our objects selected in the correct order, we can hit Control and L at the same time on our keyboard and then we'll go down here and choose copy modifiers. This will copy the modifier, in this case, the decimate modifier from the active object to the other four objects selected. Now if we click on each of these objects individually, we can see that each one has the exact same decimate modifier applied might also notice that not all these objects have the same face count. In this case, the last object has a higher face count than the first four. This really isn't an issue, but if you're worried about it, you could increase the iterations on just this high poly rock here, the fifth rock and set that to two, and that will lower the face count even lower than the others. And it really doesn't change the look all that much either. So for my case, I'll leave this rock here with an iteration set to two. Our last step is to drag select over all these rocks, right click and then choose convert to mesh, and that will collapse this decimate modifier onto each of these rocks. Before we start the process of making our asteroid belt, let's get the file organized a little better than it is now because everything is kind of just thrown into one big folder. This is going to be important in just a moment when we start making the asteroid belt. Let's organize the asteroids first. So first, let's drag select over all of these asteroids here, and then in this viewport on the right side, we're just going to hit M on our keyboard. This brings up the move to collection interface. In our case, we want a new collection. We're going to click this, and then we can give this new collection a name. Let's call asteroids ASTROIDS then hit Create. This places all of the selected objects, in our case, the asteroids into a new collection called asteroids. These collections that we're creating here in this right list help keep your file organized. It allows you to name objects as to what they are and then place them into individual folders that can then be collapsed so that it's a little bit cleaner looking over here on the right side. Let's organize the remaining objects in our scene. First, over here on the object list on the right, we're going to click on the camera, then we'll hold Shift and click on Light pink, and that we'll select all these objects between. In this case, it's selected the camera, the camera target, as well as the three lights. If you didn't name your lights and everything exactly as I did, your list will not be in the same order. If that's the case, you'll have to select these objects individually. If you select then hold Control. You can select objects in any order that you'd like. So if you wanted to skip this object in the middle, you could. But in my case, I'd like to have all five of these objects selected, so we'll do that now. With the correct objects selected, we can just hit on our keyboard while hovering over here. Click New collection, and we'll call this camera and Lights. And our last change is to just rename the original collection. We can do that just by double clicking on the word collection, and we're just going to call this models, as it's somewhat of a miscellaneous folder just containing the rest of the models in the scene. And now it's time to create our asteroid belt. We'll be using a brand new modifier called scatter on surface to create the asteroid belt. Effect was technically possible before Blender 5.0, but it required a lot more work than a simple modifier. Our first step is to make the surface that will scatter these asteroids on. Over here in our right viewport, let's zoom out a bit so we can see more of the scene. Now we can hit Shift and A, go to mesh, and then we'll choose circle for the mesh. Down here in the settings, we're going to change the radius to 30, so it's much larger and then we'll change the fill type from nothing to N gone instead. We'll see after doing that, it will now make a circle mesh instead of just the outline of it. Now with our circle made, now we need to cut out the middle of this circle to turn it into a ring. First, we're going to hit tab or Edit mode can also zoom in a bit. Now hit three on your keyboard to enter face mode, though you're likely there already, and we can see our modes up here on this toolbar. Next, make sure you have this large face in the middle selected just by clicking on it. Now we can hit I on our keyboard for inset. So we'll click I first, and then we can just move our mouse just a little bit. It doesn't really matter where you move it because we'll be changing the setting in just a moment. So just move it to somewhere around here and then we can left click to apply. Now we can set the exact amount of thickness that we want down here. In this case, we want 5.5 for the thickness. That we have the middle inset, we can hit delete on our keyboard to remove the face, so we delete and then choose faces. And then we also want to delete the back half of this ring. You'll see why later. In this case, we want to delete the side of the ring that has the black hole on it. So we're going to delete everything on this side of this red line towards the black hole. To do this, we can just drag select over top of all of these faces. Then again, hit Delete and then choose faces. With that done, we can hit Tab to exit our Edit mode. With this half ring object created, let's go over here and rename it. We'll double click on this circle, then type in asteroid belt, space front. So we have our surface created. Now we just need to scatter these asteroids on the surface. Then position the asteroid belt so that it fits the camera view. Let's start by scattering the asteroids. So make sure you have your rings still selected. Then go over here to the modifiers tab, which is this blue wrench icon. Go to add Modifier, and then we're going to click Search and type in scatter SCA TT, then choose scatter on surface. I mentioned with some previous modifiers, this modifier is new to Blender 5.0. So you do need to be working on Blender 5.0 or newer for this modifier to even show up in the list. Now let's zoom into our ring, and we can already see the effect that this modifier is having on the model. These tiny placeholder cubes have been randomly scattered along the surface, creating an object that already looks a little bit like an asteroid belt. Let's go through a few of these initial settings here to get the asteroid belt set up. Then we'll dive into the randomization settings. The most impactful setting that we can adjust is choosing which object should be scattered onto the surface. Doing that down here where it says instance type, underneath the instancing settings, and we're going to switch it from object to collection instead. So the difference between these is basically object will allow you to choose one singular object to be scattered, whereas collection will allow you to choose a collection of objects to be scattered so multiple different versions of that same object. Now we can go down here to where it says collection, and we're going to choose the asteroids collection, which will scatter all five of these different asteroids across this surface. This reliance on collections is the main reason that we had to organize this and put all of the asteroids into one singular collection. One issue that we're going to notice right away, though, is one, these are no longer applied to the ring, and two, it's choosing the exact same rock for each one of these placements. What's actually happening, though, is rather than choosing one of the five asteroids to scatter on each of those placeholder cubes that we saw earlier, it's instead placing all five asteroids on top of each of those cubes. So it looks like it's the exact same asteroid on every one, but it's actually all five asteroids sitting on top of every one of those cubes. Is obviously not what we want, so let's fix that now. We can fix this by clicking the Pick instance button down here. Then we can twirtl open these settings. Now we can zoom back out to our ring, and we can see it's fixed the placement of these, and that's because it has reset transform one, which is basically telling it to not use the transform of these original objects and instead use them on per instances. So if we turn this off, we'll see that they just jump right back to where they were. So we need that we can also choose the instance seed. In our case, an instance seed of one just changes the way it's randomizing them, and one worked pretty well on my testing. So we're going to leave the seed set to one. Now that we have our correct objects in place and they're actually attached to this belt, we can begin adjusting the distribution found up here. As usual, let's go through and change the settings, and then we'll go through and explain what each of these did. So first, we're going to change the distribution method to Poisson disc. Then we'll change the density to two, the minimum distance to 0.1. Then lastly, we're going to uncheck keep surface. Okay, so what do these settings actually do? So first up, we have the distribution method. We switched it from random to Poisson disk. These methods are relatively similar except Poisson disc has one key difference. It allows us to control whether or not these objects will overlap and by how much. This is controlled by the minimum distance down here. If you have a higher minimum distance, it puts, kind of like a force field, you can think of it around each of these rocks and prevents any rock from entering that force field. For the sake of example, if we increase this minimum distance, it's going to make a lot less rocks. Because this minimum distance is essentially controlling, you could think of it as a bubble around each of these rocks. So the larger that bubble is, we're giving the rock more personal space, meaning that no rock is allowed to be within this distance next to this rock. If it gets too close to the rock, it'll just remove that rock instead. So with a value of 1.73, we've made a 1.73 meter bubble around each of these rocks. We don't need it to be nearly this big, so we're going to set it back down to 0.1. This overlap prevention that we just added isn't noticeable just yet. As the asteroids are way bigger than the final product will be in just a moment. Next we have the density. This one's pretty obvious. By increasing the density, we're just making more rocks. Higher numbers mean more rocks, less numbers mean less rocks. And then, lastly, we unchecked keep surface. This tells Blender to either keep the visual of the surface that we attach these rocks to or to remove it. By unchecking it, we told it to hide that plane, so the half ring that we had around it so that we can't see it in the final render. If we check this on, you can barely see it, but we'll see down here, this corner stays on when we have keep surfaces on. If we uncheck it, it hides that surface. We don't want to have a cool looking asteroid belt floating in space with a thin gray ring floating inside. We're going to turn this off. Okay, so now it's time to adjust the randomization and sizing of this asteroid belt. We'll be doing that down here underneath the transform settings, so we'll have to twirl these open. So first, we're going to be adjusting the scale of each of these rocks. We're going to change each of these values here to just 0.2. So you can go through each one of them and type in 0.2, if you want. Or you can make it a little faster by clicking and dragging from the top one down to the bottom one, and that'll allow you to change all of them at the same time and just type in 0.2. Has decreased the size of each of these rocks down to 20% of what they were before. Now we're ready to randomize these asteroids and basically every transform possible. We'll go through each of these segments one by one to see how they affect the asteroid belt. To begin with, we need to turn on randomize down here, then we can twirl open these settings so we can see each of them. Let's start with the offset. We'll set the X to two, the Y to three, and then the Z to 50. Each one of these settings simply tells Blender to scatter the asteroids of random value between zero, not moving at all, and the max value that we just typed in. The X and Y are small adjustments to add just a little bit of randomness, but the Z is significantly higher to create a huge amount of variation between each asteroid. And we can see that here by the fact that our ring is much taller than it was before thanks to this much higher Z value. Almost looks like a wall right now, which works well for blocking the view, but it doesn't look the most like an asteroid belt. So let's adjust that now. The next setting is the rotation. So again, we're going to click on the top one here and then drag to the bottom one to highlight all three, we're just going to type in 360, setting each of these values to 360. This is another situation where we're giving Blender a maximum value that it can change the rotation by. When set to 360, it means that basically any rotation value is available, giving us the most randomization possible. Thing to note, however, is that this rotation is actually based on the original location, not the local rotation of it. This means that as we adjust these values, they sort of hinge around a point in space that we no longer see. So rather than just rotating in place on top of themselves, they move through space due to this rotation, which actually plays into our benefit. With this rotation adjustment, the asteroid belt is already looking a lot more natural. Now let's give each asteroid a random size so they aren't so uniform. Do that down here with the scale value. We're going to set this all the way up to one. The scale slider is a little bit counterintuitive. A value of one makes the scale as random as possible. It allows each of the asteroids to range anywhere between 100% and nearly 0%. They'll never fully disappear, which is nice, but they will get really, really small. You can see that here. Some of these are basically just points in space, whereas other ones are relatively large rocks. Next up, we have flipping. This is another situation where we're going to click and drag on the top value, go down to the bottom, and then type in 0.5 to make them all the same. Setting changes how likely an asteroid is to mirror itself on any of these three axes. So what this means is any one of these asteroids has a 50% chance to mirror itself either left or right, up and down or front and back. This just helps vary their silhouettes and make them feel more unique. That way, if we do have two of the same asteroids next to each other, as long as they're flipped vertically or horizontally, it might not be as obvious. The last setting that we might end up changing in a moment is the seed. This setting will re randomize all of the values and produce a new look for the asteroid belt. This is only necessary if we don't like what we see once we have the belt in place. Let's get the asteroid belt placed so that we know how it looks from the camera. So first, we'll hit N to bring up the side menu over here on the right viewport, and then we're going to type in some specific values. So for the location, we're going to go to the Y and set that to 21, the Z to negative 3.4. Then the rotation, we're only going to change the rotation for the X. We'll set that to negative 15.5. Now if we zoom out here on the right viewport, we can see this asteroid belt is basically centered around the black hole with it being a little offset. Another thing we'll notice is that, like I mentioned before, we're probably going to need to adjust this seed because this rock here is right in our face. This is where the seed value is helpful. Based on my experimenting previously, I found that seed 42. So down here at the bottom right, we type in 42 and then hit enter. It gets the rocks out of our face but still has them relatively close to the camera. It also prevents any of these larger rocks from obscuring the black hole, which is our focal. I'm sure by now that you've noticed that our asteroid belt isn't really a full ring, so it's not technically a belt. It doesn't surround the black hole on all sides. It's empty back here. This was an intentional choice to make it as customizable as possible. First, we're going to duplicate this half ring that we have here so that we can rotate it and place it on the back side as well. With your asteroid belt selected, we can hit Shift and D to make a duplicate and before left clicking to place it anywhere in the scene, instead, we're going to right click to place it directly on top of where it was. Now we have two versions. They're just sitting directly on top of each other. Over here in our list, we're going to scroll up, and we're going to change the name for this one from asteroid belt front instead to asteroid belt back. So then we know it's for the backside. Now, in our side menu that we still have up over here, we're going to change the position and the rotation. So we'll set our Z location to negative 9.5. We're going to change the rotation for the X to just positive 15.5, so just remove the negative from that. We'll set the Z to 155. Now if we zoom in on our scene here, we can see that we have a basically full ring, even though it's slightly offset. We didn't rotate the ring a full 180 degrees to make it a complete circle, as we won't really see the left side of the ring after we animate the camera. For that reason, we're going to favor the right side of the frame, having a little bit more asteroids and making it a bit more dense. We've also broken the ring slightly by making the back half of it slightly lower than the front half. Did this to help fill out the composition a bit better and to make sure that the warping area around the black hole interacts with the view of the asteroid belt, making it even more obvious. We can see that here on the left side. The backside of this asteroid belt is near the bottom of the view, and it's going directly behind where this black hole is. Having the ring split into two parts means that we can just easily adjust this backside wherever we'd like. Now for our last change to this lesson, let's add a little bit of depth of field to our scene. Now one thing I do want to point out is that this isn't a strictly realistic setting to enable for space due to the absolutely massive distances in space. But we're the artist and we get to choose what makes it look good. Depth the field improves the look of our animation. So we're going to use it anyway. So our first step is to go over here to the outliner list on the top right and select the camera. Now we'll go down here and select the object data properties by clicking on this green camera icon. Then we can check on depth of field. Now let's twirl open these options. And we only really have two settings to change. So first, we're going to choose an object for it to focus on, so we can click on the word object here, and then we can just choose black hole from the list. And then, lastly, we're going to change the F stop from 2.8 down to 1.5 instead. The focus on object setting allows us to choose an automatic focal distance for the camera, determining what remains in focus at all times. In our case, we chose the black hole as it's the focal point of our animation. So it should also be the focal point of our depth of field. The F stop that we change down here determines how blurry the foreground and the background. Foreground and background are determined by what is not the focal point, in this case, the black hole. So if we zoom in here, we'll notice that these rocks here much closer to us, have a blurry edge, whereas the black hole has a nice sharp edge. You can change the amount that the blur occurs by lowering this value or raising the value. Smaller F stop values such as 0.5, will make the scene have a lot more blur in it, and then higher values such as five I'm sure that the scene has hardly any blur at all. We're gonna leave it set to 1.5 as it's a nice balance for our scene. This step to field simply helps focus our attention on the black hole and reinforce the distance between these objects. In the next lesson, we'll add some accent lighting to the world so that we can actually see this asteroid belt. And we're going to make a material for the asteroids, as well. I'll see you there. 13. Material: Asteroid Belt: In this lesson, we'll add some accent lighting to the world so we can better see the asteroid belt and we'll make a new material for the asteroids. Let's begin. Got the asteroid belt in place, but it's pretty hard to see right now because it's not receiving a whole lot of illumination from the lights currently on the scene. We're going to add two more lights specifically to illuminate the asteroid belt so it's more visible. First, make sure that you're in the layout workspace found here at the top left. Next, set your left viewport to the rendered mode by clicking this button here on the far right. Now let's begin making some new lights. Our first step is to select the light dash green object here from the list on the right side. Now we're going to duplicate this light by hitting Shift and D on our keyboard to make a duplicate and then we're just going to right click to place it directly where it was before. Before we go any further, let's rename this light so we know what it is. So we can double click on this new name. We're going to call this light blue space front, and then hit Enter. Before we adjust the color of this light, let's get it in place first. Over here in the right viewport, we're going to hit N to bring up the side menu. And then for the location, we're going to set the X to negative 19, the Y to negative eight, and then the Z to 11. We can see in both of these views that this light has now moved behind the camera and it's now illuminating the backside of these asteroids. With this light in position, now we can adjust the color. So first, make sure you're in the object data properties tab found here on the right. It looks like a little green light bulb icon. Now we can click this color bar and we'll set the hue to 0.52, the saturation to 0.68. And then the last thing we need to do is change the power, which controls the brightness. We're going to set that to 2002 000 and then hit enter. Blue light might seem a bit bright at the moment, but we haven't applied the material to the asteroid yet, so they're basically white. When the asteroids have their darker material, the light won't be nearly as impactful. Now let's create one more blue light to illuminate the back half of the asteroid belt. So with our blue light still selected, we're going to hit Shift and D to duplicate it. Then again, we can just right click to place it back where it was before. Let's rename this light to light blue back instead. And now we can get the position correct. So for the X location up here in the side menu, we'll set it to 29, the Y location set to 47, and the Z location set to negative three. And lastly, we are going to need to increase the brightness on this light because it's much further away from the asteroids that it's trying to illuminate. So we'll set this power to 5,000 just by switching this two to a five. Now if we zoom in on our render here, we can see all these asteroids in the back that were basically invisible before, now have a nice amount of lighting on the top side of them. So we can really see this asteroid belt surrounding this black hole. Okay. We've successfully illuminated the asteroids, so all that's left is to add the material to them. Let's head over to the shading workspace now. We can find that here at the top center. Next, we'll set this top view port to the rendered mode by clicking this far right button. Now head over here to the outliner list on the right side, and we're going to scroll down until we find the asteroids collection that we made earlier. You may or may not need to twirl it open. If so, just click on this little arrow. Now we're going to select the very first rock in this list just called rock with no number behind it. Go down to the bottom center viewport and click on the new button to add a new material. Let's name this asteroid, ASTE ROID. Let's apply this asteroid material that we just created on this rock to the other four rocks. We'll notice if we click on them, they don't actually have this material applied to them. If you wanted to do it the manual way, you could go through and select each one of these rocks, click on this drop down, and then choose asteroid. But you'd have to do that for each one of these rocks individually. Your other option is using the ability to link the materials. So to do this, we're going to select the rock 001, which is the first rock that doesn't have a material on it. Then we'll hold Shift, select the last rock in the list, and now we're going to hold Control and select the very first rock making this the active object. Also notice that these four rocks on the bottom here are a slightly darker orange than the top rock. Letting us know that this top rock here is the active object. Now if we hover our mouse over the viewport, we can hit Control and L to bring up the Link menu and we'll choose link materials. After doing that, we can now notice that each one of these rocks, if we select them individually, they all have the exact same material applied to. Can also tell that it's actually the exact same material and not a duplicate of that material because this material here has a five next to it, letting us know that this asteroid material is applied to five different objects. In our case, the five different rocks. So if I make a change to the material in any one of these rocks, it's going to change it for all of them. It doesn't really matter which rock you have selected, but for this case, I'm just going to select the first rock and now we can begin adjusting this material. Our goal with this material is to make a dark craggy rock with sharp edges and slight variations in color. Material will largely use nodes that we've seen before, just in different configurations. So let's jump right in. First, let's zoom in down here to the principled BSDF. Our first step is to change the roughness. We're going to set this to 0.75. Make the material have a bit less of a sharp reflection, and it'll make it look a little bit more dusty. Now let's add a few new nodes to the system. First, we'll start by hitting Shift and A over here on the left side. Go to search, type in color space R, and then choose color ramp. We're going to move this a little bit to the left to make some room here. Now we can hit Shift and A, go to search, type in Voronoi, VR, and then choose Voronoi. Place that here to the left. Then lastly, shift and a search, type in bump, BUMP. Click this and then place it between the color ramp and the principle BSDF. Then one more step, select the Voronoi texture and then hit Control and T to make the texture coordinate and the mapping node. Now let's get everything hooked up. So first, we're going to drag from the distance on the Voronoi down here to the factor on the color ramp, then from the color ramp, we're going to drag from the color to the height down here on the bump. Then we'll connect the normal socket on the bump to the normal socket here directly to the right, and then finally, connect from the color again over here to the base color on the principled BSDF. Our first change is over here on the left side. That's going to be switching from the generated to the object mode for the texture coordinate just by dragging this wire here to the vector. Again, there are many different modes with different purposes. However, the object mode is often a good default as it looks good in most situations, especially when creating procedurally generated materials like we've been doing throughout this class. Next up, we have the Voronoi over here. Let's go through and change all these settings, and then we'll go back and talk about them. So first, we're going to switch from the F one mode to F two instead. Next, we'll click on the normalized checkbox. Then we'll set the scale to two, the detail to 0.4, the roughness down to zero, the lacinarty down to zero, and then we'll leave the randomness set to one. Settings really aren't anything that we haven't adjusted in previous lessons, so I'm not going to go into extreme detail on any of them. A few of the more important settings though, are the switch from F two rather than F one and the normalized checkbox being enabled. F two changes the pattern of the noise to a sharper, more gem like pattern, rather than the softer cell like pattern that the F one setting has. This works well for the craggy rock texture that we're after. And then the normalized checkbox makes the texture overall higher contrast, making stronger peaks and valleys and the visual patterns. It's further increase the contrast to the Vinoi texture using the color ramp node that we added to the right. So our first change is for slider zero. We're going to set the position to 0.095, and then for slider one on the right side, we're going to set the position to 0.8. This is a relatively subtle change overall, but it does help make sure that the overall material is a bit darker and it deepens the visual craters on the asteroids. We can see that here with these dark spots. We haven't interacted with a bump node yet in this class, so let's move on to that now. If you've never seen a bump node before, it converts a black and white image into a colorful texture that Blender can read as bumpiness of a material. Bumpiness doesn't actually move the faces of the model, though. It's entirely a magic trick, so to speak, to trick the viewer into thinking that a surface is rough or bumpy by warping the light across it rather than an otherwise smooth surface. This is a very, very common trick in three D rendering to limit the required faces on a model while still providing a high level of detail. It's not a Zoom in down here on the bump. Only setting that we're going to change is the distance. As this distance value goes up, it makes the texture more bumpy, increasing the distance between the highs and the lows. So if we drag this slider to the right, you can see we can make really, really bumpy rocks or we can set it to something more realistic. In our case, we're going to use 0.05 and then it enter. And now we notice that we have just a little bit of definition here, having some shadows cast here, as well as some highlights caught by the light. This has to right here at the bottom right is a good example of what this bump node is doing for us. Now we have one last node to add to our material. Let's zoom out a bit. Then we're going to hit Shift and a search, and then we're going to type in color ramp. Again, we're just making another color ramp, and this time we're going to place it between the other color ramp and the principled BSDF. If we hover over this line, we'll see that it turns white. We can click to place it and it'll automatically connect it for us. Now let's zoom into this color ramp, and we'll be using this color ramp to adjust the base color of the material while allowing the bump node below to use the original black and white version. Is mainly because the bump node works best when being used with a black and white image rather than a color image. So for our first adjustment on this top color ramp, we'll change the position on slider zero to 0.1, and then we'll adjust this color by clicking on this black bar, and we're just going to set it to 0.21 for the value. So just making it a gray color. Next, we'll switch to slider one over here on the right, set the position to 0.79, and then we'll adjust this color here by changing the value to 0.54. So just a brighter gray. These color changes make the base color of the asteroid a lot less contrasty and give it a more gray color. And now we can see why the really bright blue lights that we had earlier in the lesson weren't really an issue at all. This darker rocky material doesn't illuminate nearly as well as the default white. So those lights needed to be pretty bright to accomplish the illumination that we wanted. At this point, the scene is feature complete, meaning every object and material has been created, and now we're ready to begin the animation and compositing process to make the world come to life. In the next lesson, we'll start the animation process by animating the camera's movement. I'll see you there. 14. Animate: Camera Movement: In this lesson, we'll start the animation process by animating the cameras movement. Let's begin. Each of the following animation lessons will focus on one particular object in the scene, adding movement to the object or the materials applied to it. This is the process by which we'll be adding a life to our world. Breaking the animation down into short lessons will also allow you to reference these steps in the future if you want to apply it to your own personal projects. With that briefing out of the way, let's jump right in. So first, we're going to head back to the layout workspace found here at the top left. You also want to set your left view port to the rendered mode if it's not there already by using this button here on the far right. Also, importantly, for this lesson that your view is through the camera. So make sure that when you click this button, you're actually seeing through the view of the camera. You should see a dotted line here showing you the edges of the frame. Now select the camera from the list here on the right side. Before we do any animation in the scene, let's make the timeline at the bottom a little bit taller. To do this, just go down here and click on the border between any of these viewpoints. We'll see an up and down arrow, and we're just going to click and drag and drag it up to make it taller. Isn't strictly necessary, but it does make our life a bit easier. Now that we're set up and ready to go, what's the goal for our camera movement? We want to have a pretty subtle camera movement in our scene, as anything too fast will be jarring to the viewer over such a short time frame. Our whole animation is only 8 seconds long, so we have to keep that in mind when planning our movement. With that being said, we'll be making our camera drift slowly to the right, while also pushing forward slightly. This movement will be subtle enough to not be distracting while still being interesting enough to keep our attention. Start by locking the camera in place where it is now for the beginning of the animation. First, make sure that the playhead on the animation is set to frame zero over here on the far left. Now let's head over here to the object properties tab, this orange box icon, and then with the camera still selected, we're going to be placing a keyframe on each of the location values. We can do that by clicking this white dot next to each of these three values. So we'll click on each of these, and we'll see that it turns to a diamond, and it also turns yellow. Process has told Blender that at frame zero, this camera needs to be at this exact location. Now that we've told Blender where our camera starts, let's tell it where it ends. So let's go down here and drag this playhead to frame 240, which is the last frame, and now we're going to change some of these values. So for the X location, we're going to set this to negative 10.3, the Y location to negative six, and the Z location to 5.6. And then with these values changed, we have to remember to click on these icons here to place new keyframes. Otherwise, Blender will forget the values that we just typed in and default back to the ones that it knew previously. Now we have two different options to see the movement for our camera. We can just click and drag this playhead back and forth to see what it looks like manually, or we can click on this play button here at the bottom center. Now our camera slowly drifts to the right while it also pushes forward towards the black hole, almost as if we're being pulled into it by its intense gravity. We also avoid all of the asteroids in front of us as we drift between them. This provides another source of depth and scale as these asteroids overlap and pass by each other in our view. One last change that we have is to make the animation linear rather than bezier. Default, Blender creates Bezier keyframes, which generally is the right choice when you're starting in animation as it provides a smooth and slow start and finish to the movements. You'll notice that the camera begins its movement slowly, then speeds up in the middle before coming to a slow stop at the end. Due to the editing effects that we'll be adding near the end of the class, we want this movement to appear as a constant speed from start to finish, which means that we want keyframes to be linear instead of bezier. Before we move on to adjusting these keyframes, I did want to mention that this animation is not currently playing at its full speed. You'll notice up at the top left corner we see a red FPS indicator. This is showing us how fast the animation is actually playing to us right now versus what it's supposed to be. So in my case, it's playing at around 18 to 16 FPS, somewhere in between there. But we'll remember from the very beginning of this lesson, this should be playing at 30 FPS. FBS stands for frames per second. So if it's playing at 16 frames per second, that's basically half of what 30 is. So it's playing at half speed. When we render our animation, this won't be an issue as it'll rendered out correctly and we'll be able to play it back at its full speed. But because this is playing in real time, it's struggling to keep up, so it's playing it as slower speed. This is one important thing to keep in mind when you're timing your animations. So this animation is only 8 seconds long, but it might feel significantly longer. In my case, it's closer to 16 seconds long. We render out our final render, it's going to be an actual eight second long animation. So this movement is going to be much faster. Let's go back and adjust these keyframes. So we're going to stop the animation. Then we'll hover our mouse over this timeline at the bottom and hit A on our keyboard to select all keyframes. Then we can hit T on our keyboard to bring out the interpolation options, and we're going to choose linear. Now if we bring the playhead back to the first frame, frame zero, and then hit play, we'll notice that the speed of this animation doesn't change. It's the same speed all the way throughout. It's just as fast at the beginning as it is at the end. This is exactly what we were looking for. We have all of our motion set up. If you'd like to see what this animation looks like at closer to its normal speed, we can pause the animation and then go up here and switch this viewport mode on the left. If we switch it to the wireframe mode and then hit Play, we're not going to see anything too pretty over here, but we will notice that it's playing at 30 FPS. So it's playing at its actual speed, so you get a better sense of how fast everything is actually moving. At this point, our camera is fully animated, and we're ready to move on to the next object. In the next lesson, we'll animate the materials on the black hole. I'll see you there. 15. Animate: Black Hole Materials: In this lesson, we'll animate the materials on the black hole. Let's begin. Our goal in this lesson is to bring the black hole to life by animating the glow around the center and the movement of the accretion disc material. We'll start with the main black hole material as it'll be the most impactful on the look of the black hole overall. So first, we'll head over here to the shading workspace. Next, make sure you have your top view port set to the rendered mode by clicking this button here on the right side. We'll also need to add a timeline to this workspace so we can actually see the keyframes that we're adding. To add the timeline, we can go down here to the bottom. Then hover over this bottom left corner until your mouse turns into a plus sign. Once it's a plus sign, we can click and drag and then drag it up, and we'll see it splits this view into two. So we'll drag it up to about here, and then we're going to click on this menu here on the left side that looks like a little circle. And then from this menu, we're going to be choosing the timeline found here on the second column, second from the top. And now with our timeline made, feel free to adjust the position wherever you'd like. Now let's select the black hole object and we can do that over here on the right side by scrolling up to the top and then selecting BlackHle. Only material that we're going to be animating is this glow around the outside edge, which is the exterior material. This interior material is basically just black with a thin glowing line. There's not really anything to animate there. With that being said, make sure you're set to slot one so that we can see the black hole exterior material. Next, make sure that your playhead is set to frame zero down here in the bottom left, and then we're going to be selecting this noise texture down here at the bottom of the material. So this node here, let's zoom in, and then we can select this node. One important aspect of animating materials is you need to select the specific node that you're animating in order to see the key frames in the timeline. You don't have the animated node selected, you won't see any keyframes on the timeline below. So unlike the camera where we can just select the camera from the list and then see any of the keyframes we have here at the bottom, that won't work for the black hole because we're actually animating individual nodes on its materials. So in order to see these animations, you actually have to select the node that you're animating. Is an important thing to remember when you're working on your own personal projects. If you apply it in animation, and then later on you select it and you don't see it, it's probably because you don't have the correct node selected. Now let's place our first keyframe. So let's zoom in on this noise texture so we can see it a bit better. And with our playhead set to zero, we're just going to hover over this W value and then hit I on our keyboard to place our keyframe. The I key is a shortcut to place a keyframe on a setting. In this case, it's the W value. And we can tell that we've placed our keyframe successfully by the fact that this W value is now yellow, and we can also see a keyframe down here on the left. The W value is a setting that we added when we switch the noise texture to four D earlier on. Four D, in this case, means four dimensions. And you can think of this W value as this fourth dimension, which would be time. So as we animate the W value, you're essentially animating the time of the texture. So let's drag our playhead over here to the end of the animation, which is frame 240. Then we're going to set W to 0.2, hit Enter, and then we have to remember to hover over it again and hit I to place a new keyframe. Now if we slide this playhead back and forth, we can see that this texture moves as it passes through time, and that's because we animated this W value. Last parameter that we're going to change for this material is the rotation on the mapping node. Our goal is to have this noise pattern slowly rotate around the center as the clouds also move around in change phase. So let's go back to frame zero on the timeline, and then on this mapping node directly to the left, we're just going to hover over any one of these rotation values and then hit I on our keyboard to place our keyframes. This is going to place a keyframe on all three of these values at once. And then, again, we can drag our playhead down here to the end, frame 240, and we're going to change the X rotation to 15, and we're also going to change the Z rotation to 15, as well. And then with these changes made, we have to hit I again to place our keyframe. Now if we drag our playhead back and forth, we'll notice that there's a really subtle rotation to these clouds. So it's a little bit more obvious if you just play it. But we can see here that these clouds aren't just moving outwards from the center. They're moving out, but they're also hovering around and moving around the center. Is a subtle change, but it does make a difference. Our last step for this portion is to set both of these new animations to linear key frames rather than the default bezier. This is because we want this pulsing and swirling to look like it's going at a constant speed, not stopping and then starting up and moving really fast and then stopping again at the end. So first, we're going to select the noise texture. If it's not already, hover over this timeline, hit A to select all the keyframes, then hit T to bring out the interpolation and choose linear. And then one more time, select the mapping node, hover over the timeline, hit A, then hit T and choose linear. Now, this animation is the same speed all the way throughout. It doesn't start out slow and then speed up. Okay, we have just one more material to animate for this lesson. So over here on the right side, we're going to select the black hole accretion disc. Now let's zoom out. And the only node that we're going to be animating is this mapping node here on the far left. All we want to do with this material is to make these cloudy rings appear to circle around the disc as they move. Almost as if these cloudy particles are orbiting the black hole. This is going to be a really subtle effect in the final animation, but these subtle details add up across the entirety of the scene and give it a sense of realism and complexity. So a lot of times, even if you don't really notice the movement, you do kind of feel the movement, so to speak. So our first step is to go to frame zero, then we'll select our mapping node, which is this purple one here on the left. We'll hover over the location settings here at the top and then hit I to place our keyframe. Now we'll go to frame 240, the very last one. And we're going to set the X location to two, and then hit Enter, and then don't forget to hit I again to place your keyframe. And then before we play this animation, let's just get the keyframe set up here at the bottom by hitting A to select all the keyframes, then T and then choose linear. Now if we zoom out a little bit, and then we drag our playhead back and forth, we'll notice that this texture on the rings, you can follow some of these darker spots. We'll see that they move along the distance of the ring. So it's as if these bands of dust are moving around this ring and orbiting this black hole before eventually being sucked into the center. This is also adding together with the animation we just did previously of all this dust swirling around the edges as well. So these add together to give the black hole a lot more life. At this point, we're halfway done animating the objects in our scene already. In the next lesson, we'll animate nebulae, so they float subtly through space. I'll see you there. 16. Animate: Nebulae: And this lesson we'll animate the nebulae so they float subtly through space. Let's begin. This process will be pretty similar to the previous lessons, so let's not waste any time. First, make sure you're in the shading workspace found here, set your top view port to the rendered mode found here, and then make sure that you're in the camera view. We've already set up the timeline in the previous lesson, so we can start placing keyframes right away. Have three separate nebulae to animate. And we're going to start with the nebula A Cloudy. We can find that over here on the right side in our list, and we'll just select it here, nebula A cloudy. Now, let's zoom into this material and select the Voronoi texture here on the far left. Go to frame zero, which I'm currently at now with the playhead. We can zoom into the W value on this Voronoi texture and then hit I to place our keyframe. Now go to frame 240, the last keyframe, and we're going to set the W to 0.008 and then hit Enter. And then finally, place your keyframe by hitting I. 0.008 might seem like a very tiny number, and it is. But our goal with these nebulae animation is to simply make them drift through space slowly as the animation plays. The bulk of the motion in our scene is contained in the camera, black hole, and later the asteroid belt. The slow drifting of the nebulae just adds some layer of complexity to the scene to make it feel a little less static. This amount of change in the W gives the blue clouds and the nebulae some subtle shifting movements that make it feel as if the black hole or the asteroid belt is pushing this cosmic dust around in space. Before we move on, let's set these keyframes to linear. We can do that by going down here, hovering over the timeline, and hitting A to select all the keyframes, then hit T to bring up the interpolation and then choose linear. Now, if we drag back and forth, we'll notice that these blue clouds here subtly change shape as they move. It's a relatively subtle change, as I mentioned, but all these movements really add up. With this first nebula animated, we just have two more left. Now we can go over here and select nebula B, wispy, then we're going to zoom out on this material, and we're going to choose this noise texture here on the far left. We can go to frame zero on the playhead, hover over this W value, hit I to place our keyframe, go to frame 240, set this W value to 0.015, hit Enter, and then again, hit I to place our keyframe. Now go down to the timeline, hit A to select all of the keyframes, T to bring up the interpolation and choose linear. Now we can drag our playhead back and forth and see that these wispy lines here, especially on the bottom left, where it's orange, begin to move around and drift through space. So we can see here that they're not just moving past us, they're actually moving within themselves as well. It's also noticeable down here at the bottom, where the green is. Now we have just one more nebula left, and that is nebula C, foggy, which we can select here from the list. Again, let's zoom out, and then we can select this noise texture here on the far left. Let's go to frame zero on the timeline, hover over the W value, and hit I to place our keyframe. Now go to frame 240, set this W value to 0.03, it enter, then hover over it again, hit I to place the keyframe. Hover over the timeline, hit A, then T, and choose linear. This nebula animation is one of the more subtle movements, as this nebula is really only the soft background fog in the scene. But as I mentioned before, every little bit helps to add life to our scene. Might not be able to notice this one, but it is moving in the background, and that's it for the nebula animations. We're nearly done with the animation portion of this class, one more object left. And the next lesson we'll animate the asteroid belt floating through space. I'll see you there. 17. Animate: Asteroid Belt: In this lesson, we'll animate the asteroid belt floating through space. Let's begin. Our last animation for this class is the asteroid belt circling the black hole. Currently, the asteroids remain motionless as the camera moves through the scene. Our goal with this short lesson is to add a subtle drifting motion to the asteroids so they don't feel quite as lifeless as the rest of the world moves around them. We're going to head back to the layout workspace for this lesson. Make sure your left viewport is set to the rendered mode, clicking this button here on the far right, and then also make sure that you're looking through the camera in this case, as the asteroids do tend to block the camera, so we want to make sure that we're not blocking it. You can get into the camera view by clicking this camera button here. Let's select the asteroid belt underscare front object from the outliner, the top right. So if we zoom up to the top of the list, we can see it here asteroid belt front. We'll be animating the scatter on surface modifier to achieve the drifting effect for this asteroid belt. So we'll need to go down here to the modifiers tab, which is this blue wrench. Now let's scroll down to the very bottom to the randomization settings found here. The easiest way for us to give our asteroids randomized drifting movements is to animate the rotation values. This method works for us because the asteroid rotations are randomized around their original starting positions rather than simply rotating in place. Means that the asteroids sort of orbit around an invisible point in space. We can see a quick example of this by adjusting the Z rotation here. So if we make this value less, we'll notice that these asteroids just kind of move through space. The ring as a whole stays pretty much where it was at, but each asteroid seems to have its own momentum as if it was bumped into by another asteroid and is now drifting slightly through space within this ring. Now let's add our keyframes. We're going to go to frame zero on the timeline below, and we'll set the Z rotation in the randomized settings back to 360, then we can just click this dot here next to it on the right to place our first keyframe. Now go to frame 240, change this value from 360 down to 330, then again, click on this keyframe button to place a keyframe. And then our last step is to set these keyframes to linear like usual. So we'll hover over the timeline, hit A, to select all keyframes, hit T, to bring up the interpolation menus, and then choose linear. You can either hit the play button or just simply drag it back and forth to see the movement of these asteroids. Mentioned before, it just kind of looks like maybe they've bumped into each other over time and have their own momentum in different directions, being pushed around in space, but still remaining generally within this ring. This extra bit of movement really adds a lot of life to the animation, especially in the foreground. Our asteroid belt is made of two separate pieces, so we're going to have to replicate this animation on the back half of the belt as well. So let's go over here to the list, select asteroid belt back, go to frame zero, go back to the randomized settings for the z rotation, place our keyframe with it set to 360, then go to frame 240, set the Z rotation to 330, place our keyframe by clicking this button. Hover over the timeline, hit A to select, T to bring up the interpolation, and then choose linear. Now that we have the asteroid belt animated, you may want to change the seed value of the front asteroid belt object. So if we select the front asteroid belt object here, this is the seed value that I'm referring to. The very last setting here in the randomize. Only necessary if you don't like how the asteroids drift in front of the camera due to their starting position. So if you don't like how these asteroids here move close to the black hole or if they make areas where it's really sparse near the end, this is where the seed value can come into play. If you're looking for a slightly different look for your scene, we can try seed 164. This is one that I've tried in the past that looks pretty good. So we can see here that no asteroid passes in front of the black hole, and it still has a relatively dense population of asteroids nearby. Or you could also try seed 199. This one also looks pretty good. So now if we drag it back and forth, we can see that we have asteroids pretty dense throughout the entire animation. Thing passes too close in front of the black hole, and it also doesn't thin out too much by the end. Just for the sake of change, I think I'll leave my file set to seed 199, but feel free to leave yours set to Sed 42 or whatever layout that you'd like, and that's it. Our scene is fully animated, so we can click this play button down here to see what it looks like. We're not quite done yet, though. We still have a lot of post processing effects that we can add to our scene to make it more colorful, higher contrast, and even more realistic. In the next lesson, we'll add compositing effects to make our render look even better. I'll see you there. 18. Compositing Effects: And this lesson will add compositing effects to make our render look even better. Let's begin. Now that our scene is modeled, textured, lit, and animated, all that's left is compositing. Compositing effects can do simple things like making your render brighter or more colorful, but they can also add brand new visual effects like glow, blur, or static. Our goal by the end of this lesson is to make our image appear like it's a live camera feed from a space probe passing by the black hole to gather data. This means we'll be adding effects that make the image look a little distorted by things like static or lens flares while also maintaining a really eye catching and vibrant look. This will make the video and sound effects that we add to the final animation make more sense and feel more purposeful. So now let's jump right in by heading to the compositing workspace found here on the top. This compositing workspace will work pretty similar to the shading workspace that we've used in previous lessons. But first, let's get it customized so that it fits our needs a bit better. First, let's hover over this top viewport and hit N to hide the side menu. We won't need that. Now let's make this timeline at the bottom a bit smaller. We're going to drag this down by grabbing on this border between the two and just pull it down so it's just around here. Lastly, we're going to need an area on the right side to see the render that we're working on. To make this new view port, we're going to go over here to the top right of this viewport until our mouse turns into a plus sign, then we're going to click and drag until it snaps here to the middle, you'll notice that it kind of clicks and snaps there. Once you get to that point, you can just let go. Now let's click this drop down menu here and this new view port, and we're going to choose Image Editor right here. In this new viewport, we can go over here to this drop down next to this new button. We're going to click on this and then choose viewer node. Now let's head back to the left viewport, and we're going to click on this new button here to add our new compositing nodes. The first step to compositing will always be rendering your image. Compositing effects are applied on top of the base rendered image. An image to effect, we won't really be able to see any of our changes. So down on our timeline here, we're going to go to frame zero. If you're not there already, you can just click and drag this playhead and go to zero. Now we're going to go up here to the top left where it says render, click this and then choose render image. You could also hit F 12 on your keyboard instead if you'd like. It shouldn't take too long for your image to finish rendering, as we're using the much faster EV render engine for this animation. After it finishes, though, you'll see that we have our render twice, once on the left side below these nodes, and then again on the right side in the new viewport that we created. We specifically created this right viewport to avoid having the image here on the left side. You'll notice that if you zoom in and out on the left side here, the image doesn't change Zoom. I personally find this pretty annoying to work with, which is why we added a dedicated image viewer here on the right side. Because if we zoom in and out over here, we can actually zoom in to certain parts of the image, and it works as we expect. To turn this image off on the left side, all we have to do is go over here and click on this backdrop button, and that will hide the image. All right. So how do we add these new effects that I've been hyping up this whole lesson? As I mentioned before, this workspace works very similarly to this shader editor that we've used previously. So all we need to do is add new nodes and then connect them to the system. Let's start this process by adding our first new node. We'll actually be using one of these new presets found down here that were added in Blender 5.0. We'll be using this left one here called sensor noise, the second from the left. So we can just click and drag on this and then drag it over here into this window and then let go and it'll create a new node. This is actually a somewhat complicated preset that Blender actually built for us so that we can use it right away, rather than having to build this effect for ourselves. Notice that if you zoom in here, this node actually has a couple of different lines behind it showing that there's more than one node creating this effect. This is actually a grouping of nodes. We won't be getting into exactly how any of this works. I just wanted to let you know that this isn't a normal effect. This is a preset grouping provided by Blender to make our lives a bit easier, and we can see other effects down here that we'll be using later. With the center noise node added, we're just going to click and drag it and place it on top of this line here so that it automatically connects. The center noise effect that we just added does pretty much exactly what it sounds like. It adds noise to our image. You can also think of this as a static across the image. Effect helps break up a little of the super smooth and perfect look that we have now. It also helps add a bit of realism to the render, as videos recorded in low light areas tend to feature a lot of static and noise in the darker areas of the image. We can still adjust these noise effects though, by changing the settings here on the node. So first, let's find a place on our image to zoom into so that way we can see what we're doing. Just zoom in here near the black hole, we can see here on the right side, we have a lot of this kind of static across our image, and that's because of the sensor noise here. Let's go through and adjust some of these settings now. We're going to set the luminance noise to 0.03 and the chroma noise to 0.02, and then we're going to check on animated here. The luminance controls the noise present and the lightness and darkness of the image. So just as the sake of example here, if I make this much higher, you'll notice that we have a lot of black and white noise on top of our image. Because it's affecting only the lightness and the darkness. So if I undo that, now we can go to the chroma noise, which is affecting the colorful noise present in the image. So if I turn this up, you'll notice that this noise here is most prevalent here in the colorful areas, and it's also not just black and white. We can see greens and yellows and purples and pinks. So let's undo that. And then finally, the animated check box down here causes the noise pattern to randomize each frame rather than remaining motionless the entire an this animated noise is particularly important for us as we're creating a video. So each frame of our animation Blender is going to randomize this noise. It won't make it any darker or lighter or more colorful. It's just going to change the position of these dots and make it feel more realistic to how noise is typically presented in video. If you'd like to see what this image looks like without this static over it, all you need to do is select this sensor noise node that we have here, and then we can hit M on our keyboard to mute this node, and we can see the effect without it. You can see it's a relatively subtle effect. So this is without the effect, and then if I hit M again, we can see with the effect. It's just adding a little bit of visual texture to the image to break up some of the perfect smooth gradients that we had. Now let's add our next effect. Before we do this, though, let's create some extra room between these nodes. That way we can fit more in the system. So let's zoom mount. I'm going to drag select over these two nodes plus this small dot here. So you want to get this dot here, that way it's selected, and then we can hit G and then X to move it only in the X direction, and we're just going to move it way out here. We just want to make a bunch of room here, and then we can move these back once we're done. We just want to make sure we don't have to fight with them while we're working. Let's use another one of these presets found here at the bottom. This time we're going to use the vignette. We're going to click and drag this, drag it over here towards the left side. Now we can zoom in and then click again to drag and place it on top of this line. Over here on the right side, let's zoom out so we can see what it's doing to the image. So to begin with, let's just select this and hit M to mute it so we can see what it looked like before it. So we can see what this is doing is darkening the edges of the frame. This darkening helps pull our attention to the center of the image, it also increases the contrast between the light and the dark in the render as it makes these really dark areas on the outside, and then relatively bright areas here in the middle. The moment, though, the effect is a bit strong, so let's adjust that. So over here on the left, we're going to zoom into the vignette. We're going to set the factor to 0.3 and the feather to 0.75. This factor slider determines how dark the shadow is along the edges, so higher numbers will make for a darker shadow. The feather slider changes how sharp or blurry this shadowing effect is along the edges. The changes we just made made the shadow a lot less dark and made the edges of the shadow a lot blurrier and softer. This has made the effect significantly more subtle, but it's still there helping to pull our attention to the middle. And again, we can select this, hit M, to see what it looks like without it, and then M again to see what it looks like with it. Let's make the stars in our render look a lot more interesting by adding pointed lens flares on top of them. This time we're going to be adding a regular node, so we won't be using one of these presets. So let's zoom out a bit. Hit Shift and A, go to search and then type in glare, G, LAR, then we can see here glare. Then again, we're just going to drag this on top of this yellow line. And right away, you should notice the effect that this has had on our image. We have a ton of small four pointed stars dotted across our image, focused on the brightest parts of the render. While the effect right now is a little heavy handed, we can adjust that by changing the settings. We're going to go through and change a bunch of these settings here, and then we'll go back and explain what we did. Changes we're about to make will significantly diminish the lens flares effect. However, later changes will make it a bit stronger than it appears after these changes. So first, we're going to go down here and we're going to adjust this strength all the way down to 0.03. Now we can go down further down the list. We'll change these streaks to six, the streak angle to 30. And then the rest of these settings we can leave as is. Let's now zoom into one of these stars. I'm going to choose this one here as it's relatively bright. So our first change was up here was the strength. This basically just changes how bright these lens flares. Significantly lowered this to make them a lot more dim. The streaks value down here changes the number of points on these stars. So if we change the number, it just has that many points. This number can be whatever you'd like, but I specifically chose six because that's what the James Webb Space Telescope has in real life. The streaks angle simply rotates the streaks around the star. So if I change this angle, you can see here that these streaks move around. If we set it back to 30, we'll see here that these points are vertically aligned. It just look a little bit better. One other important setting that we didn't change is the fade. So we zoom out a bit here. You can see as we adjust the fade, these streaks get a lot longer and more prominent. So higher numbers will make for longer streaks, lower numbers will make for shorter streaks. We're going to lead this set to 0.9. I've also noticed that at the top of this glare node, there's a drop down here that has a few different modes. The streaks mode here is the default, but there are other useful options here as well. Our next two effects for the image will simply be different modes of this glare node to add new effects to the render. So to begin with, we're going to have this glare node selected, and we can zoom out, and then we can hit Shift and D to duplicate. We'll drag it over here to the right and just place it directly on top of this line again. Again, let's go through these adjustments here, and then we'll go back and explain what we did. So first, we're going to zoom in here on this new glare node on the right and change it from streaks to fog glow found just below it. Next, we'll twirl open the highlights option and set the threshold to 0.01. Now we'll adjust the strength and set it to 0.5. And then, lastly, here at the bottom, we'll set the glares size to one. Now let's zoom out so we can see a bit more of the image. The overall effect of this new node is to soften the image with a glow across the brightest parts of the image. It also brightens the brightest parts of the image, like the black hole and the larger stars even more by accentuating these areas with glow. So what do these settings that we changed affect? First up is fog glow, which was in this type dropdown. This is the main thing that makes this glarinde different from the first one where the streaks mode place stars on the brightest parts of the image. The fog glow mode instead places a soft glow around these bright parts. This is how we're creating the appearance of this overwhelming brightness from the brightest parts. The threshold slider here near the top determines what Blender thinks is bright enough to have a glow applied to it. Lower values like 0.01, which is what we're using, make Blender see dimmer and dimmer areas bright enough to have a glow placed on. Higher values for the threshold would make Blender more picky about what's bright enough to have a glow. So if you want a lot of glow on your image, you need a lower number here. By lowering this value significantly, we've told Blender to place a soft glow across nearly the entire image, while making the brightest parts of the image even stronger. This isn't typically how you'd use this threshold slidter, but due to the cosmic and other worldly nature of our render, having the glow a little heavy handed doesn't look too bad. Next, we have the strength slider. We've covered this before, but this changes how bright the glow effect is. And then lastly, the size here at the bottom. This slider makes the glow extend farther out from the brightest pixel that generated the glow. Higher value helps make the glow, cover more the image, and also softens it. Alright, so we have one more glare node dad. So let's zoom out a bit. Select this glare node, hit shift in D to duplicate it, place it to the right, and then place it on top of this line. As usual, let's go through and change the settings, and then we'll talk about them. So first, we're going to change from fog glow to sunbeams here at the bottom. Then set the threshold all the way up to one, change the strength to 0.02, and then further down the list, adjust the size to 0.2, and then lastly, change the sun position to 0.3, three, five. Alright, so let's go through and talk about these. The overall effect of this glare mode creates streaks of light that all point towards a specific point on your image. We've told these points of light to all point towards the center of the black hole, making it feel as if this light itself is being pulled into the singularity. And we'll notice effects like here, where the starlight here kind of trails off towards the right side as it looks like it's being pulled inward towards this direction. And you'll notice as you move around the image that these effects here are being pulled this direction. All pulling towards this point. This effect is caused by the sunbeams mode that we chose here. This is what's creating these streaks of light. The strength, again, just adjust how bright this effect is. We used a really low numbers we don't want these lines to be too distracting. Besize for the same reason, we lowered quite low because we don't want these streaks to be too long, either. Then lastly, the sun position is what's responsible for choosing which direction these lines all point. This top value here controls the left and right, and then the bottom value controls the up and down. Black hole is pretty much in the center, if you look at it up and down, but it is off to the left a little bit. So we move this value down to pull this center towards the left. And now we have just two more effects to add before we can call our image done. So let's zoom out a bit. Pulled Shift and A. Search. This time, we'll type in lens LEN and choose lens distortion. And again, place it on the line here to the right. Lens distortion node does a few different things, but we'll mainly be using it for the dispersion effect. Let's zoom in here so we can see the node a bit better. The dispersion slider here splits the colors of the edge of the image and adds a rainbow blur effect. So if we increase this value here, we're going to start seeing a really intense, in this case, rainbow blur effect along the edge. You'll notice, though, is no matter how high you increase this dispersion value, so you can increase it really, really high and have it pretty much unintelligible at the edges. It never affects the middle, the image. So this all looks pretty much normal. But if you start moving towards the side, it gets really strong and really blurry. It's also warping the image so that you can't see it on the corners anymore. It's actually bending the image. So this is the hole in our image here. Obviously, for our render, we're going to be using a much lower value. So the value we'll be using for dispersion is 0.03, much, much tinier value. So now if we zoom into the image, we'll see we do have this rainbow blur effect, but it's much more subtle and more realistic in this case. Notice that even with this small value, though, we do still have this kind of hole at the bottom of our image. To fix this, we're going to check on the fit checkbox here at the bottom, and that will scale the image up just until the point that that hole is removed. Since we're using such a small value here, it didn't really have to scale it up very much. And now it's time for the last effect, but arguably probably one of the most important ones. This last effect is going to use one of these presets down here at the bottom. In this case, we'll be using tune Image, which is the third from the right. So we'll drag this over here, zoom out. And then we'll drag this onto the line. This tune image node here is a multi purpose node that contains a lot of different changes. So let's zoom in here so we can see it a bit better. You can think of this node almost as an Instagram filter for your render as it allows you to fine tune common adjustments like contrast and saturation. Let's go through each of these sliders one by one and explain their effect. So first up, we have the contrast slider. This is the only slider that we won't be adjusting, mostly because we'll be handling the contrast with a different slider below. But this slider does exactly what it says. It increases the contrast of your image by making the darker parts darker and the lighter parts lighter. We'll notice that as we increase it, though, it's a pretty strong effect. Find it a bit heavy handed and prefer using different methods below. So I'm going to set this back down to zero. Next, we have the color boost slider. This slider affects the saturation of your image by making it a lot more colorful. So if we increase this value, we'll notice that our image is going to get a lot more colorful. The value that we'll be using is 0.4, and this will make our image a lot more vibrant and colorful thanks to this color boost. It primarily seems to saturate the mid tones of your image, similar to the vibrance effect in Photoshop, if you're familiar with that. Our next effect is here called clarity. This is the slider that we'll be using as a replacement for the contrast slider above. So as we increase this, we'll notice that the contrast of the image goes up. So the dark areas get darker, the light areas get brighter, and if we keep going, it gets more and more intense. But you also notice that even at this really high value, it's not nearly as intense as the contrast was before, and it also does a better job of retaining the color of your image. To have a pretty high effect here, but we'll still have it lower than this. So we're going to set it to 0.6. In general, I much prefer the look of the clarity slider over the contrast slider. After this, we have the detail slider. This slider will sharpen the smallest details of your image, such as the censor noise that we added earlier or the small differences in this wispy nebula. We increase this value, it's going to make defect more pronounced. So with a really high value like this, it's really picking out all the smallest details. So we zoom in here a bit and then lower the value, we'll notice that the image gets a little bit more blurry. If we increase it, it gets a bit sharper. We're going to set this detail to 0.5 to help accentuate areas like the clouds around the black hole, the asteroids, as well as these wisps within the nebula. And then, lastly, we have the sharpened slider below. This slider is very similar to the relationship between contrast and clarity. The detail slider we just adjusted is a more complex version of the sharpened slider, in my opinion. Sharpen will slightly increase the sharpness on the entire image in a uniform pattern, whereas the detail slider is a bit more isolated and works better in the lighter and darker areas. So if we increase the sharpen, we'll notice that the whole image just gets a blanket sharpening. It doesn't seem to pick out any specific area. This is still a useful effect, so we're going to set ours down to 0.1 just to have a subtle sharpening. Then finally, we won't be adjusting this, but this preserved color checkbox here, if we uncheck it, we'll notice that this effect here does a worse job at maintaining the original intended colors that we had. But if we check it on, it does a better job of retaining what that color originally looked like before we made all these adjustments. In general, you're going to want to leave this on and that's it. The final look for our image is finished. Before we close out this lesson, let's zoom out a bit and bring these notes here to the right back closer to the left. I'm going to drag select over, hit G, then X, and then move them closer to the left and then you can reposition them if you'd like. All of these effects that we added together create a render that is significantly more vibrant and high contrast than the original while also incorporating distortion and visual artifacts that make it feel like it's a video signal sent back to Earth from some distant location in our galaxy. The lens distortion, sensor noise, and high level of sharpening really help sell this idea of it being a degraded video signal from a distance. This is the exact effect that we were after, and the next lesson we'll render the animation as an image sequence. I'll see you there. 19. Rendering the Image Sequence: In this lesson we'll render the animation as an image sequence. Let's begin. The time has come to actually render our animation. We've got the final look for the three D portion of our animation completed. So all that's left is to render the animation so we can add extra video effects and sound. There are two main ways to render an animation and Blender. You can render the animation directly to a video file that you can watch immediately, or you can render each frame of the animation as a still image. Then use Blender or another video editing software to stitch these images together into a video that you can watch later. You might be curious why anyone would go through the hassle of rendering a sequence of still images that require extra work to turn into a video rather than just rendering a video directly. That's a great question. Main reason you'd want to do it this way is that it allows you to stop your animation in the middle, then pick it back up from the frame that you stopped on later. It also saves you a lot of extra render time if your Blender file crashes in the middle of a long render. If you stop or crash the render during a direct to video output, you have to start over from the very beginning as Blender can't save half of a video file. The majority of the classes I teach and the animations that I create are quite short and at a low risk of crashing, so I tend to export directly to a video. But for the sake of a learning opportunity, this class will use the image sequence option just so you're aware how it works. This will give us the opportunity to learn how to assemble these separate image files into a video with the built in Blender video editor, while also adding some extra visuals and sound effects. Our first step for this process is to head to the rendering workspace. We can find that up here at the very top next to compositing. Now let's double check that our render looks correct before we render our animation. My case, I've already rendered this frame, so we can see here that it looks fine. But if you haven't rendered a steel frame yet and you just see a blank screen right now, you should go up here to render and then choose render Image or hit F 12. Render finished, everything looks good, so we're ready to double check our output settings. We can find the output settings over here on the top right by clicking on this icon that looks a bit like a printer printing out a photo. Now, just to prevent any issues in the near future, let's give our basic settings a quick once over. For our resolution, we have 1920 for the X and then 1080 for the Y. Our frame rate is set to 30 FPS. The frame start is set to one, and the frame end is set to 240. Now the last settings to set up are the output settings down here at the bottom. First, let's set up the output location so that we can tell Blender where to save all these images. First, we'll click on this white folder here to bring up the navigation. Now navigate to the location that you have your Blender file saved. Next, we're going to create a new folder by clicking this button here at the top. We'll call this new folder image sequence. The reason we need this new folder is we'll be rendering 240 individual pictures in just a moment. So we really don't want them to be all output directly into the same folder with all of our other important files. Makes for a really messy organization for the files and generally makes our lives more difficult than they need to be. Now let's double click on this image sequence folder, and now inside this folder, we're going to create a new folder by clicking this button again. We're going to call this V one, which stands for version one. It's good practice to create obvious naming conventions for your renders to keep things tidy and organized. If we decide to render this animation again in the future with any changes, all we need to do is create a V two folder here, and then we can render into that without removing the old files if we wanted to keep. Let's double click on this V one folder, and then down here, we need to decide the name for our images. I'm going to name mine Black, whole animation, underscore V one, and then end it again with another underscore. The underscore at the end of the filename is important as Blender will automatically add the numbers for the current frame to the end of each file name. Without the extra underscore at the bottom, these numbers would run right into the V one that we placed at the end of the file name and make things more confusing. After you have your name set, we can go over here and just click except. All right. We have one last setting to double check. Here for our media type, it should be set to image. Our file format should be set to PNG. The color, we're going to switch from RGBA to RGB instead. The color depth will leave at eight and the compression will leave at 15%. The only change that we made here was changing from RGBA to RGB. The A stands for Alpha, which is the transparent part of our image. Our render doesn't have any transparent parts in the image itself, only the material is contained within, so we don't need to add this extra file data. All of these other settings can be left on their default values as they work just fine for our purposes. And that's all of the settings we need to adjust before rendering our animation. I do have one word of caution here before we hit the render button. While rendering each frame, you may notice that some of these seem to be missing all the compositing effects that we added in the last lesson. This is just blenders skipping the preview for these effects while rendering, but it is still adding them to each of the frames as it outputs. Isn't a bug. It's just Blender choosing not to show us the work it's doing to save itself some time. You can safely let it continue to render if you notice that at the end of each frame, it's not showing the compositing effects. It's only showing them on a few of them. This isn't an issue. It's all good. All right. Without delay, it's time to render. You don't need to worry about putting your playhead on frame zero as Blender already knows where it's supposed to start. Can go over here to render and then choose render animation. Each of these renders only takes a few seconds to create on average. So the whole animation should only take about 15 minutes or so to finish, depending on how powerful your computer is. Go ahead and pause this video while all of your frames finish rendering and maybe grab a snack and a drink. You won't need to watch Blender while it renders the animation, so you're free to get up and stretch your legs if you'd like. I'll see you in just a moment when my render finishes. Alright, my animation is finished, and the frames look great. You can double check that all of your frames rendered out properly by navigating to the V one folder that we save the images in. You should see all 240 images in this folder, and that's it for the rendering process. Now we're ready to compile these images into a video file and add visual and sound effects. I'll see you there. 20. Compiling and Adding Effects: Yeah. In this lesson, we'll assemble the animation images into a video file and add additional effects. Let's begin. Now that we have the frames of our animation rendered as individual images, known as an image sequence, it's time to compile them into a playable video file. We'll actually be doing this process in a brand new Blender file rather than the original file. This will help keep the individual settings for each file separate from each other with no risk of messing up each file. First, let's make sure that we've saved our original three D scene as it exists now after we've rendered the image sequence. So we'll just go over here to file, and then choose Save. Now let's open up a brand new instance of Blender. We can do that over here, going to File New, and then we're going to choose video editing. This new file option will open a fresh instance of Blender and it'll set up the workspace specifically for video editing. This workspace is perfect for assembling our video and adding new effects. With our new file open, let's get some of the initial settings dialed in before we import our image sequence. First, we're going to save this new file so we don't lose our work. Also, don't forget to save this file again once we finish the lesson to save all the work we're doing in the lesson. So we'll go over here to File, Save, and we'll be saving this new Blender file in the same location as the three D Blender file. So once you found that location, we can go down here to the name, and I'm going to name mine BlackHle animation, underscore video editor, underscore 01. And now we can hit Save Blender File. Let's go over here to the output settings. This icon here looks like a printer printing out a photo, and we're going to change the frame rate to 30 FPS like the other file was, and we're going to set the end frame to 240 so that it matches the other animation. Now we're ready to import our image sequence. We're going to hover our mouse down here over this bottom viewport and then hit Shift and A, then go to image sequence. Now we'll navigate to the folder that we saved all of our images into. So we'll go to image sequence, then V one. Now I'm going to select the very first image, so zero, zero, 01. Groll all the way down to the bottom of the list, hold Shift, and then select the very last image. So I should have every single image selected here. With everything selected, we can go down here and hit Add Image strip. Upon importing it, you'll notice that it's attached to our mouse, so we're just going to move this over here to the far left, and we're going to snap it so we can see here on the right side, it's snapping to the line there. We can see that white line showing us that it's snapping to the far right. We're going to click to place it on channel three. So we want it to be on channel three, and we wanted it snapped to the right side. Another way to tell if it's in the right spot is if you click and drag it to move it around. You notice at the very beginning of the clip, it says one at the bottom left corner, and the far right, the bottom right corner, it says 240. So we know that it's placed on the correct frame. We have our video imported, and it starts on frame zero and ends on frame 240, just like our three D animation did. We placed the video on Channel three to allow room below it for the sound effects. This technically isn't necessary, but if you've ever worked in a video editing software before, this is how almost all software formats it as well. Sound is typically on the bottom, and video is typically on the top. So we'll follow this standard within Blender, as well. Before we go any further, let's see what our animation looks like in motion now that it's fully rendered. We can do that just by going down here and clicking on the Play button on the right side. We can see our animation in full motion at the correct speed, 30 FPS. It's really cool to see everything move all at once now. We can see the black hole has the clouds that orbit around it, the asteroids drift slightly through space, the nebula change shape as we move through. There's really a lot going on here in just a short amount of time. Now we can pause our animation, and the first new thing that we're going to add is the static effect that helps hide the repeat of the video. We notice that as we hit the play button, our animation looks great, but it has a sudden jump at the end of the video where it starts again at the beginning. We're going to add a static effect that hides this jump back to the beginning of the animation. Also helps make it feel more like a video transmission that is cut out and is replaying the clip over and over again as if stuck in a loop. Can add the static video effect in a similar way to the image sequence. So we're just going to hit Shift and a while hovering over this timeline. And then this time, we're going to choose movie instead. Now navigate to the video assets folder that we downloaded at the beginning of this class. Once you've gotten there, we're going to go into the video assets folder, and then we'll choose sticvideo.p4 and then click Add Movie Strip. Again, this clip will be attached to our mouse, so we're going to drag it over here to the left, and then we want to snap it to the left side this time. And again, we'll see at the bottom left, it says one, but then this time on the bottom right, it says 30, showing us that this clip is exactly 1 second long. After you have it in place, we can just click to play. This is going to be placed on Channel four above the animation. Before we adjust the length of this clip or anything else, let's adjust the visual so we don't need to double up our work quite as much. First, we're going to darken the static effect using a brightness slash contrast modifier. The static effect is already quite impactful on its own, so we don't need it to be even more jarring by being too bright. With this clip still selected, we're going to go over here to the modifiers panel, which is a blue wrench icon. Then click the add modifier and choose brightness slash contrast. We'll be using this modifier to dim the static video a bit. We're going to set the brightness down to negative 80, so significantly darker. The contrast to negative 60 helping brighten it up just a little bit more. We can still clearly see the static. However, it's just a lot softer and less bright. We'll be seeing the static quite often, so we don't want it to be too distracting. Now we need to split this clip into two halves. That way we can have it at the beginning and the end of the animation. First, we're going to duplicate this clip. So with our clip still selected, we can hit Shift and D to make a duplicate, and we're going to place it directly above the old one. Make sure that it is snapped like it was to the others. So you should see one and 30 at the bottom of this clip. We want to trim the front half of one of the clips and the back half on the other clip. To make our lives a little bit easier, let's move our playhead to frame 16. So we'll just drag it to UC plus 16 here. And then we're going to click and drag on the bottom clip here. We're going to drag just on the edge here. We can see our mouse turns into a different symbol. So we're going to drag just this side here until it snaps to the playhead. So you should see 16 and 30 now on the bottom of that clip. Then for the top clip, we're going to do the exact opposite. We're going to drag from the right and then drag it over here to the playhead. So now you should see one and 15 on the bottom of that clip. Now we have two halves of the same video. Just one is the beginning and one is the end. Our next step is to place them at the beginning and the end of the video. We're going to take this top clip here so the beginning of this static animation, and we're going to place it all the way here at the very end, so you'll see 226 and then 240 at the bottom of that clip. And then we're going to take the remaining static clip and move it over here to the left, so we see one and 15. Now let's drag our playhead back to zero and then play the animation again. Now as we play the video, the two halves of the static video play seamlessly into each other, successfully hiding the part of the animation where it jumps back to the beginning. The static effect looks pretty good, but we can make the effect a lot less abrupt by fading the static in and out rather than a hard cut as it has now. Let's pause our video, and we'll start with the first static clip. So select this clip, right click on it, and then choose fade, fade out. Now let's go to the other clip, the last one. We can right click, fade. And this time, we'll choose fade in. Now we can notice that each one of these clips has a sort of sloped darker area on it. So this one slopes downward, and then this one slopes upward. This shows the direction that they fade in or out as the animation plays. The animation again to see what this looks like. Now we get the benefit of the static hiding the animation starting over, also being a lot more gradual and polished looking. It's not nearly as abrupt and jarring as it was before. This is thanks to the slow fade in and fade out that each clip has. Now we can pause our video, and the video portion of this lesson is now finished. So let's move on to the audio. The real benefit of working with our video after it's been rendered is that we can add things like sound effects. In our case, we'll be adding a subtle static sound at the beginning and the end of the video to pair with the static video that we added. We'll also be adding a spacey, droning noise that sounds like distant asteroids bumping together as dust brushes by the camera. I know, I know space doesn't really have a sound as we know it due to the lack of an atmosphere, but it does make for a more interesting video, so we're going to suspend our disbelief. Let's start with the static sound effect. So we'll go down here to the bottom viewport, hit Shift and A, and then choose sound. It should have automatically placed you into the video assets folder that we pulled the static video from, but if not, you want to navigate there again. Then we're going to choose the staticsund.p3 and click Add Sound Strip. We'll move this over here to the very beginning of the animation and snap it here to the left. Just like the static video clip, our first step is to make some changes to it before we split it into two parts. The main thing that we want to do is make it a lot quieter than it is now. Just like the brightness of the static, we'll be hearing this sound quite often, so we don't want it to be too annoying. So first, make sure you have the static sound clip still selected. Then we'll go over here and click on this Strip properties icon, which is just three white bars on top of each other. And we're going to set this volume slider here to 0.1 and then enter. Changes made the static sound just 10% of its original volume, which is much more appropriate for this subtle effect. The next step is to cut this sound clip in half, just like we did with the static video. So let's move our playhead over here and we're going to set the playhead to 17, which is half of this clip. And then this time, I'm going to show you a new tool to do the same splitting action that we did on the video. It's just a different way to do it. So over here on the left side, we'll notice three different tools. Currently, we have the selection tool enabled. But we also have access to this blade tool below that allows us to cut a clip into two pieces. So let's select that tool now. Over here on our timeline, let's hover our mouse directly on top of this blue line. This is the area where we want to cut the video. Once you have your mouse lined up with the left side of this blade icon, we can just click. I will notice that it's now split this clip into two pieces. This blue line is not strictly necessary. It's just a way for us to guide where we're cutting it and find a good halfway point. Now with this clip cut into two pieces, we can switch back to the selection tool, and that allows us to move these clips around. Going to click on the left static sound clip here to the left side, and we're going to drag this one to the end because this is the beginning of the static sound, which matches up with the beginning of the static effect. And then we'll take this remaining clip and then snap this one to the beginning. And with that step done, let's play our video to see it synced up with the sound effect. So we'll drag it to frame zero, and then we can go down here and play the video. We can see that these sound effects really make the static feel live. If you'd prefer that the static effects were a little quieter, we can always change the volume afterwards. So if you find that these are a little bit too loud for your preference, can pause, select one clip, go over here to volume, and then maybe we'll have it, set it to 0.05, hit Enter, and then remember to do the same thing for the other clip. We'll set that one to 0.05, hit Enter, and then we can start playing it from here at the end. And now we can see that the effect is a bit quieter. So that's really up to your preference. And now we have just one last sound to add. So we're going to hit Shift and A, go to sound, and then we'll choose space drone sound and click Add Sound Strip. Let's drag this over here to the left, and we're going to snap it to the far left side. We won't need to split this clip in half, but we are going to shorten it so that it fits the end of the timeline. Notice over here that it's actually a little bit longer than the timeline is. So to do this, just click on the right side of this clip and then drag it until it snaps with all the others. And then the last step is to lower the volume just like the other clips. So it's a lot more subtle, to make sure you have your clip selected. Go over here to the strip properties, and then we can adjust the volume. We want this to be a pretty quiet sound. So we're going to set this relatively low down to 0.03 and see how that sounds. Because this is just basically the background droning noise. It doesn't need to be very loud. Let's test out a clip here in the middle. I think that sounds pretty good. It's not too loud, but it still has a bit of presence in the animation. As always, feel free to adjust the volume to your preference. Now let's head back to the beginning of the animation and give it a play. These small additions have really brought the world to life and made the animation a lot more interesting. Our last step is to render this image sequence in sound effects into a video file that can be shared online. Let's head over here to the output tab to begin adjusting these settings. Let's scroll down to the very bottom. Now we can choose an output location for the file. So we'll start by clicking on this white folder. Now I'd recommend that you save this video file and the main folder along with your Blender files, just so it's easy to find. This is just going to be a single file, so we don't need to be worrying about making a new folder for it. Let's give this video a name so we can click down here and call this black whole animation underscore zero, one, then we can click except. Our last step is to adjust the settings for the video file itself. Our only adjustment will be found over here underneath the encoding settings, so we'll twirl this open now. Ly, the file type is set to MPEG four, also known as an MP four, which is a very universal file type, so it should work just fine. Our video codec is h.264, which is also, in this case, the default and also very universal. It should work just fine for our purposes. The one setting we will be adjusting, though, is the output quality. We're going to change it from medium quality to perceptually lossless near the top. We'll ensure our video file is as high quality as possible while not making a really, really large file. So it's basically the best you can get without making a huge video file that's hard to share. And that's it. We're ready to render the video file, including the sound effects. We'll render this video file in the exact same way that we rendered the three D animation just by going over here and clicking Render and then Render Image. Time, however, the animation will render significantly faster because it's just rendering image sequences and sound effects rather than calculating the complex three D lighting and materials. It should really only take a minute or so to finish. It'll be much, much faster than the first render. I'll see you in just a moment when this finishes. Now if we check our output location, we should have a video file that we can play, including all the sound effects and visual effects we added. Also notice that I forgot to tell us to put a underscore at the end of the filename, so you can see here what it did. So it's underscore 01, but then it immediately put the filename right after it. So I'm just going to rename this by clicking on it, and then manually place this underscore here and then hit Enter. This is an optional step. I just don't really like how it runs directly into our version number. We can double click on the video and play our animation. The animation looks and sounds great. We can make this animation even more sharable, though, by converting it into an animated gift. Even if it does mean that the sound effects will be lost when we do so. We'll always have the video file to share, though, so we have the option of choosing the right format for the right platform. In the next lesson, we'll convert the video file into an animated GIF. I'll see you there. 21. Creating an Animated GIF: Yeah. In this lesson, we'll convert the video file into an animated GIF. Let's begin. Our video file has been rendered, but we can make it even more universal by converting it into an animated gift. Animated gifts are a really useful file format for platforms that don't let you upload a video file directly. Platforms like Skillshare don't allow you to upload a video file directly to your class project yet. However, you can upload an animated GIF with no issue at all. The first thing we need to do, though, is to go to this free converter website. We'll be using the website, easygif.com slash MR to create our gifts. It's a really simple and free way to convert our video file into an animated GIF file. We'll start by clicking on the Choose Files button found here. Now navigate to wherever you save your video file from the last lesson. After you've found it, we can select it here and then click Open. With our file chosen, we can go down here and click Upload Files. This process might take a minute or two to complete. I'll see you in just a moment when the video is uploaded. With our video now uploaded, we can change some of the settings for the gift. So we're going to scroll down this list here until we see these settings. Let's start by changing the size. So we're going to change it from original up to 800 instead to 500 by Auto. Will make the gift 500 pixels wide, and then however tall it needs to be in order to maintain the same aspect ratio. We're going to change the FPS to 15, which is half of 30. This will make the GIF a little bit more choppy, but it should reduce the file size, and you won't notice it too much in the smaller format. With these settings changed, we can go down here and just click Convert to GIF. Again, this might take a moment, but we can see as soon as it's done, it pops up the GIF down here. If this gift seems a little bit extra choppy or it's playing a little too slow, let it play through one time and then after that first play, it'll have cached some of this data and then it should be playing at its correct speed. One particularly important bit of information we can see below this GIF and that's here, the file size. Right now, mine is at 8.36, so a little bit over 8 megabytes. Some platforms have a maximum size for uploaded images. In the case of Skillshare, the image needs to be smaller than 8 megabytes, which ours is currently over. Luckily, this site also has a very easy to use optimized feature that can help us shrink the file size of our GIF. We can get to the optimized settings by going to here where it says optimize the GIF or by going down here and clicking this optimized button. Main way you'll be adjusting the file size is by adjusting this compression level. Larger compression levels will make the file size smaller after the loss of quality, whereas a smaller compression level will make the file size a little less small, so it won't be quite as big of an adjustment, but it also won't mess with the quality quite as much. For this particular gift, we're already very close to 8 megabytes, which is our goal. So we don't really need to have a very high compression level. File size, however, depends pretty heavily on how the colors are in your image or how big your image is overall, the length of the animation. So this can be pretty variable depending on the person that's doing it. So if this is your own personal project or even if you just change some of the colors, you might notice a different file size. So your compression level might need to be higher or lower depending on what you're. My case, I'm going to leave this at 15 and then click Optimize GIF. We can always change this later. After clicking this button and waiting a moment, we can scroll down and now see the new GIF, as well as its new size. The quality of this gift isn't all that different than the first one. So I'm pretty happy with this level of compression. If the level of compression that you used either wasn't enough or it was too much, you can always go back up here and change this number. Because I have so much more room before it hits 8 megabytes, I might lower this compression value. So I'm going to lower this down to eight, so roughly half. And then after typing eight and hitting Enter, it'll immediately start reprocessing it. So that really didn't make a whole lot of difference. The image looks pretty much the same, and the file size is also pretty similar. So let's lower this all the way down to something like five. For this type of compression, five is actually the lowest value you can use, so it can't go any lower than this. We can see after a level of five compression, it does look a little bit better, and our file size is still below 8 megabytes, which works perfect for us. You're happy with how your GIF looks, we can right click on the image and then just choose Save Image As and save our GIF. I'd recommend you save this GIF in the same place that you save the original video animation as well as the Blender file, just so everything is all together. Down here, we can name this GIF file. I'll just call this Black hoole animation, underscore GIF. It'll be in the file type, but I find it easier just to have it in the name as well, and then I'll do underscore 01 in case I want to version this. Now with our name set, we can just click Save. And that's it. We're done. You can now upload this animated GIF as though it were a regular image file on many different platforms. Example, if you're uploading a project to Skillshare, choose the image upload rather than the video upload when adding media to your class project. Don't forget to add it to your textbox, though. If you only add it to your cover image, it'll be cropped and the animation won't play. One important thing to note about animated gifts before we end, though. Due to this being an image format, it doesn't contain any sound. If you want to share a version of your animation with sound, you'll need to actually share the video file that we created. For those of you sharing your projects on Skillshare, I'd recommend uploading your video to YouTube, then sharing a link to that video. And the next lesson, we'll learn some ways you can customize your animation to make it unique to you and your style. I'll see you there. We 22. Class Project Examples: In this lesson, we'll discuss the class project and learn some useful tips that customize your render. Let's begin. Now that we have the example from class completed, we're ready to learn some tips that we can use to make our renders more unique to our own personal style. These changes don't need to be super complicated to have a profound impact on the look and feel of your render. We'll focus on easily attainable changes in this lesson while touching on some of the more ambitious things that you could tackle near the end of this lesson. First step is to make sure that you have the three D file open that we worked on throughout most of this class. Now with the three D file, not the video editing file open, we're going to go over here and make sure that we're set to the layout workspace found here at the top left. Then we'll set our left view port to the rendered mode, clicking this button here. And then we'll also make sure that we're in the camera view, seeing these little dotted lines here showing the frame of the camera. If you're not in the camera view, just click this button here. Before we start making any changes to this file, we're going to want to branch it out into its own unique version. This will allow us to have the example from class saved while also having a new class project version of the file that we can edit without having to worry about effecting the original version. First, let's make sure that you have this original file saved at its current progress. This will be our final version for the class example. So we'll just go over here and click File and then save. We need to save a class project version of this file. Again, we'll go back up here to file, and then this time we'll choose Save As. Now we just need to change the name to something different. Down here in the filename where it's red right now, showing us that it's using the exact same filename. We're going to go to the beginning of the name and just type in class project underscore. It's very obvious that this is a different version. With the name changed, we can go over here and click Save As. All right, we've successfully branched this file, and Blender has already opened up the class project version for us. We don't need to open it up again. So right now we're currently in the class project version. We have a new version of this file that we can edit without fear of messing up our hard work from the class. Before we begin our first change, I do want to emphasize that this lesson is entirely meant to give you ideas for how you could change your own scene to make it look how you want. Feel free to follow along with what I do just to get comfortable, but the end goal of this lesson is to give you the tools that you need to make a version of the scene that you like. You can experiment while you watch this lesson and choose different settings, or you can wait until the end after we've gone through all the tips and then go back and customize your scene further. Either way, have fun and don't stress out too much about matching exactly what I do. This lesson will be a bit more free form for that exact reason. All right, let's begin. Over here on the left viewport, over here in the left viewport, let's enable a setting that will give us a rough preview of the compositing effects that we added to the render right inside this three D viewport. This will be useful for getting a better idea of what the final render actually looks like. We can do that over here at the top, right next to this render button that we've been switching to. We're going to click on this dropdown button, and then at the very bottom of this list, we can see here compositing. Right now it's set to disabled. We're going to choose camera. And now, right away, we can see our image looks a lot more similar to the final render rather than the original version, I didn't have all the other compositing effects. So we're going to leave it set to camera. Is important to note that this is just a preview of the compositing effects. For that reason, some of the effects will behave a little incorrectly in the viewport, even if they look correct in the final render. The Sunbeam glare effect, in particular, has some trouble in the viewport. As the center, the render is constantly changing as we zoom in and out and pan on the viewpoint. So if over here, we zoom in a little bit and we pan around, we'll see that these lines here kind of follow where the center is now rather than where it should be. So it's important to know that this is just kind of a rough preview in the actual render these will be correctly facing. The first and easiest adjustment will be to the colors in the scene. We'll remember from the very beginning of the class that a large portion of the color found in the nebulae surrounding the black hole is the color of the lights that we placed. Changing the colors of these lights is the easiest way to adjust the color palette of the scene. So first, let's change the orange light. We'll find that over here in our list, and we're going to scroll down to the bottom and then find light orange and just select it. Now we'll go down here to the object data properties, clicking on this green light bulb icon. Mycene example, I'm going to make all of my lights cool colors like purples and blues. So let's select this color bar here, and we're just going to change this to kind of a violet, sort of lilac color. Somewhere around this kind of purply blue color, maybe a little bit more blue. Somewhere around here looks fine for mycene. If you'd like to follow along, just pick a purply blue color. Don't worry about getting these numbers exact. And if you don't want to follow along exactly with this purple color, you could choose a green or a yellow or teal, whatever you'd like. Just choose the color that you think looks cool. Can see how just changing this one singular light in this scene has really changed the look of the render. By making the colors largely dependent on the lighting in the scene, we've made it really easy for ourselves to completely change the look of the scene just with a few simple changes. Before we make any other changes, let's adjust the name on this light so it better matches what it actually is. So we'll get rid of the word orange, and I'm just going to call this purple. Now let's go through and adjust any light that doesn't match the look that we want for our scene. So I'm going to select this green light here from the list, and I'll make this one instead, maybe a bright blue color. Somewhere around here looks pretty good. Again, don't worry about these exact numbers. Just pick a blue color or whatever color you think looks nice. Let's change the name of this light to light dash blue. I'll leave the original pink light as it is, as that color matches the new look that I'd like for my scene anyway, but feel free to change it for yours if you'd like. And then, lastly, I'm going to change these blue front and blue back lights to a really bright pinkish color, maybe a little pinkish red to provide a bit more contrast to the scene. So we'll start with the front light, select this one, blue front, and then adjust this color to somewhere down here. Looks pretty cool, so we'll leave it there. I'll also make this light brighter because this red doesn't stand out quite as much. So I'll set this to 4,000 for the power just to brighten it up a bit. Let's rename this light from light blue front to light red front. And then before we select the other light, I'll just hover over this color, hit Control C to copy it. And now we can select light blue back, hover over the color, hit Control V to paste that exact same pinkish red color in there. And then we'll also double the power of this light to 10,000 100, zero, zero. And then finally rename this to light red back. With those few very easy changes, we have a very different looking render with a little bit of effort on our part. It's also pretty easy to change the color of the black hole as well. Let's head over to the shading workspace now found here at the top. We'll set the top view to the rendered mode and then also click on this drop down menu here and then change it to compositing camera. Now at the top right in our list, we're going to select the black hole object, and then we'll start by adjusting the material on slot one, so the exterior material. Now let's zoom out a bit. Then we can see here that the only thing really adjusting the color that we're seeing here, this orange color is this color ramp note here at the bottom. That's all we need to adjust. So I'll zoom in down here to this bottom color ramp, and then we're going to select slider one, which is the orange slider. Click on this color bar, and then I'm going to pick a blue, green, minty color for this. Maybe something a little closer to green. Right around here looks pretty good. This color stands out pretty nicely with all the pinks and blues in the background. Always, though, choose the color that you think looks cool for your scene. Now we need to adjust the interior of the black hole, which is this little orange line that goes around the center. Before we do that, let's hover over this color to copy it. Control C, and then we can switch to slot two for the interior black hole material. And then in my case, I was pretty much zoomed in exactly where I needed to be, but it's right here at the bottom. We'll zoom in down here, make sure we have the slider one selected, and then hover over this color bar, hit Control and V to paste it, and then I'll change the color right away. And then, lastly, we'll adjust the accretion disc material found over here by selecting the black hole accretion disc. Now, let's zoom out on the material editor. And in this case, we have two different places that we need to adjust the color. Both over here on the principled BSDF. I'm just going to hover over this base color here at the top of the principled SDF and hit Control V to paste that exact same blue color in there. Then again, one more time down here in the emission control and V on top of this color bar, and that'll change the color of this entire accretion disc for us. That's it for the black hole color adjustments. It's that easy. Again, we'll see how simple changes like the color completely transform the look and feel of your render. There are definitely other materials in here that you could adjust within the scene, such as the stars or the asteroids, but I'll allow you to explore those areas on your own. Now let's move on to our next adjustment. Let's head back to the layout workspace found here at the top. For this adjustment, let's change the size of the black hole to make it significantly larger and more impactful within our view. So first, we'll go over here to our list, scroll up to the top, and then we're going to select the black hole and then hold Shift and select Black Hole accretion disk. So we have both parts selected. Now, over here in our left view port, we can just hit S on our keyboard to start scaling, and we can scale this up significantly larger than it was before to really make it impactful in the view. Somewhere around here is fine. New larger size really dominates the view and showcases all of its fine details. So we can really get a look here at the accretion disc and the bands in it as well as the cloudy appearance around the outside of the black hole. The cost of this increased detail, though, is the loss of the surrounding areas being obscured by the black hole. This is a choice you'll have to make for your own render, but for my example, I think it looks pretty cool having the black hole so much larger in the view. For our next change, let's head over to the compositing workspace found here at the top. First, you'll need to render your image if you haven't done so recently. So we can just go over here to render render image. Now we have the option to customize some of the existing effects or add new ones. Let's start by adjusting an existing effect. With this really large black hole, we might expect to see more distortion in the image. Let's zoom in down here to the lens distortion node near the end of the chain, and we can adjust this dispersion value here, the bottom slider to make the distortion even more powerful because the black hole is so much closer to the view. So let's let this dispersion to 0.1 instead and see how that looks. This increased dispersion value makes the larger black hole feel like it's tearing apart the light as it's being pulled into the center of it. Can see it over here. It's really starting to stretch these areas out. So I think that looks pretty cool. If you wanted to, you could also adjust this distortion value here, and then I'll actually bend your image, making it either push inward or push outward towards you. So if you make it a lower number, it'll go inward. If you make it a higher number, it'll come towards you. And this can really change the look of it. For my case, I'm just going to leave this set to zero because I think it looks fine without it. So what about adding a new effect? What could be? Maybe you want to make your image even more stylized for your animation, giving it almost painterly look. If that's the case, we can zoom out here, go to the end of this list, hit Shift and A to bring up our ad menu, go to search, and then we'll type in posterize. POST and then choose posterize here at the top. Then we'll just drag this up here and place it on the small segment of wire here to the left. That'll connected in, so it's between these. This posterize effect will simplify the soft gradients and render into sharper, more banded gradients. Has a pretty interesting effect on our image due to how much of the image relies on subtle gradients between similar colors. So we can zoom in here on this node here and see that right now it's set to eight steps. So it's breaking our image into eight different bands. Obviously, that pretty severely degrades the image because it's not enough colors. So let's set it to a higher value like 40 and we'll get a lot more colors back into our image, and it looks more similar to how it did before. But it does add this really interesting painterly effect to the image. So if this is a look that you're after, this might be a useful node for you. As always, these compositing changes we just made are optional, feel free to change them for your render as you see fit. After applying this posterized note here, you don't like it, could simply just bypass it and leave it there for later if you want to come back to it, or you can just delete it entirely. It's up to you. For my case, just for the sake of example, I'm going to leave it on the image just so it has a little bit of a different look. For our last change, let's head back to the layout workspace found here at the top left. The animation of our camera plays a big role in the overall look of our final video. Let's adjust the camera's animation to change up the overall look and feel of the animation. For the sake of example, I'll make my camera's movement a bit more extreme just so we can get an idea of how this might look. So first, let's go over here to the list, scroll down to the bottom and then choose the camera from the list. Now in our timeline, we're going to go down here to frame 240, and now we're going to use a new tool to adjust the placement of our camera. So over here in our left viewport, we're going to click on this little lock eye just below the camera icon. This button allows us to change the position of our camera simply by adjusting its perspective directly in the viewport. This means that we can navigate around in this viewport, and we'll see here that it's actually moving the camera with it. You don't need to manually move the camera around and rotate it and position it. You can just jump into the camera over here with this lock icon one and position it exactly where you'd like it. For this example, I'm going to zoom in a little bit and then position the camera a little bit further to the right just to make the push in a little bit more drastic for the video. Probably go a little bit higher as well. Somewhere around there, I think, looks fine. Now that we've moved the camera, we do need to update the keyframes to make sure Blender saves the movement, so we can go over here to the object properties tab, and then we'll hover our mouse over top of the location values that are in orange and then hit I on our keyboard to place a new keyframe and update the old one. Now if we go down here and slide the playhead back and forth, you can see how much more our camera moves towards the black hole than it did before. It gets a lot closer to these asteroids, as well, which is pretty cool. With our camera movement updated, we can go over here and then click on this lock icon to turn ability to move the camera from withinside of it. It's pretty easy to forget that you have that checked on, and then you'll try to zoom into your image and then realize you accidentally moved your camera. So try to remember to turn this off when you're done with it. If you want to adjust your camera angle even further, you could animate the position of the camera target object over time, as well. So we can go over here and select the camera target object, which is an empty. Then we can go down here to frame zero. Can choose to move the camera target before we place our keyframe or we can just leave it in place where it's at now. For my example, I'll just leave it where it's at now. So over here in the object properties tab, we're just going to hover over the location and then hit I to place our keyframe. Now go to frame 240 very end of the animation, and then we'll move our mouse over here to the left viewport and hit G to move this object. Let's move it over here so that the black hole is right in the center of the view just to give it a bit of a difference from the original. After you found the location you like, just left click to place it. With our change made, let's go over here and hit I on top of these location values to update the keyframe. We'll also want to adjust these keyframes to be linear like the rest of the animation. So hover over the timeline at the bottom, hit A to select all the keyframes, then T to bring up the interpolation, and then choose linear. Now if we drag our playhead back and forth, you can see just how much more movement we've gotten in our animation just with a few easy changes. So this is a lot more dynamic. And now we've reached the end of the tips that I have for this lesson. But that doesn't mean that this is the extent of what you can achieve on your own personal projects. You could tackle more ambitious changes, such as adding new models, like a spaceship or a comet flying through space, or you could show an asteroid succumbing to the overwhelming gravity of the black hole and being sucked into the center. You could also change the sound effects or visuals that we added in the video at the next step. Maybe you could even add some cinematic music to really increase the drama of the on screen visuals. Ultimately, you're the creator of this little universe, so you can do whatever you think looks cool. Don't let the fear of making something perfect stop you from creating something that looks awesome. Experiment and have fun. Try not to stress out about the little details, and just do your best to express yourself and learn some new tricks along the way as you try new things. I can't wait to see what you come up with. Done with your personalized version of the animation, simply follow the steps found in the previous lessons to render the animation with a new name so you don't overrate the original one, then load it into the video editing Blender file that we had before, and render the final animation. The steps are pretty much identical, so I know that you'll be able to figure it out on your own. Good luck with your own projects, please don't hesitate to ask me any questions big or small if you run into any issues. I'm more than happy to help. In the last lesson, we'll end the class with some conclusions and farewells. I'll see you there. 23. Conclusion: Congratulations on reaching the end of our class. I wanted to take a moment to thank each and every one of you for taking my class. Your participation and excitement for learning is incredibly rewarding for me as a teacher, and I can't thank you enough. I hope you've had fun learning how to create this awe inspiring Black Hole animation and Blender. It's been a pleasure guiding you, and I hope you found the class both enjoyable and valuable. Now that you've got these awesome new skills under your belt, I can't wait to see where your creativity takes you. I wish you the best of luck in creating your own awesome animations and Blender. If you like this class, let other students know by leaving your review. Your feedback really helps me understand what you found most valuable in the class. You can leave a review easily by going to the Reviews tab just below this video and clicking the leave of Review button. I appreciate the support. After leaving a review, you might want to follow me here on Skillshare, as well. You can follow me at any time by clicking the Follow button above this video or by going into my teacher profile and clicking the follow button there. Following me is the best way to get notified when I release a new class or make important announcements. Don't forget to check out my teacher profile for more classes just like this. You might find something else that interests you. Lastly, I wanted to thank you all again so much for taking my class and supporting me by participating in the class project. I can't wait to see what you all come up with. Well for now, and I hope to see you in another class soon.