Blender Cosmos: Create Realistic Looking Nebulas in Blender

1. Trailer: Hello, and welcome to creating realistic looking nebulas in blender. If you ever dealt with nodes and volumes in blender, you know how frustrating it can get. Probably you have also seen some of those crazy note trees and wondered how someone can create such a thing and how they even understand what's happening. Well, this course is trying to make this easier. Throughout this course, you will learn how to create a nice, realistic looking nebula, 100% in Blender. At first, we will start by creating the basic shape of the and then we will move to how to mold and shape it the way we want using some clever techniques. This will be really fun. I promise. Once we have a shape we're happy with, we will introduce more details to it to make it look even better. To finish everything, we will also cover how to render and composite nebula. So by the end of this course, you will have a nice piece of art you can share. But most importantly, this course is a nice exercise on certain aspects of blender that most of the time get neglected. Or people simply assume it is complicated, so they glance over it, like how to use nodes to create procedural stuff using math in blender or even how to use math to shape things in artistic ways, which I think is a really important skill to have. And besides creating a nice looking nebula, my goal is to unlock new concepts, new ways of how to think about nodes, and to better visualize and understand exactly what they do. I'm really trying to make something new click on your mind, and I'm really chasing that moment when you will say. Ah. Okay, I finally get it. Honestly, that will be the ultimate goal in this course. So if this sounds like something you're interested in, I can't wait to see you inside the course. 2. Scene Preparation: Hello, welcome to the first video of creating Nebuls in Blender. In this first video, we will prepare Blender for all the work that we will be doing throughout this course. We will activate some add ons, adjust the render settings, and overall, set the environment for the nebula. So yeah, it's time to jump into blender. Okay. Hello, and welcome inside of Blender. And as I mentioned before, in this video, we are going to prepare the scene for all the work that we will be doing. We will be adjusting some render settings, activate some add ons we will need during this course, and we will just prepare the overall environment for the nebula. So let's start doing that. The first thing I want to start with is to enable some add ons. What I mean by add ons, honestly, is just one add on, which is the node wrangler. So go to edit preferences, and from here, go to add ons, which is here, and let's look for node wrangler. And yeah, I already enabled it. So make sure to check this box to enable this add on. Up until this point, I don't know why Blender doesn't ship with this add on already active. I did some research on why is that happening. And what I found is that the nodragular add on, it's not developed by blender, and it does have some quirky things on how to enable certain features. Let's say it uses some cheating sometimes, and that's why the developers of blender, they always were hesitant to, like, fully integrate it in the software. But the really nice thing is that they are slowly implementing more and more feature that does exist in the node wrangler. They are integrating it directly into blender, which is always nice. So maybe one day, Blender will come with all of those features of the node regular add on already built in. Anyway, this course is not about the node wrangler, so let's get back to creating our nebula. Once you activate the add on, I'm going to close this, and let's start working. And one thing that which will be the most special thing during this course, we will not be deleting the default cube. We will actually keep it because that will be the base of our nebula. The second thing I'm going to do is to check this light, which is called light surprisingly. But if I jump here to the properties, you will find that it is a point light. Later on, we will probably use one point light. But as the main source of illumination for our nebula, it should be a sun, which I find kind of poetic because we're talking about nebulas, and there's a lot of stars, so a lot of suns. So kind of makes sense. Okay, this was a silly joke. Anyway, so make sure to change this point to sun. And for the strength, I'm going to get it back to one or actually, you know what, instead of changing all of these settings and trying to remember what does the sun have as default settings, let's delete the slide, select it an x, and then delete, and let's go shift A, and let's add a sun. This was easier. Sorry for wasting your time. I'm going to hit Z and move it up, let's say 3 meters, and something to always remember about the sun light. The location of the slight doesn't matter. If I just jump really quick to the rendered view and I try to move the light, it doesn't matter that I'm moving this light. What really matters is the direction of the sun. So yeah, don't worry about the position. Worry about the rotation. The only reason we're moving it up is just for visual clarity. This is number one. Number two, because obviously, right now, I'm using EV, I need to change it to cycles because cycles is better. To do that, let's jump to the render settings. From here, change from EV and you can see EV next, which will come soon. But for now, we will still be in cycles. Let's change the device from CPU to GPU compute, which will allow you to have faster renders because you're using your external graphic card. For the viewport sample, when we are looking to the scene, I'm going to disable the noise threshold and reduce the samples to something like 32. This will not the ideal. You will see later when we're dealing with the nebula and lot of volumes, 32 is really low to actually make any creative decisions. But at the same time, you will find yourself limited by how much you can do in real time. So in my case, 32 was the right balance between performance and being able to see at least some big shapes to make some creative decisions about the look. So in case you have really decent GPU, you can probably even crank this number a little bit up to something like 64 or 128. This will give you more visual clarity and will allow you to make more creative decisions. Later, especially when it comes to shaping the nebula and colorizing it and all of those stuff. Now for the noise threshold in the render, I'm also going to disable that, and I'm going to render the scene at 128 samples. The render you're seeing right now is at 128 samples. So I think it is suitable, and it is a good point between performance and speed. Even though it took me like decent time to render it. But 128 will be good enough for a good visual colarity when it comes to creating this ebula. Let's disable the Denise because we will be doing it later in compositing. Now let's move to light paths. The light path settings will allow you to change how the different rays of light behave inside of your scene. As you can see right now, the Mx bounces are set to 12. Which means that for one ray of light, Blender will calculate 12 different bounces. In other words, let's say there is a light coming from here, it will go here, here, here, here, here, here, here. Basically, what I'm trying to say, Blender will calculate 12 bounces. Now, of course, the reality is way more complicated than that because these rays are not emitted from the light. They are actually emitted from the camera. And that's why it is called rate racing, but that's a topic for another time. All you need to know because we are in space, there is no bounces. I hope this is physically correct. That's why I'm going to kill the total 20. Let's kill also the diffuse to zero, kill the glossy to zero. And let's keep the transmission to 12 because that number scares me. Nebuls does have certain level of transparency. It makes sense to keep this transmission high to have some transparency going on. Keep it at 12. I didn't encounter any problems with 12. Let's jump now to the second tab, which is the output. I'm going to keep all of these settings the way they are. The only thing I want this animation to be 5 seconds in length, which is to be honest is already overkilled because nebulas take a lot of time to render. And yeah, so do five multiply by 24, which is my frame rate, and that will give you 120. Let's jump to the view layer. This will allow you to check some different passes that will help you later on in compositing. For now, we will not stress a lot about compositing and all of those stuff. The only thing you need to keep in mind is to check denoising data, which basically means that Blender will render some extra data to help in the denoising process. How can you use the denoising data by jumping to the compositing, and there is a really famous sentence I always use. Think of compositing as the process that happens once your render is finished. So when I check use nodes, my render will be coming out of this render layers node, and everything that will happen here, it is something that will happen after that. So what I want to do is to denoise my render. So go Shift A, and let's look for denise. Let's pick de noise and put it here, plug the denoising normal to the normal and the denoising albedo to the albedo. And really handy thing, make sure to activate this magnet because this will make the nodes stick to the grid, and I always find that so satisfying. This is number one, and also once we denise our render, we want to save it. How can we tell Blender that, hey, Blender, please save these files because they take a lot of time to render. You can do that by adding a file output node. Look for file output, this one right here, and let's plug it to the image. Let's check this file output and jump to node and properties to change all the different settings. Here's a shortcut that changed my life. Actually, it didn't. Basically, if you write three slashes, or let's say if you write two slashes, this way, you're telling blender that, hey, Blender, I want you to save it inside the folder where the project file is. In other words, Blender will save the images inside the folder where this blender file exists, which is a really nice thing because you don't have to actually manually pick to save each time. But we don't want blender to save all the images in the folder where our blender project lives. That's why I'm going to do another slash and write render. And then another slash. And by doing this, you will tell Blender that hey, blender. Jump to where this blender file exists, and then create a folder called render and save all the images there. Especially once you memorize this, three slashes, render slash, and you don't have to actually use this feature anymore, which is really nice. For the fire format, let's jump to open XR, which is better. And for the RGB, I'm going to keep it at RGBA. Probably we will not use the alpha channel. In case you don't know, the Alpha channel is the transparency channel. We will not be using it, but just in case if somehow we needed it. I'm going to keep it at RGBA, but probably will be good also with RGB. For the color depth, I'm going to use float health. Float fo honestly is so overkilled and probably most of the movies will do just fine with just float health. And for the Cx plus less, I'm going to change it to DWB loss. I'm still trying to understand all the differences between all of these different codex. But as far as I research, the best option and the best one in terms of quality and in terms of the size of the final files is the DWB loss, and that's what I will always recommend. And for the image, I'm going to call this nebula. Score. Later on, the sequence of images I will have will be called Nebula 001, nebula 002, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera until Nebula 120. Later on, we'll be doing more compositing, but that will be in the end of the course. Now, let's focus a little bit more on how to create this nebula. Let's jump back to the layout, and let's finalize everything we'll be doing. Number one, let's organize all of these different elements. The sun will be under a folder called let's call it sun. Because it is the sun. For the cube, this will also be called the nebula. So let's move it in a new collection by typing Nebula. And the collection that does contain the camera, I always like to call it scene because it does have all the scene elements. So this is how we will organize our blender file, the hierarchy of the different objects. Let's also do some window management. I'm going to bring this up, and let's jump to the solid view. I'm going to also bring another viewer from here and hit zero from here to jump to what the camera sees. I always find the setup really appealing because I can always work in three D here, see what my camera is here. And if I need any other thing like the shader editor, I will use it in this area right here. Let's clean this visual mess a little bit here, so it to hide the toolbar. Let's hide all of these different overlays. I also like to jump to my camera, and I'm going to change the focal length to 24. When I was creating my original scene, I didn't know that I will use 24. And it took some trial and error until I found 24. It's not like a big deal, but I'm just going to set this for 24 because that's the same focal length I use for my final shots, especially because this cube is kind of small. I want wider lens to capture as much as possible of this nebula, set this to 24. And also in the viewport display, there is an option for the pass partou which is actually a French word, which in Blender means that it will make all the areas that are not inside what the camera sees will be black. So it will turn all of these areas right here to black and look what will happen. Boom. Speaking of that, also, you can always jump if I'm not mistaken to the output, and you should have here to render region and crop to render region, which will basically mean that Blender will only render the stuff that are inside this box. This is the same thing as when you hit Control B and you create a box around the area you wanted to render. This is our basic window management. And I think I'm also going to move my camera. So let's move it a little bit closer, something like so and hit Control A zero to move it to this position. So this is what my camera is seeing right now. Let's change this to the shader editor. Let's select our cube, and let's call this material nebula. We're not going to use the principle BSDF because we're going to deal with volumes. So let's delete the principle SDF, and I'm not going to tell you what shader we will be using that I will keep for the next video, where we will create the basic shape for our nebula. So now, make sure to save your blender file for the next session, and I will see you in the next video, where we will create the basic shape for our nebula. Thank you and see you in the next one. 3. Create the Base Shape of the Nebula: Hello, and welcome back to the second video of creating Nebulas in Blender. This video is special because we will create the basic shape of the nebula using volumes. This will be a great opportunity to learn more about volumes and how to shape and transform them in really cool ways. So, Let's jump into Blender. Hello, and welcome back everyone inside of Blender. And as I mentioned in this video, we are going to create the basic shape for our nebula. Now, here's something. When I first started thinking about the way of how to create a nebula, I thought that, you can maybe just maybe create, for example, sphere. Let's say Shift A, and let's add UVphere let's jump to the localized view. And maybe somehow if I do enough extrusions, I will be able to somehow start getting certain shape or create the shape of ebula basically trying to create the shape of nebula by actual modeling. I doubled a little bit with that, because that's the first instinct you'll have. Okay, I want to create a nebula. So try to model it. But that's a really trerible thing because there is something that slipped away from me, which is what are nebula. If you Google atar Nebula, you will find this interesting thing. Actually, it is not interesting, but in my case, or our case, it is interesting, which is Nebula is a cloud of gas and dust in outer space. This is all I care about, a cloud of gas and dust, which means that either you should create really small particles to simulate how gases and dust acts like, maybe using something like geometry nodes to do that. And Technically, or let's say theoretically should get you close to the idea or nebulas, by creating small particles, as I said, and making them behave and shaping them in the form of a nebula. That can be a viable process or number two, by creating volumes or volume shading in blender. And that's the path we will take during this course. We will try to create nebula by using the principled volume node inside of blender. I'm going to delete this weird shape I have created X and then delete. Let's jump back to the normal view, and yeah, let's select this cube. And as you remember, last time I said that I deleted the principle B SDF because it is not what we will be using. We will be using the principled volume, which you can add by hitting Shift A and looking for principled volume. And let's connect the volume to the volume. The best way I can explain what are volumes in blender or what is actually volume shading. In normal shading, you're addressing what should appear in the surface. Okay? When you add, for example, a texture and you put it inside the surface socket. What happens is that blender will slap the texture on the surface of the object. When we talk about volumes, blender will put whatever you plug into the volume, it will try to put it inside of the cube, so it is bigger. So we're talking about the inside of the cube. And that's how you create gases, explosions, et cetera. If I jump right now to the rendered view to see what does it look like, you can see it is just a black thing here in the middle. That's not what we want, and there are actually two things I notice right now. First of all, if I just jump to the environment or the world properties, you will notice that the world is already emitting some sort of light. In space, there is no such thing as global illumination. That's why I'm going to drop down the strength to zero. So everything is black, and somehow this principled volume is right now gray. The main reason for that being is because of the sun, the sun is the one responsible for eliminating this volume. And it feels like it is too low the strength. So let's bring it up to something like two, double it. Let's jump back to the nebula. This density factor will allow you to control how dense the volume is. Basically, if you crank this number to something like 50, it will almost act like it is a cube, a solid cube. But when you lower it down to something like one, it acts like a gas. This density slider does have a really interesting implication. Because it control the density, if we can just find a way to tell Blender, Hey, Blender. In certain areas, we want the volume to be dense, and in other areas, we want the volume to not be dense. This theoretically should give us something similar to how nebulae look like. We need to plug something here. And what is the node that will allow you to do such a thing? It is the famous node called, Noise texture. So go shift A and look for noise, noise texture, and plug the factor into the density. This will give you the following result. I don't know if you can see it clearly, but right now, there are certain areas that are less dense than others. To make this effect more visible, I'm going to add a color ramp after this, so go shift A and add a color ramp. Let's plug it here. And if I start dragging this flag up, You can see how I'm controlling. I'm basically making this noise texture a little bit more contrasty. Just to see what's happening, if you hit control shift and click on a certain node, you will be able to preview it. So this is how the noise texture looks like. Here's what it looks after the color ramp. I'm basically making it more contrasty. And when I plug this to the volume, it will give me, okay, I'm going to disconnect this from the surface because I want it to only go to the volume. This will give you the following look, which looks like clouds. Let me also bring this white flag a little bit to the left. And we'll adjust all of these settings later a little bit more. But now, we're starting to get something interesting. We're starting to get something that looks like clouds. And theoretically, if we just know the right buttons and the right settings to use, we will be able to shape this blob into something that looks like nebula. Everything we will be doing during the next couple of videos will be attempting to shape this volume into something that looks like nebula. But at the heart of this setup, it is this noise texture plugged into the density of a principled volume. Everything else is just a way of how to shape the volume. Now, I want to make all of this a little bit denser. So how can I do this? Maybe some people might suggest playing a little bit with the noise texture, but that's not what I will be doing. I'm actually going to add a math node, so go Shift A and let's add a math and change this operation from D to multiply. So I'm multiplying the values that are coming from here by this value. So right now it is 0.5. When you multiply a number by 0.5, you're basically dividing it by two. So right now, I'm dividing the density by two. That's not what I want. I want to multiply it a little bit more, and you can do that by increasing this number. So let's say I increase it to 100. And something happen. Now, this volume is way way denser. Let's pick something like 50 to see the effect more clear, 25. And yeah. This is how our volume is looking like right now. But there is a problem right now. This volume doesn't look good. It looks like it is just a blob. So how can we increase the resolution or the quality of this volume? This will bring me to the most important setting in this entire course, which is related to the render settings. I'm not going to touch on these, the rendering samples and all of that. I'm actually going to jump way way down to the volumes. This step called volumes, control the quality of your volumes. These settings right here are the main settings that will decide how good and how defined your final nebula will look. The lower these two numbers are. The more quality you will have and more details you will have, and the bigger this max steps, the more also steps you will have, and therefore, better quality. And the most time consuming part for me was trying to find the right values or where you can actually be able to render the scene while also having a good visual clarity. In my case, both of these two numbers were 0.01. And once you do that, you will notice that your volume kind becomes more detailed. This volume right now is really detailed. You might wonder, hey, but there's not that much of a change if I get this back to one. Okay, so this is one, and this is 0.01, and there is not that much of a change. In this case, this volume is really detailed, but the problem, it looks blobby is because of the noise texture. We didn't adjust the right settings. But once we adjust the settings of the noise texture, we will be able to get a really detailed nebula. And for the next steps, I think it is a little bit over killed when it is 1024. That's why I'm going to drop it down to 128. Later on in the course, we will be getting back to these volume settings to see how our nebula will hold with different step rates. But for now, we're going to keep it at 0.01, but also, I need to mention this in case your computer doesn't hold up, which is that you can bring this number up to one. These numbers work in reverse, so bigger number are easier to render and smaller numbers means more details. Let me get it back to 0.01, and now let's adjust some settings in my noise texture. I'm going to change the type from three D to four D, which will act like a seed number, which will allow you to change the look of the nebula in case you don't like what you're seeing. You can play with this slider until you get something interesting or a look that you like. In my case, I'm going to leave it at 22. For the scale, I'm going to drop it down on to two or let's say three for now. Later, we will drive the scale also using another noise texture. But for now, I'm just going to use three. For the details, I'm going to increase it to something like four, let's say, and now let's let's try six. And yeah, six seems to add way more details, and you can clearly start seeing some visual details here in my volume. And also, right now, we're not using a texture coordinate node. So go shift A, and let's add a texture coordinate to tell exactly Blender how it should maps the volumes where I'm going to use the object, which means I can bring this number even down to something like one or two, And for the scale, if you remember, I mentioned that I'm going to drive it with another noise texture. If I select this node and hit shift D to duplicate it, let's take the object and plug it here and plug the factor into the scale. When we plug this noise texture into the scale. This means that the scale of this noise texture will also vary from place to place. I'm going to select this noise texture. Here's the back space to rest it to the default values, and let's increase the level of detail to something like six, and I'm going to add a color ramp, so go shift A and add color ramp. Let's put it here. I'm going to make it way more contrasty. Let's say zero point Um, maybe slightly more. Okay, this is too much. Let's reduce this. Let's say 0.7 for this one. And for this one, let's give it more breathing room. Let's say 0.35. Now this is still looking a little bit too dense. But instead of changing the different settings here on the noise texture, I want to play a little bit with this color ramp, the one coming after the main noise texture. Let's say this should be 0.52. And this one Let's say 0.61. And I'm going to add another flag in the middle by clicking on this new color stop, and let's make it way way darker. Something like, I guess the value of 0.15 will do the job. Let's increase the density to something like 100. If I Zoom right now, you will be able to see a lot of details now happening in my volume. Let's zoom a little bit more. You can clearly see a lot of details right now. If I just drop this to one, Look how it looks. There is no details at all. Okay, yes, my render is no way way faster, but there is no visual details here. But when I get it back to 0.01, this is actually the same quality we will use for the final render. Let me hit also zero to get back to my usual camera view because now the volume is smaller, which means faster renders. But this is the core of how I'm going to drive this noise texture that is responsible for creating the main shape of the nebula. In the next couple of videos, we're still going to shape this nebula more and more until we start getting a result we like. But for now, this is the main setup we will be using. I'm going to let's say, select these three nodes, hit Control G to create a labor around them, hit F two to rename it. And let's call it, for example, main noise. And as I mentioned in the next couple of videos, we're going to spend most of our time trying to shape this nebula to a shape we like. So yeah, I will see you, everyone in the next video. 4. Spherical Falloff: Hello, and welcome back to the third video of creating Nebulas in Blender. This video might cause some headaches for some people because we're going to talk a little bit about math. But rest assured, nothing too complicated, and I will try to explain everything in detail. The goal is to add some spherical fall off to the nebula. What do I mean by that? Well, let's jump into blender first. Hello, and welcome everyone in this video where we are going to create the sphercal fall off for our nebula. If you notice because we're using a cube, you can clearly see all the edges of the cube. So our goal during this video will be basically to make all of these edges slightly smoother by making the inner or the center of this cube really dense, so we will have the center of the nebula inside the center of the cube, and gradually, we want everything to fall off. This will be a really interesting exercise to deal a little bit with math nodes. So yeah, Let's do that. Now, actually, before we start doing that, there are a couple of things that I notice that I want to adjust from now. The first thing, I still think this volume is too dense. That's why I'm going to jump to this noise texture right here, the one driving the scale, and I'm going to lower it to something like one. So now I can see more shapes in this volume. Number two, I'm going to jump to my principled volume, and I want to start seeing some colors. The way we're going to change the color of this nebula is by changing the color here and the absorption color. You can think of color as the color for all the surface areas, and the deeper the lights will go into the volume, the more it will shift into another color. So basically, when we set a certain color here, that will be let's call it for the shadow areas that are not that deep into the volume. And the deeper the lights will go, the more we will have more of the absorption color. And the nice way of how to do this is to use complimentary colors. So if I go right here and I pick some sort of let's say shades of sen like this, and maybe can increase this to the top. Now, from here, I'm going to select a complimentary color. So I will bring this up, and bring this somewhere around here. And this will give you the following result, which actually I'm kind of digging. As you can see, if I zoom a little bit, and I hope that my blender doesn't crash, you can see that the shallow areas will have the cyan color, and the deeper we get into the volume and the denser the volume is, the more we will have more of this color. The main reason you might think like, hey, this is red, while this is like crey beige color. The reason for that is because this color is getting multiplied multiple times. That's why you will get the darker shades of red or brown. But either way, I think that this is looking pretty sick. And now we can move on to creating this furcal fall off. And to understand exactly how this will work, we need to talk a little bit about math. Okay, this is a different scene, and I'm going to use it to explain the math operations we will be doing. It is a really simple scene. I just added a plane, and I added a noise texture, made the noise texture a little bit more contrast using this color ramp, and I'm using the whole thing as a material. This is the most vanilla thing you can do in There is a concept. I'd like you to always keep it in mind, which is that three D operations or three D math operations are just two D math operation, but they are done in three D, because sometimes it happens that because we're doing everything in three D, you might have a hard time trying to visualize what's happening. But when you bring it down to two D because you only have to deal with two dimensions, it is always easier to imagine what's happening, and based on that, you can imagine how the three D operations will look like. And that's exactly what I will try to explain. So let's imagine this is our nebula. We're going to create a two D nebula, let's say. Our two D nebula is bounded by this box. I'm going to hit seven to jump to the top view. And what we want is to make the edges basically becomes smoother. That's exactly the same thing we want to do in three D because we have a cube, and we want the edges or the nebula that is inside this cube to fall off gradually. So it's basically the same thing. It is just done. In two D. So what we really want to do is to tell Blender that hey, blender, make the nebula visible here, and the further you go from the center, make it fades. And let's imagine how we can do such a thing. There is a famous operation in blender called multiplication. I'm going to show another plane. And for this plane, I only want you to think about the texture that is right here, this gradient. If we were to multiply this texture by this one, try to imagine what will happen because all of these values right here are white, which means one. I will see the noise texture on these areas. Meanwhile, because the center is black, I won't be able to see the center of this noise texture. That's what will happen when I multiply this by this. Basically, black is zero. That's why nothing will show up in the black areas, and white is one, and that's why I will be able to see the noise texture in the white areas. But what we want actually is to inverse this by making the center white, and it gradually falls down to black. Why is that? Because when the center is white, I will be able to see the noise texture. And because it fades to black, also this noise texture will fade to black. So now let's think of how we can do such a thing on my plane. I'm going to hide also this plane by hitting H, and let's focus on this one. What we want is to figure out a way to generate a gradient that is white in the center and gradually falls into black. Now, before we actually jump to that, let's think of an easier thing, which is, let's try to figure out a way of how to tell Blender, that hey, Blender, I want you to generate a texture that is black on the inside and gradually goes to white because we can always invert that and get exactly the result we want. So what is something that will tell me that hey, The further you go from the center, the greater the value will be, which means basically the color white. If you focus on what I just said, I said the distance from the center. So this problem will be solved, just if I had an operation that tells me the distance from the center, and there is this exact operation. If I go right here and add a texture coordinate and add a vector math, and I'm going to plug the object into the vector, from here, there is an operation called length. And this length operation is responsible for telling me the distance from the center. If I take this and plug it to the surface to be able to see the result, notice what will happen. Right now, this length operation is giving me the distance from the center. So because I'm really close to the center, the distance will be zero, and that's why it is represented by black, and the further I go from the center, the bigger the distance will be, and that's why I'm going to white. Actually, these values go even over one, but Blender basically will represent anything above one as white. So what you need to keep in mind right now is that we're going from black, a distance from zero to white, which is a distance from one or above. And if I multiply this length by the noise texture, I will get exactly the result I want. So let me do just that. I'm going to go shift A and look for math and change this operation from D to multiply, and let's plug the color to the second socket and boom. Maybe the effect is not that visible, so let me hide this line and hide the overlays. And if you focus, you will be able to see that these areas right here are now darker. If I select the multiply node, and I hit M, this is the before, and this is the after. Or to actually make the result even more obvious, I'm going to take this and plug it to the second one and take this and plug it to the first one. And if I hit M, this is the before, and this is the after. This is the before, and this is the after. And as you can see right now, the center of this noise texture is now black. What we want is the reverse of that. So if this length texture is going from black to white, I want it to go from white to black, and you can do that by inverting. The length operation. How can you do that? By adding another math node, so go Shift A and let's look for math and plug it here. Change the operation from add to subtract, move this to the second socket and change the first value to one. That's how you invert a number. So let's say you have five and you want the inverse of five, you do one minus five, one minus the number. So we have this length that we want to invert. So what we do is to do one minus this length operation. And now, if I take this and plug it to the second socket of the multiply and get back to this one, that's what you will get. And now, if I want to control the fall off of this texture, I can always add another math node and change the operation from add to power. And by changing the exponent, you will be able to control the fall off of this noise texture or actually of this mask. What we just did in two D will be the same thing that we will try to do in three D. So right now if you try to imagine how these operations will be in three D, here's what will happen. Let's imagine this is our cube. I'm going to figure out the distance from the center by using this length operation. And since we are in a cube, if you try to imagine how will the distance from the center look like, it will look like a sphere because we are in a cube. So the distance from the center from all the different directions, it will look like it is a sphere, sphere that is black in the inside, and the further you go from the center, it becomes white. We want the reverse of that. That's why we are going to do a subtract operation. And when we do the subtract operation, we will have a sphere that is white in the inside and gradually falls down to black. And later we will multiply our nebula, the volumes that we created by that mask that we generated using the length operation, and we will also add a power node to control the falloff. It is basically the same exact concept we just did just in three D. I hope this makes sense. So right now, let's get back to doing that in three D. And now it is time to create the spherical fall off. And as I mentioned, to get what we want, we are going to multiply this volume by a gradient texture that we need to generate. So now, Let's jump on how we can generate that texture. I'm going to zoom out, and everything I will be doing will be after the main noise. So select all of these nodes and let's bring them here. I'm going to add a texture coordinate. And if I zoom on it and control shift and click multiple times until I jump to object, and let's also click on this. This is what our object coordinate system looks like. We want to figure out a way on how to tell blender that he. Blender, we want you to tell us the distance from the center. In other words, the points that are closer to the center of this cube will be zero in distance or closer to zero, which means they will be black, and the further we go from the center, the greater the distance will be, and therefore we will be having bigger numbers like one and all of that, which will be symbolized as white. And the really nice thing, there is a function in blender called length. So if I go shift A and look for vector math, and let me put it here and change the operation from D to length. And if I control shift and click on it, this is how it is looking. Now you might say hey, but that doesn't look like a gradient. The main reason for that is that because it is right now plugged into the surface. We want it to be plugged to the volume, so I'm going to take this and plug it to volume. And now, something is happening. If I zoom in here, and I go shift A and let's add a math node to change the intensity of this and change the operation to multiply, and I start multiplying this. As you can see, now we're starting to get some sort of gradient that goes inside. As black, and it gets denser the closer you get to the edges of the cube. And this is exactly what we want, except it is kind of reverse because we want everything to be dense in the center, and it will gradually fall off. So we need to figure out a way of how we can inverse what we're having right now. There is a node actually for this called invert invert color, which you can use. But because I love math, I'm going to use another math node by selecting this hit Shift D, and let's put it here and change the operation to subtract, and let's bring this here and change this to one. Subtract operation happening right now, it is the exact same thing as the invert node I just added, because if you want to invert a number, you do one minus the number. So this is the exact same operation. I think I need to lower also the intensity a little bit more. Let's try 0.5. No, this is too much. Let's try 0.01, 0.02. To four. Okay. Now, as you can see on these edges, we're starting to get really smooth fall off happening. And now, all I have to do is to multiply all of these by the noise texture that is coming from here, and that will create the gradient fall off we want. So how can we do such thing? Go shift A, and let's look for color mix, mix color. Let's put it here, select all of these nodes and bring them here. Take the subtract and plug it to the second socket in the B. Control shift, and click on this to be able to preview it, and let's preview it inside the volume. And if I change the operation from mix, we want to multiply it and bring this factor up. As you can see right now here, maybe you'll be able to notice the noise texture doing things here, and it is gradually falling into black. So that will be smooer fall off, which is exactly what we want. And let's say hypothetically you want this gradual fall off to be even smoother. You can do that by adding a power node. So go after this multiply, hitch d two duplicated and change this from multiply to power. If I zoom a little bit down, you will be able to see this effect happening. This power node right now by changing the exponent, will allow you to control how smooth the fall off will be. We fall into negative areas. This will allow you to control the transition area or how smooth your gradient fall off will be. In case you don't want to do anything, you can pick one and that will give you the same result basically. So you can play a little bit with that in case you want smoother fall off. But in my case, I'm actually going to delete it. I don't need it because I'm digging this result the way it is. And now I'm going to get these nodes closer to each other because I'm going to label them, select all of them. Control G, hit F two to rename this label. And let's call it spherical fall off. And if I preview the final result by plugging the volume into the volume, Boom. Now we're starting to see a really nice gritty and fall off happening. Of course, there will always be some hard edges right here, but at least it will go smoother, the closer it gets to the edges of that cube. That's it for me for this video, and I will see you in the next one. 5. Core Density: Hello and welcome back to the fourth video of creating Nebulas in Blender. Previously, we used some math to lower the density around the edges. In this one, we want to do the opposite. By increasing the density, the closer we get to the core of the nebula. So, let's jump into blender. Hello, welcome. This is where we stopped last time. In this video, we are going to create the core density, as I mentioned. What I mean by core density is that if you remember, in the previous video, we created the spercal fall off, which is responsible for creating the fall off of the volume, the further we go from the center. But also, I want a way to control how dense the core and the center of our cube is. And this will have really similar concept to what we did with the spercal fall off, except that we will not be inverting it because we want the center to be denser. So yeah, let's jump into doing that. This is our no tree, and everything we will be doing will be happening around here. You might wonder why we don't do it around here. The reason for that is that we already created the spercal fall off. And if we are going to do operations that makes the volume denser, basically, we'll have operations that are clashing. So in one way, you have the spercal fall off trying to reduce the intensity of the volume in certain areas, and another operation that will happen after that is trying to make the volume denser. Simply, my thought process is basically, let's make the whole volume denser from the center by doing some operations here. And that's what will be the core density we were created during this video. And once we create the core density, then the spherical fall off will be applied on the whole thing. And this is a neater and cleaner setup, and also in my mind, it makes more sense. I'm going to add a texture coordinate node, shift a texture coordinate. And because we did this before, I'm going to plug the object into a length function, vector math length, As you remember, this function will give you the distance from the center, and always try to think of how will this look like, how will a texture that does have the distance from the center will look like. It will be black on the center, and it will gradually go to white. The further we go from the center. Let's add a power node to control the fall off or the intensity in this case, and let's also add a multiply. Node to actually change the intensity, and we need to combine the setup somewhere here, and that will be by using a color mix. Let's put it here. Everything vanished. So let's take the result out of this multiply node and plug it into B. Let's bring the multiply up to one so that is not doing anything. Let's start reducing the exponent to something like so. Let's reduce this 0.5. Okay, this is a really interesting shape. As you can see, now we're basically making the center and the core of the nebula weight denser. And I want to change this from x to multiply, and let's bring the factor up to one. And maybe let's do this as one, and this will give you the following result. To see exactly what's happening, you can select this multiply node hit empty mute it. So this is the before, and this is the after. This is the before, and this is the after. I don't know if you can see it clearly, so let me zoom in a little bit. This is the after, and this is the before. This is the after, and this is the before. Now, technically, what this whole setup is doing, as I mentioned, is trying to make the center denser. Let me get back to it already being activated. And to try and see the effect in a better way, let me zoom out a little bit, and I'm going to disable this multiply node. Mm. So now there is no spherical fall off. We killed the spherical fall off because this was the node responsible to activating it. Let's kill this, so this is the after, and this is the before. And this is the after. And when I activate this multiply node, you will have the following result. To exaggerate this effect and that you see exactly what's happening, I'm going to go to this power node, the -0.1, and let's drop this to minus one. As you can see, now, you will have this shape, which looks like a sphere. It's like we crunched the whole volume to the center of the cube. So it forms something like a sphere, this really interesting shape, which if you focus, you will see this is an and also this is an and maybe this is a mouth. But the moral of the story, this whole set up cteria is responsible to crunching and increasing the density toward the center because nebulas, that that actually happens because of gravity. This is kind of physically accurate, but we don't this effect to be really strong. That's why I always kept it to something like -0.1. It is a nice way of how to actually push and pull everything together in really smooth and nice ways. So now let's organize this note tree. I'm going to select these three nodes, control G two label them, F two for a name. Let's call it core density. I'm going to hit control space bar to maximize this editor, bring these nodes here, bring this one here. Let's take this here, and let's take this hercal fall off here. Basically, what I'm trying to do is to make this note tree easily readable. Okay, so this is our notary, and this is our nebula and how it is looking right now, but it is still missing a couple of things. First of all, we need to adjust our camera position because surprise, we're not going to look at this nebula from this angle. We are actually going to put this camera inside the cube to see different shapes and all of that. So we will be inside the nebula. Number two, nebulas tend to have some sort of you can call them tentacles, I guess, but it should be having some twirls and it should be spinning and all of that. So we will try to create that in the next video. So yeah, I will see you everyone in the next one. 6. Twirls: Hello, and welcome back. In this video, we'll add the twirls to our nebula, which I also like to call tentacles. We create them also using M. But rest assured, this will be fun as usual. Let's jump into Blender. Okay, so, hello, everyone inside of Blender again. And as I mentioned in this one, we are going to create the twirls for our nebula. So, yeah let's do that. What we'll be doing will feel like it is a little bit complicated. Let's try to explain everything in detail. I'm actually going to go to file new and general and don't save it because I already saved that file. Don't follow me in this because the goal of this is to visualize what we'll be doing in a better way. Let's hit A and x and then delete everything. I'm going to go shift A, and let's add a plane, hit seven to jump to the top view, and let's jump to the render view, and I'm going to change this to the shader editor and pick the default material. And now we can start working. Three D operations are just two D operations, but they are happened in three D. Sometimes because it is hard to visualize how certain operations will happen in three D. I like to bring them back to two D so that you will be able to see what will happen on flat plane. And in your mind, I guess it will be easier for you to visualize how this will look in three D. I'm going to delete this principle, B SDF, and I'm going to add a noise texture. And I'm going to bring the factor into the surface and to make the whole thing more contrasty and easier to visualize, I'm going to add a color ramp, and let's make it a little bit more contrasty. Something like so, and let's make them snap to the grid. Okay. This is the most vanilla thing you can basically do in blender. I just plug a noise texture into color ramp to make it more contrasty and I slap it on the surface. And also, let's add a texture coordinate and take the object and plug it to vector. Okay. So in our case, imagine this is our nebula. It is inside this box. What we want to do is to create some sort of twirls that goes like this. So how can we do such things? Well, let's start breaking it down. This motion of the twirls, it looks like it needs some rotation. Or another way, let's say, the twirls are basically rotating based on their distance from the center. In other words, if I go and add a node called rotate vector or vector rotate, And I start rotating here from the angle, you will notice that everything that texture will be rotating. So if I can just figure out a way on how to tell blender, that hey, the areas that are right here will not be rotating that much, but the areas that are far from the center, which is around here will be here, will rotate way more. And if you try to imagine it, the further we go from the center, the greater the rotation will be, this will give you these twirls. So how can we do that? Well, happily, there is this angle socket. So we need to plug something into this angle socket that will tell blender that, hey. In the center, don't rotate. The further you go from the center, do more rotation. And what is a node that will allow me to tell what is the distance from the center, it is the length node. We already use it multiple times, look for length. Let's put it here and notice what will happen when I plug the length into the angle. Boom. We got the twirls we're looking for. If I just hit control shift and click on this length node, as you can see, it will tell you the distance from the center. So in the center, it will be black because the distance is zero, and the further you go from the center, the whiter it get because you will have greater values. And when you plug that into the angle, basically, there's no rotation in the black areas, and the further you go from the center, the greater that rotation will be. Let me get back to my color ramp to see exactly the final result. And in case you want to control the fall off of this length, let me get back to control shift and clicking on it to see what we will be doing. If I add a math node and I change it here to power. This will allow you to control, as you can see the fall off of that dark circle or the fall off of the distance from the center. Let me lower it to something like Let's say 04. And if I plug this into the angle and control shift and click on the color ramp, you will get the following result. This will allow you, as you can see to control the strength of the effect or the areas affected by this transformation. And if you want to make it more intense now, you can add a multiply node. Now we are multiplying the whole thing. So let's bring up to something like two. And yeah. I'm digging this result. If I select both of these two nodes, this is the before, and this is the. This is the before, and this is the after. Both of these two operations are just for us to manipulate how this texture, the length texture looks like. Number two, which will be slightly harder to explain, which is that think of these points in the center. As we mentioned, there's not much rotation applied on the center. But the further we go from the center, the more rotation is applied. I also want to make the areas that are in the center sharper and the areas that are outside, which means the further we go will be slightly more stretched. I hope that makes sense. So when we start talking about, I want them to be smaller, I want to have smaller details in the center, and I want to be stretched based on the distance. Kind that begs to use something that can do something like scale. What I'm trying to say is if I go shift A and look for a vector math, and I'm going to change this operation from A to multiply, everything right now is multiplied by zero. And if I start playing with these numbers, as you can see, it is changing the scale of this texture. Of course, this can open an entire tangent about how the different operations in blender work. But what you need to know is that when you talk about moving something, you are talking about adding and subtracting operations. But when you start talking about scaling, you start talking about multiplying. That's why when I plug this multiply and plug it into the vector. As you can see, it is basically changing the scale of this texture. This multiplying operation is the exact same thing when you add a mapping node. As you can see, or you will have here a property called scale. This scale is the exact same one as this. We just simplified it down because we only want the multiply features or the scale feature in this case. Now, if I bring this down to something like one to see the default result, try to imagine what will happen if we plug this length into the vector. Let's think of how this length look like. It is black on the center and white on the outside. So when I will plug this, the scale in the areas that are closer to the center will be almost zero, and the further we go from the center, the greater the scale will be. Let's take this and plug it into vector and boom. Now, the scale in the dead in the center will be zero. And the further we go, the bigger the scale will be. And that's why you see this blob right here. And to control the look of this, I'm going to add a power node, so let's go and add a power. Oh, wait. I need to write. Let's put it here, and let's change the operation to power. And if I start bringing this down, as you can see, you will be able to create this really nice effect. Let's say something like 0.5. Now, as you can see, you will get this really interesting result to see the before and after, this is the after, and this is the before. This is the after, and this is the before. Basically, it is like we're stretching the whole thing, which will give you a sense of motion or sense of motion blur, maybe. I don't know how to explain it. But yeah, this set up we did in two D, imagine it now it will happen in three D. Okay? Imagine that we are going to do all of this stretching and pulling on our nebula. So let me get back now to my usual blender file, open recent core density. Save. And let's do that. Let me bring this here. And because we understood how the whole setup looks like, I'm going to rebuild it now from scratch really quick. So I'm going to take the object and plug it into a length operation, and this length operation will go into a power operation, which will go into a multiply operation. And that will go into a vector, rotate, but it should go to the angle, and let's plug this into this and also plug it to the other noise texture. So both of these will be connected like this. If I control shift and click, already connected, let's jump to the rendered view. You will have the following result, which looks kind of weird for whatever reason, which means I need to play a little bit with these values. Let me bring the intensity to something like two. Okay, nothing much is happening. The scale is too small, which means we need to add the other branch of the snow tree, which will go into a multiply, and let's take the length and plug it into the vector, shift A, and let's add a power node. Let's shift de duplicate this and put it here -0.5, and let's plug this into the vector. Boom. Now it is working. As you can see, we're creating these really nice shapes. Basically, we're making our nebula have these two whirls and these tentacles. If that makes sense. Also, I guess it will be interesting if we take the color and plug it to the vector, This will give you the following result, which I think it looks better honestly. Okay. So now let's select this entire setup and hit Control G to label it, F two to rename it, and let's call it to Wirs. And this is our nebula right now. I hope this swirl setups make sense right now in your head. It is just some clever cheating using math. As I always say, if you try to create this in two D and then transform it in three D, that will make it easier for your brain to basically visualize what's happening. I hope it was fun. I hope it was easy, and I will see you in the next video. 7. Camera Animation: Hello, and welcome back. This video is simple. We will create a nice camera movement. That's it. Let's jump into Blender. Hello, and welcome back everyone inside of Blender. And as I mentioned in this one, we are going to create the camera animation, which will allow us later to create the star field. I'm going to jump to the rendered view. And since we will be working with animation, I want my viewport to be a little bit more responsive. That's why I'm going to bring these numbers up to something like 0.1, which will give me lower resolution for the volumes, but it will allow me to work real time more or less on my volume so that I will be able to preview the animation. You can even drop it down to one in case your computer also doesn't handle 0.1. Number two, I'm going to select this cube, and I'm going to jump to the object properties, and under viewport display, you will have an option for display as textured. Right now, we're seeing a cube. What I want is to only see the wire frame of this cube, which will make it easier to put the camera inside. That's why I change it from textured to wire. Nothing will change except that as I mentioned, the cube right now is just a wire frame, which makes it easier when we will put the camera inside it. Now, here's the whole concept of what we will be doing. We will put this camera inside this cube, so we will be inside the nebula. To do that, you can a J z double times to move on the local axis, and I'm going to bring it inside this cube as you can see right now. For whatever reason, this view is not updating, and my theory is because I'm not looking to what the camera is looking, so head zero from the number pad and this is what my camera is seeing right now. Now, to be honest, one of the hardest things about nebulas is trying to fight the right angle and right shapes. That's why something I like to do is to jump to this lighting group called the sun, and I'm going to go shift A under light, you will have an option for point light. And I'm going to bring the brightness or the power of this slide to something like 200. And my thought is this maybe will make it easier to frame a nice shot. And I would love to move this point light somewhere right here. So while you're selecting your point light, hit G, and let's move it somewhere And it seems like the strength is too much at this point. That's why I'm going to lower this number to something like 100 or maybe even 50. Maybe I can also push it a little bit inside this nebula. So let's jump here, hit seven to jump to the top view and hit J and let's move it slightly inside the nebula. And you can now increase the intensity to something like 100. And that will give you the following result. Which I'm kind of digging. I still think that the intensity is a little bit too strong. That's why I'm going to lower this number 275 or maybe even 50, honestly. I don't want to go overboard with this number because we will also be adding a lot of small stars that will also eliminate the scene more and more. I'm going to keep it at 50 right now, and in case we want to change it in the future, we can always do that. I'm going to jump to my camera. And from here, you will have two options, clip start and clip end. Which means which areas the camera will be able to see. The clip start means that the camera will only be able to see something that is further than 0.1 meters or 10 centimeters away from the camera. Anything that is closer than 10 centimeters to the camera, the camera will not be able to see it. That's what we really care about. And for the end, that means that the camera will not be able to see anything that is further than 100 meters from the camera. At this case, usually, we don't mess a lot with these numbers. But what I found is that you can play a little bit with the clip start to actually tell blender which areas of the nebula you want to actually see in the final render. And you can start increasing this number slowly. Let's say 0.3, and this will give you the following result. And as you can see now, certain parts are being hidden. The main reason for that is that all of these shapes and clouds that were closer than 10 centimeters are now hidden, which means right now we will only be able to see something that is further than 30 centimeters away from the camera. Let's try 0.5. Okay, I think I'm going to leave it at 0.5. I'm kind of digging this result, and now we are going to create the camera animation. What I have in mind for the camera animation is to make the camera spin in an arc like this while it is looking on the center, so it will be moving along this line that I just drew. So how can we do that? The easiest way will be like the following. I'm going to go shift A, And under empty, you will have plane axis. And let's move it to the scene collection. And while you're hitting shift, move the camera inside the empty, and I'm going to rename this camera controller. So now, while I'm selecting this camera controller when I rotate it, I will also be able to rotate the camera around the center. Technically, I'm rotating the camera around this empty object. But because this empty object is in the center, that means that I'm also rotating the camera around the center of the scene and the center of the cube at the same time. From here, let's jump to time line. I'm going to the first key frame and let's jump to the object properties and we want to animate the rotation on the z axis. Let's pick something like -15 or actually, let's say 15 because I wanted to start from here and then go here. Put a key frame, and let's jump to the last keyframe and say that I want it to be -15 and put a key frame. If I just jump to the solid view, I don't know whether I will be able to see anything. Okay, let's focus here. This is how M animation is playing right now. As you can see, the camera is rotating. But there is a slight issue, which is the bidfal blender will make the animation interpolated in a busier way, which means the animation will start slow and then go faster and slow down at the end. What we actually want is to keep a linear velocity along the animation. That's why while you're selecting both of your two keyframes, hit T and change it to linear. And now you will keep the same velocity along the animation. If you think that this is slow, you can always increase the values. For example, you can start from 30 and end at -30, which will give you a faster camera animation. But as a general advice, always remember that these nebulas are measured in light years. So it makes sense for your camera to travel in a really slow controlled way. Also, since I'm seeing these weird shapes right here, which I will assume it's because of the camera clipping. I'm going to jump back to this camera and jump to the camera properties, and I'm going to lower the clip start to something like 0.2, which I think will look better since these areas right now doesn't look that weird. And just to verify that everything is looking good, I'm going to jump to the render settings, and let's get these back to 0.01. So this is the result we have, and I still think that these shapes are really ugly. They are really out of place. That's why I guess for this shot, I'm going to select the camera and actually kill all the camera clip start. I'm going to bring it back to the default value, 0.1. I think this will look better. In the scene I used for the promo. I remember using a number of 0.5 here, but I guess in this example, I think it looks better with 0.1. Anyway, make sure to save your file as usual, and I will see you everyone in the next one. Where we will be creating the star field. So yeah. See you in the next one. 8. Starfield: Hello, and welcome to the longest video of creating nebulas in Blender. Nebuls have stars. Our Nebula doesn't have stars. So we need to add some stars, and that's exactly what we will be doing in this video. But we will create the stars in a separate blender project for reasons I will tell you about later. So in a rambling and let's jump into blender. Hello, and welcome back inside of Blender. And as I mentioned in this video, we are going to create the star field. Basically, we are going to attempt to distribute a lot of stars within this volume of our nebula because Nebula tend to have a lot of stars. Now, there is something I need to explain. The way of how we are going to create this star field is by distributing a lot of small points and we will make them emit light. But that will cause a huge problem. This render is already complicated. Blender will already need to do heavy amount of calculations to calculate how will this nebula look like. If we introduce a lot of small points of light that will act as the stars, that will make the computation even more demanding. And that will also cause a really huge problem, which is noise. And that's something you need to keep in mind when working with volumes. The more sources of light, the harder it will be to keep the render consistent from one frame to another frame. What will happen if you try to render this entire scene all at once with a star field is that you will end up with a really glitchy and noisy render where it is impossible to have consistency throughout the animation. That's why the solution I came up with is to render the star field separately from our nebula render. And that's exactly what we will be doing. So, yeah, let's see how we can do that. I'm going to jump to file new and pick general. Everything will be in a fresh blender file. Later on, we'll combine everything. I'm going to delete this slide, X and then delete, and I'm also going to delete this camera, and I want the same exact camera animation I did before. That's why I'm going to go to file. Link, and from here, I'm going to choose camera animation collection and scene, because as you remember, in my scene collection, I have my camera. So hit link, and you will have this collection called scene. You can think of linked collection as elements that are shared between different blender files. So right now, if I go and change the camera animation in my previous blender file, the camera animation will also update here. And therefore, later on, when I will try to put the stars above the other render of the nebula, they will match perfectly because they have the same exact camera animation. I hit zero to jump to the camera view, nothing will happen because we didn't pick a camera for our scene, so jump to the scene settings, and from here you can pick what camera you will use to render the scene. So from here, make sure to choose this camera with the link near it, because that's the camera that is coming from the other blender file. So pick camera, and if I hit zero from the number pad, I will be able to see the render, And if I bring the time line up, you can clearly see the animation is now playing. And since we're here, let's adjust the length of our animation to 120 to match exactly the other animation. Let me add another editor and hide the toolbar hitting T. Let's hide all of these overlays, and let's jump to the rendered view. And from here let's get back to our normal Also, for the render, I'm going to use V by the way, make sure you're also using V. You can use cycles. At the end of the day, this render will not be that complicated, so you can easily render it using V or you can render it using cycle as you want. In my case, I'm going to use EV just because it is faster. Let's select this cube, and I'm going to jump to the geometry node editor because The way of how we are going to create these stars is by using some geometry nodes. What we want to do is to distribute a lot of small points inside this cube. And these small points, we will make them emit light, and that will technically look like they are just stars, because at the end of the day, stars look like just small points, emitting light. While I'm selecting my cube, I'm going to click on new to Add new geometry node modifier, and I'm going to rename this two star field. You can either work. With this regular cube, or you can x to delete and go shift A and look for volume cube, this one right here, and connect this to the geometry, which will give you the exact same cube, except this time it is a volume cube. Once you have this volume cube, you can control the density of that volume from here. Let's keep it at one. Later, we will plug a noise texture here. But let's focus a little bit on this volume cube. I want to distribute a lot of points inside of this cube, and those points will be emitting light. And what is the node that will allow you to distribute points inside the volume? Surprisingly, it is called distribute points in volume. Let's put it here. And as you can see, now, we have a couple of points doing some things here. The distribute points in volume node will distribute virtual points, Hose are not physical. This is just a preview for us to be able to see what's happening, and later, we can use those points to tell Blender that, Hey, Blender, I want you to put this object on these points. And the node that will allow you to do such a thing is called, distribute or actually instance on points. Let's take it and put it here. And what we will plug in the instance will be put on the points. Now, what is an object that looks like a star. Well, you can either use a sphere or you can use an icosphere because I think it looks more like a star more than an actual perfect sphere. Shift A, icosphere and plug this into the instance. As you can see from here, now we're having something going on. We distribute the icospheres on the points that this distribute points in volume is generating. Of course, now they are really huge, let's bring the radius down to something like 0.01, and they are barely visible. The main reason for that being is that they're not emitting light. So to see everything clearly, let's switch gears and switch to shading. I'm going to add another editor from here, and let's change this to shader editor and hit to hide the side bar, so we have more space. And now we are going to create the materials for the stars. Select the principle BSDF and deleted because we don't need it. Shift A, and let's add an emission shader. This is the simplest shader and blender and take it and plug it into surface. But nothing will happen because blender doesn't not to use this material on these points. So we need to tell it through these geometry nodes that hey, Blender we want you to actually use this material, and you can do that by adding another node called set material. Shift A, look for set material. Let's put it here after the instance on points and select the material. And now, Something is going. Now Blender is using this shader, which we will also call stars. Now it is referenced in my geometry node tree, which means Blender will be able to use this material to colorize our stars. I'm going to hit also to hide the side bar, and let's bring the emission to something like 20. Instead of having this gray background, I'm going to jump to the environment and kill the strength down to zero, and in my render settings, I'm going to enable the blue, so all of these stars will be glowing. I think this is a better way to visualize what's happening. Let's now focus on increasing the density of these stars. Surprisingly, there is a slider for that called density. I'm going to pick 100. This is already too much, but I'm going to leave it the way it is. We can always change that later. You can clearly see some clipping happening here and here because these are the edges of my cube. I want to make this cube slightly larger, which you can do by changing the minimum and maximum. You can drop this two minus two and make this two. Now the cube is bigger, which means more stars, and also by doing that, I can avoid seeing the edges of the cube. Number two, all of these points right now have the same exact scale, and I would love to find a way on how to tell blender that hey, blender, I want you to make certain points slightly bigger and other points slightly smaller, because right now, all of these icospheres have the same exact size, and even the small ones, they're not actually smaller, they're just further from the camera. That's why they appear like they are smaller. And the really nice thing is that you can change the scale of these points using this. So if I plug a node called random, value. Let's take it and plug it into the scale. What this ID will do, it will set a scale for each point 0-1. So this is the minimum scale at this case, which is zero, which technically means that those shares will be invisible. That's why I'm going to lower it to something like 01. And for the maximum, which is the maximum scale, I'm going to lower this to something like 02, maybe, or let's say 0.5. You can hit control space bar to maximize the editor. I still think this is too small. Let's try 0.1, control space bar. This will give you the following result. Which is not bad. I still think I need a little bit of scale. So let's increase this to 0.02 and this to 15 Yeah, I still need to make this 6.05. This one looks really big, so I think let's drop this 2.1. Actually, you know what? I'm going to lower the radius in the icosphere to something like 0.01. I'm going to play a little bit of these values. Let's set the minimum to one and set this to two. No 1.1. This is slightly better. Let me bring this back to 0.1. Sorry, everyone, and let's make this 0.1 and reduce the scale. Okay, sorry, because I jumped that part, because I was trying to find the right values. And after some trial and error, I stumbled upon these values. I left the radius at 0.1, and for the random value, I picked for the minimum 0.0 16 and for the maximum 0.0 17. And that will give you this look, which I think it looks decent. I still think there are more small points than larger points, but I think this is already good enough. What I want to do next is to drive the density of these points by a noise texture. What do I mean by that? Well, the distribution of all of these points right now is kind of uniform. There are stars in every single part of the frame. We don't want that, because if you think about it, nebulas are huge clouds of gases, which means they should obscure certain parts of the frame, which also implies that the stars will not be visible in every single part of the frame, because at certain parts, the gases of the nebula will hide those stars. We need to figure out a way to tell blender that hey, blender. Yes, we want you to distribute these stars, but also certain areas shouldn't have stars because those areas will be covered by the nebula. And that's really simple because if you remember, we have this volume cube, and it does have a density socket. And if we plug a noise texture here, theoretically, this will give us the result we want. So go shift A, noise texture. Let's plug the factor into the density. And in the same exact way, if you want to preview a certain node in the geometry nodes, especially textures, you can do control shift and click on a node to be able to preview it. And the viewer in the geometry nodes works in a different way because you need to specify what you want to see, the value, in this case, this is the noise texture. On what geometry, you want to see that happening. And in this case, this will be the volume cube, Now, if I play, for example, a little bit with a scale, you will be able to see the result of what's happening here. The preview now is not that clear because this noise ature need a little bit of contrast. Let's go shift A and add a color ramp. Let's put it here. Let's make the whole thing way more contrasty. Let's reduce the scale down. Let's say 0.5. You can maybe also increase the details, but that's not doing that much. So let's try plugging this now into the density. And this will give you the following result. And to explain what the setup is doing again, we're using this noise texture, we're making it more contrasty, and we're using this entire setup to drive the density of this volume cube. In other words, we're telling lender that, hey, yes, we're using this volume cube, but we want it to be denser in certain areas. Technically, if I jump right now back or actually, if I delete this viewer node, as you can see, we have this distribution of the stars. Now there are certain areas that are black, no stars and other areas where you will have a lot of stars. And what's driving this mask is this noise texture right here. I think I'm going to open the contrast a little bit. Let's say 0.58, and let's make the green flag, the black flag, 0.54. This is not bad at all. In case you don't like this shape, you can always go back to the noise texture, change this from three D to four D, and this will introduce this width or actually W socket, which I don't know what W stands for, which will act like a seed. Now I can change the distribution until I find something that I dig. Three. Let's try one. Okay, I'm liking this log, but I think I need to increase the density a little bit. So let me go back to the density of the distribute points in volume. Let's increase it to 500, which will give you the following result. And I still think these points are so big. I'm going to make the maximum scale here, smaller two point. Let's try the same scale 016. Still too big. Let's try 0.01. Let's try 0.005. Okay. This point is still really big. 0.001. Okay, let's also reduce this to 0.00 or let's say 0.01. Let's leave it at this for now, even though we flipped both the minimum and the maximum, but that's technically wrong, but it's not a big deal because the maximum right now is acting like a minimum and the minimum is acting like a maximum. And I'm going to double the density to something like 1,000. Okay. Let's try changing the seed to zero or 0.5. Okay, this is looking good. This is the geometry node setup we used to create the star fields. And the last thing now I'm going to do is to finalize my shader. Same as introducing random scale variations to the stars to the scale of the stars. We also want to introduce the randomness to the brightness of the different stars, which means certain stars will be brighter than others because that's how nature works. We are going to use this strength socket. We are going to drive it using a noise texture. Let's collect this to this. We only have the shader editor, Shift A and texture, noise. Let's plug this into the strength. I want to use the object coordinate system, texture coordinate. Plug the object to the vector. Now the stars are really dim. I need to increase the intensity, so let's shift a math node and change the operation from add to multiply, and let's multiply it by something like 20, control space bar to maximize. Now you can already see the effect happening. Certain stars are brighter than others. If you want the effect to be more visible, you can add a color ramp. Let's bring the black flag. Somewhere around 0.4. And maybe introduce another flag, and let's make it way way darker. Let's say 0.01, and let's put it at the 0.6 mark. And this will give you the following result, which I'm actually kind of digging. Now you might say bate, see, these points are really dim. You can always increase the strength by using this multiply node, let's say multiply it by 50, which will make them slightly brighter. But instead of doing that, I'm actually going to do that later in post. Since this image is just some white points on a black background, it will be really easy later in compositing to make these points brighter, add some glare and all of that. What we will do later is to comp the render out of the suplender file on top of the nebula, and that will look really good. The last thing we are going to do now is to set up our compositing node tree for rendering. So jump to compositing, use nodes. Since we will be using V, we don't need any complicated de noising and all of that. So just go shift A and look for file output, plug the image into the image. Write two slashes to tell Blender that he. Jump to where this blender file is living. Create a folder called star field, and in this file output, node properties, change the format to open XR RGB, float health, for the zip lossles change it to DWB loss, and for the file subpath, let's call the star field underscore and Enter. So you will have Starfield 001002 until 120. And, yeah, that's basically it. You can either render the image sequence right now or you can wait until we finish everything and render everything all at once in case we end up changing the camera animation. My advice will be save this blender file right now, put it somewhere safe. And once you finish rendering your nebula, you can render the star field. The star field shouldn't take that much time. Probably you can render it within minutes because it is really simple and we'll be using because it is really fast. So save your file, and I will see you in the next one. 9. Rendering: This video is straightforward. We will prepare Blender for rendering. This can either be good news because you can finally go touch some grass or bad news 'cause you'll probably need to wait hours or honestly, maybe even days for it to finish. So without any further ado, let's jump into Blender. Hello, and we'll come back inside of Blender to the rendering video. Rendering is always my least favorite part because it tends to take a lot of time to finish, especially when you really want to start compositing. But, yeah, the goal of this video is to give you some advices when it comes to rendering volumes. The main thing I want to focus on is under the render settings under volumes. I already mentioned this before. This number is the main factor that will decide how good your render is and how fast your render will be. 0.01 will give you a really good quality at the cost of longer render times. And since I don't know the specs of your computer, here are a couple of things you might consider. Number one, ask yourself, do you really need the animation. If you don't need the animation, then that's really good news because you will only need to render one frame, which means you can go a little bit overboard with your step right render, which will give you a way better visual clarity for one frame that you can drop in your portfolio or post it on the Internet or whatever. So my general advice will be if it is just you practicing blender and all of that, Yeah, feel free to drop this number to something like one or 01 to have faster renders and see the final result. But if you really want a really nice looking result, especially if you will drop it in your portfolio or something like that, then I would highly recommend like, hey, just render one frame and do the compositing on that one frame, and that one frame will look really good. Because in my opinion, even one frame that will take 2 hours maybe to render is way better than an entire animation. That is low quality. Rendering the entire animation will probably take you depending on how good your computer is from a couple of hours to a couple of days. In my case, it took me a couple of days to render the entire animation because my computer is not the ABF. Let's jump to compositing. So we have our render layers. It will get de noised and then it will go to the file output. And actually, I'm going to create another sub folder for this and call it nebula. So I will have inside the folder that is called render. I will have a folder called nebula where blender will drop all the nebula renders. Hit control as to save your blender file, and then you can go to render. And render animation, and you can start rendering the animation. Or in case you want to render only one image, you can always go to layout and maybe pick an angle that you kind like because our camera is moving. And once you find a frame that you like, you can go to render and render image, as I mentioned, in case you want to render one image. And always remember, even when you render one image, this compositing will happen, so you will find that image inside the folder we created here. That's number one. And also, number two, if you are going to render as an animation. You can always, for example, each day render ten frames overnight, and each day you can start changing the scene output. So let's say you are going to render ten frames for today. So you can set the frame start to something like one for today, and it will end at ten, so it will render ten frames. And tomorrow, you set the frame start to 11 and the end at 20. And by doing that, you can render the animation on multiple days, and that can be helpful in case you don't want to overload your computer or in case you need it throughout the day. Also, since we will need the rendered file in the compositing, you will also have access to my render so you can use them later for compositing. Now, hypothetically, let's say you finished rendering your animation. I wish it was this fast. Now also, you need to render the star field. I'm going to go to file, open recent, Starfield, don't save. From here, I already prepared the animation as you remember. Just go also to rendering and render and render animation, and you should find it under the folder called Star field. Now since I'm looking at this, let's say render. Slash star field. Blender will also create a folder inside the render folder called star field. Technically, if you imagine the render folder, you will have a folder for the Nebula and another folder for the star field. Once you set up your notary, as I said, you can go to render and render animation. Once your render is finished, you will find this folder called render. Inside render, you will have Nebula, where Blender will drop the Nebula images, and Starfield where Blender will drop the star field images, and these are the images we will use for compositing. The sit for me for this video, and I will see you in the next one, where we will be doing the compositing work. Mm. 10. Compositing: Okay, let's do this one last time. Hello, and welcome back to the final video of creating Nebula's in Blender. In this video, we will co all the different elements together and do some post processing stuff to make the whole thing looks better. This will be simple, so let's jump into blender. Hello, and welcome back when last time inside of blender. And as I mentioned in this video, we are going to composite our shot. I'm going to start a fresh blender scene because I don't want to do the compositing work in the previous blender file. I always saw the three D part and the compositing part as separate things. That's why I like to start a fresh blender scene and do everything here so that it will be separate and everything would work faster this way. And at the end of the day, we don't need the three D data from the three D scene because we will be dealing with images right now. So start a fresh blender file, Let's pick general. And right away, I'm going to jump to compositing. Let's check this magnet to make the nodes stick to the grid, and let's check use nodes. I'm going to delete this render layer by hitting x, and let's import our images. Shift A, and let's look for image sequence because we will import an image sequence. You will have a folder called render. Let's start by importing the nebula. So enter the folder, hit a to select everything and import image sequence. Shift D to duplicate this node, click on the folder. And right now, let's import the star field A to select everything, and open image. Now we need to put these stars on top of the nebula. And the node that will allow us to do such thing, it is called mix shift A, and let's look for mix color. Take the first image sequence of the nebula and plug it to the first socket and take the nebula images and take the star field images and plug them to the second socket. Let's move this composite node here and also plug this to the composite node and control shift and click on the mix to be able to see the result. And to have more screen real estate to actually focus on compositing. I'm going to hit control space bar to maximize this editor and also hit to hide this side bar. And while you're selecting your viewer node, you can hit V to make the image smaller or V to make it bigger. I'm going to make it smaller v. Also, if I move this node down and make sure I'm selecting the viewer, you can move the image a little bit up, and this way, you can do your compositing work here while you're seeing the preview here. It is one of the weird things of how Blender do things, I guess. Right now, we're only seeing the stars. The main reason for that is that the stars doesn't have an Alpha channel, because, as you remember, we render these stars with a black background. So how can we get rid of this black background? Well, because we have this mix node, we can change the operation from mix to add, and this will leave the stars and get rid of the black background. Just by doing this, our render already looks good. I'm going to do a little bit of color grading first. So after this add node, let's go shift A and look for curves RGB curves, and let's put it here. Control shift and click on RGB curves to be able to see the results after it. And my goal is to create a nice, creative film look by trying to imulate the contrast curve of a film. Which usually look like an S curve, so I might bring this slightly up. Around here. Move this point down and maybe bring this a little bit up and move also this slightly down. Now, of course, this effect is too strong because these points are really sensitive. Even though I didn't move these points by a large margin. It's still the change is really drastic. That's why I always like to drop this factor to a number like 01. And by doing this, I'm lowering the sensitivity of these points. I'm lowering the strength of the gB curves. And by doing this, I can move the points of the gB curves in a better, more flexible way because I lower the sensitivity of the curve. So let's select the gB curves, it to mute it. So this is the after, and this is the before. This is the after, and this is the before. And, to use the terms of colrisight now, we made the dark areas or the black level slightly milkier because we brought the black levels slightly up. I can also play a little bit with the red channel, so I'm going to remove it from the shadows, and that will introduce some can into the shadows of my image. Let's say something like this, and I can introduce some red right now into the highlights of the image. Something like so. I can also lower the green from the shadow areas, which will give you a result like the following and also reduce it from the highlight. And for the blue, I'm only going to lower it from the highlight, which will give you the following result. If I select this node, so this is the before, and this is the after. This is the before, and this is the after, And I'm digging this result. Now, let's try to make all of these stars glow. So go shift A and look for a glare. Let's put it here. If you like the streaks, look, you can leave it at this, or you can change it from streaks to fo glow, which I like more. Let's lower the threshold to something like 0.1, and this will add some glow to all of these stars. If I select this, hit M, this is the before, and this is the after, this is the before, and this is the after. A. This looks good. I can probably even bring the size up to nine, and I'm going to leave it at this. Let's also add some lens distortion. Shift A, look for lens distortion. The first option here is responsible for controlling the lens distortion. I'm going to put it at -0.1, and the dispersion will control the chromatic aberration. I always like to set this number really low. That's why I'm going to pick 0.01. Let's now organize our node tree by bringing the composite node here. Connect this to this. So this is our compositing notary. If I select these three nodes, this is the result without any effects, and this is with. And I think we improve this shot drastically. Also, I need to mention that blender is not mainly built for compositing. That's why if I were to do this professionally or this was some work for a client, I would probably opt to choose something like fusion. First of all, because it's free, you can download it from Black Magic, and it does have way more tools to do the compositing work. But for the stuff we use for this course, blender is enough. And right now, we can jump to rendering. I'm going to hit Control Space bar again to get back to the normal view, and we need to adjust some render settings from here. Mostly the end frame, make sure to set it to 120 because that's the length of the original animation. For the output, let's do the usual thing. Three slashes inside the folder called render slash. For the file format, you can either render as open X R and then convert it to a video, but we already rendered the scene as an image sequence. That's why I'm going to choose FF MPEG right away, which will give me an MP four that is ready for sharing. For the encoding, you could choose metro Saca, which I think is the MPV file extension. I'm going to choose MPEG four, which is the usual MP four. H264, for the medium quality, you can choose lossless. At the end of the day, our animation is just 5 seconds. So it shouldn't be a big deal. And yeah, that's basically it. Make sure to go to File, Save as. Let me call this, for example, compositing. Save as. And once you have your file saved, you can go to render and render animation. This should go really fast. Okay, the render is finished, and if I jump to the folder, and as you remember, because we did use the three slashes, that means that the rendered file will be in the blender projects. From here, you will have a folder called render. And here's our nebula. And that's it for how to create Nebula's in blender. I hope this course was fun. I hope you learned a lot. And if you like this course, please, please leave us a review, and while you're here, you can check the rest of our courses. So thank you for tuning in, and I'll see you in future courses.