Create a Realistic Looking Desert in Blender

1. Course Trailer: This course will teach you everything you need to know about 3D environments in Blender. Lot of people, when they tried to make 3D environments, they end up with a result that looks like this. I don't want you to get such results and my mission is to help you with that. This course will teach you everything about how to make epic through the environments in Blender. And I mean, every day, what are the different approaches to create 3D environments? What do we mean by displacement? How to make something look realistic and get results like professionals, how to understand nodes and build complex materials easily like the one you see it right now. Lighting, compositing, rendering layers, cycles versus EV and more. We will demystify all of those topics once and for all in a way that you will never have to struggle with them again from creating hot deserts, deep oceans do huge snowy mountains. We get them all net only when you finish this scores, you will end up with a solid understanding of how to make your environments look so in gorgeous. But you will learn along the way some really valuable informations and tricks that you won't find anywhere else. And that will take your skills to the next level. So even though this course might sound like it has just about 3D environments, it is just a topic that will help me explain a lot of things, but don't get me wrong. I'm not going to give you fish. I'm going to teach you how to fish so that by the end of the scores, you will be able to create whatever you have in mind. This course is built from the ground up to suit whatever your level in Blender, we will explain everything in detail that you understand exactly what we're doing. And most importantly, why in the first place, this scores is not just about showing you the buttons to hit, but most importantly, why am doing whatever I'm doing and what is my thought process along the way, which I think is the most valuable skill that you can develop. So basically the scores is a really tasty pastor for all the beginners out there with some spicy sauce on top for the ones who are looking for some advanced stuff and wanted to take their 3D renders to the next level. There is a value in this scores for everyone no matter your level and simply it will just blow in your mind. Now if all of that sounded exciting to you, believe me, this scores will be a huge investment in your 3D skills that you will never regret. Trust me and dad enough for me for this video, and it is time to talk to you all and saw the course. Yeah, go down. 2. Scene Preparation: In this first video, as I said, we will basically prepare blender for the work that we will be doing. As you probably guessed it, we will be using a lot of adaptive sampling, micro displacement, and all of those techniques that needs certain parameters to work inside of Blender. First things first, let's start with changing our render settings. I will go to the Render tab and inside here, first of all, we'll be using cycles for all of our work. So I will just change it to cycles. And after that in feature set, I will change it to experimental. The reason for that is that micro displacement features is only available in the experimental feature set. So make sure to change this to experimental. And in device if you have like decent GPU or an extreme more graphic car and make sure to use it because it will give you faster renders. So that's first. Second of all, it will basically take a lot of heavyweight from the CPU, so you can work faster basically on your scene. So I will change it to GPU compute. I will leave for now the sampling settings the way they are until basically later on if I starting to notice some slowing down in my computer, I made like basically change them later and I will go directly to the light paths. And here I have the max balances, which is by default 12. And it is a little bit overkill to be honest. So I will change it to eight and this will basically give us faster renders. We will have some other options to change them later, but they will probably be in the end of the course, I will delete the light and the cube. I won't delete the camera because I will need it. So I'll hit just x and delete, and I will add a plane. Let's add a plane here. Makes sure that basically the size is going to be 200 meter because we want somehow a big deserts. So we have 200 meter plane. And what I'm gonna do is basically click on it, it F2 to rename it, and I will call it desert and hit Okay. After doing that, we need to add a certain modifier to this plane. I will go here, add modifier subdivision surface, and just make sure to select the option adaptive sampling or actually adaptive subdivision and change from Catmull Clark, change it to simple. There is no distortion. What we're doing basically is to try to optimize the scenes in a way that it doesn't slow down our computer. That's basically what we're doing. The adaptive subdivision option basically will subdivide the areas that are closer to us more than the areas that are basically far from us. We don't need details in far spots because probably we won't be able to notice those. This option adaptive subdivision will allow us to do such thing. Let's get back to our plane. I will hit Tab to jump into the Edit mode, I will hit the right-most button. And here we will have an option called sub-divide. I will click on it and I will probably pick a high number. For now. I will pick 100. Some people might think it is a little bit overkill, but believe me, it is not in probably at the end of this basically shaft or when we are basically preparing for rendering, we might basically subdivided even more. But for now, this will basically be enough for us to start working on this environment desert hit Tab again, basically to leave the edit mode, I will go right now to the render tab. And basically we don't have anything because we don't have lights in the scene. The good thing about blender that it already comes with some really useful initially arise that are already made. So if you want to access those, all you have to do is basically make sure to open this arrow and just uncheck Seen world and blender, it automatically will basically use some default HDRI is that it has to light in your scene. In my case, I will really like this brutes and rise, which is this one right here. So I will just click on it. And basically it is like right now the URIs that we are lighting our scene width and by that, we are ready basically to start working on this desert. And one last thing before I leave, and I will probably forget mention it later on in the course, which is saved your files as often as possible. We will be working on a lot of displacement and self will get heavy with time. The last thing you want is that you're following the scores for three or four videos, something like an hour and then blend or crashes, that would be a nightmare. So do yourself a favor. Please save your files as much as possible. In my case, I would go to File Save As and basically just save it into your hard drive. I will go to My Projects environment course and he had desert and I will create a folder call it blends because we will be saving different iteration of this blender file. And I will call it desert underscore 000 and hit Save As. And yeah, we're basically right now ready to move on to the next video where we will start creating the shape of the dunes. See you there. 3. Create The Dunes: The last video basically prepared blender for the scene that we will be working on. And in this video we'll start basically by creating the shape of the dunes. So first things first, let's just basically bring this up and I will change it to the shader editor, which is this one right here. Click on the plane and click on New. And here I would like just basically call a desert underscore displacement. One important thing before we keep ongoing is that makes sure to go to the Material tab. And if you scroll down, you will have here an option called settings and the displacement makes sure to change the displacement from bump only change it to displacement only. So you can see the displacement effect when we start doing it. So we have here our basic principle be SDF. And I will basically bring this material output here and I'll take this up. What we're gonna do, as I mentioned, is basically create displacement to change the form of this plane. So it looks something similar to sand dunes. I will go shift in a search and I will search for displacement, basic stuff for the displacement. I'm not going to change the settings for now because I will probably get back to them later on when we basically have something to change. So I will just connect the displacement to the displacement and we're ready to go for now. Now what I'm thinking about is what is the texture that is similar to the shape of a dunes? If I pull out here my reference images, is there a texture in blender that is similar to those like kind of wiggling lines inside of Blender. And you probably already guessed the answer because we already made the course about it. Yes, there is. And it is basically the Voronoi textures. I will go Shift a and just add Voronoi texture. Remember when we activate it, the Node Wrangler add-on. Now it will come really handy if you want to see what does this node look like, you can hit Control Shift and click on it and Blender will basically show you how does this texture look like. As you can see, it is a little bit similar to the shape of dunes, but we probably can change some settings in the notes so it fits better what we're looking for. So let's zoom on it. And first of all, I will change the type from F1 to smooth F1. This, you will notice that it will hide those lines that will get them back pretty easily basically by changing the smoothness. And I would like basically just drag it down maybe to something like 0.01. This will basically give us this result, which I think for now we'll be good. And probably in case you don't know the way of how micro displacement work or actually how displacement work Blender the areas that are kind of in black will be pushed down. The areas that are white will be pushed up. And the gray zones basically will be the transition from the lowest point to the highest point. And that's basically how displacement work. If we imagine this in 3D, if we rise up the white parts, bring down the dark parts. This will basically give us the shape of the dunes to see this better or to visualize it, Let's plug this distance to the height. Probably won't see anything because we're still seeing the Voronoi texture. So we need basically to get back to the principle be SDF, Control Shift and click on this. And as you can probably see something is happening. We're basically creating some sort of displacement. Notice that there are those lines that are pushed up, so we're good to go. Our shader is working. Now I need a mapping know with basically to change the position of this Voronoi texture. To do that, There is another really useful shortcut that we will be using a lot which is Control T. And this will add the texture coordinate and the mapping node. And they are really useful in case I want to change the scale, irritation or the location of this Voronoi texture. But for now, I will leave them the way they are. And if you want, you probably can play with those settings. I don't know, maybe increase the scale or anything if you want basically to just experiment with different results, for example, I'll just put it to for the sake of fun and the good thing, because we're working on a procedural environment, it doesn't matter to be honest, the values that you will put right here, for example, in the location, because probably it is fully procedural. So you're basically not destroying anything or you're not ruining the results. So that's why it will always work. Now as you probably notice, there is not much going on because the scale value is little bit pretty low. So I will basically just change it to ten. And that's more like dunes, or let's say for now it looks more like dunes. It is still really far from like sand dunes and it looks like it. Let's just keep on working. What I want to do right now is to add more variety to the way the Voronoi texture is applied on this plane. To do that, let's just bring those nodes here, Shift a and add a noise texture, noise texture. If you want to see what does this texture do, hit Control Shift and click on it. And that's the noise texture. What I want to do, as I said, is to add more variety to the way this Voronoi texture mapped onto the plane. So what I want to do, for example, I will drop maybe the scale to something like 1.5. And the details, I will maybe double them from two to four, and probably I will leave the other settings the way they are. And just maybe a little bit of distortion, something like one for now, I don't see the result pretty clearly, but I think it would be good. And to mix it with the original mapping, we will basically just use a mixed node or in Blender cold mix RGB. And I will plug it right here and take this socket, the factor socket, and plug it into color too. If you want to see this note Control Shift click on it, and we will have this. And maybe let's just drag this value a little bit down. Probably there is not much happening. I'll put it like just 0.2 for now. And if you want to see this effect, we will basically need to get back to the principal BSD F Control Shift. And let's see what it does. As you can see, what we did is basically to add more variety to the way it's Voronoi, texture is applied. And notice that we created lists sort of texture right here, which basically will give us some sort of like those small details that are on the dunes. After doing that, Let's add even more details to those like big dunes, which is by adding another noise texture noise. And right here I will take this vector and plug it from here, the vector, so on basically using the same mapping node through the Voronoi texture, I will leave the settings the way they are and just basically bring the roughness up to one and add a little bit of distortion, something like one. And what I want to do is to mix it with this Voronoi texture. How to mix nodes, shift a search and just mix RGB. And I will put it right here before the displacement effect or the displacement node. What's happening right now is that probably blender is mixing the generic texture with the color tool, which is just twice. So we need to plug the factor into color to notice the results. There are those really weird swirling things. We need to change the blending mode from mixed to overlay. Just change it to overlay and band. We just added some more details to this dunes. One thing I think that I might want to change is that the value of the distortion is a little bit down, so I might bring it up to something like 1.5. So yeah, that's looking pretty good, I guess. One thing I noticed right now, even though we probably raised up this value here, I guess the Voronoi texture needs a little bit of a boost. Now you might think that, hey, just get back and change some settings right here. But here's a general rule that we will be applying along the scores if it is possible to change the value of a certain node just by using one slider. Just do it because it will get back to it later and you will thank yourself for doing that. Instead of changing all of those values and spending hours and hours of just changing values. It would be really useful if we just change one value. To do that, let's add what we call a math node. Now I know a lot of us hate math. Here is complicated, but believe me, it is super simple. I will just add the math note and put it right here. And in a logical way, if we want to make, for example, the Voronoi texture stronger, or if we need to boost it, we will basically need to multiply it. For example, imagine you have two and you have a three. What is it like basically the biggest number that you can get out of them. If you do two plus three, you will get five. But if you multiply two by three, we get six. So we need to change the value from Ed to multiply to basically make it stronger. And I will change the value to 1.5 and we're getting this shape, which I guess will be good for now in terms of as a basic form for our dunes. And later on we will probably be changing the values of the multiply settings to get better results. But for now, we're good to go. The last thing I want to mention in this video, it is super crucial to organize your notes because we will have loads of them. So what I'm going to do is basically to create a box around all of those nodes except the displacement and just hit Control G to basically join them and put them inside this box. So if I wanted to move them, I can move the box, hit F2 to rename them. And I will call them dunes, which is like the basic form of the deals that we worked on, lets it for this video. And in the next one, we will add more variation to those dunes basically by creating some waves that represent the waves that are in the sand of the desert. See you there. 4. Create The Waves: In the last video, we created the dunes. So today we will create some waves, not ***** waves because we are in a desert that the waves that are on the sand, how to create those. It is actually pretty easy and I guess you probably already guessed how we're going to do it basically by using the bottleneck texture. We will have a lot of autonomic texture along this course. So Shift a and add Voronoi the extra and put it right here. For this Voronoi texture, we're going to change some settings. The first thing first, I'm gonna change this to smooth F1, and probably I need to see what does this node do? So Control Shift and click on it. And this is our node. We need to create waves on it. So we're basically need to bring the scale up. Let's say something like maybe 100. All right. I feel like there's still a little bit big, so maybe just bring it to something like 120. And for the smoothness, I will bring it way, way down and that will leave the randomness up to one. After doing that, we basically need to change the scale of those dots. So they will be like kind of elongated. To do that, let's add a mapping note click on the node and hit Control T. And we will have our basic mapping node. But I forgot to mention that we need to UV unwrap our geometry. We're gonna do that really fast. So let's just get back to the solid view hit Tab to jump into the edit mode, hit a to select all of your mesh, hit you. And here just hit unwrap where a little bit for blender to do its magic and bam, we're ready to go. So hit Tab to exit the edit mode and get back to the render view. And right now we can basically use the UV. Let's plug it right here. And what I want to do, as I mentioned, is that I want to make those dance a little bit longer, a little bit elongated or distorted. So I need to change the scale. I will change it from one to something like five. And notice what will happen. We basically created this wave effect. We're like stretching those dots in a way that they give us those kind of lines. That's really good for our environment to see the, really the effect that is doing on the actual geometry, we need to mix it with the dunes shader. And here's something whenever you say you need to mix two things, there is a node for the evidence called mixed. If you find yourself using the word mix, just look for mixed, mixed RGB. I will put it right here and basically plug this distance, lugging it to color to let's visualize what's happening by clicking on the principle be SDF Control Shift and click on it and we have those lines. I don't know what they call them actually in English, but those like weird beaks that looks like sponge. The main reason for that is that we're basically using the wrong blending mode right here. Notice that it is by default makes, but we need to change it from mixed to overlay. Now we have this. The only problem right now is that the value is a little bit too big or the mixing value is a little bit too big. So I will need to drop it way, way down. Let's just maybe put it for now. And 0.1, it is a little bit too strong steel. Let's put 0.05. It is a little bit too big, so maybe I will add another 0 right here. That's better, I guess. Let's just create a box around these. Hit Control J and hit F2 to rename them. And let's just call them waves, hit Enter. Right now, we basically created some waves on the sand. Now probably the effect of those waves is still not visible yet, but we will be adding a lot of variation of light, bigger waves, small waves until basically they were basically becomes super pronounced. But that's it for this video. This was a short one, and I will see you in the next video where we will be creating some small waves which will basically add more variety to those dunes. See you there. 5. Camera Adjustments: Welcome In this video and you're probably expecting me to create the small waves. But actually before we do that, there is a really important thing that I need to explain because we're working on a procedural environment. The variety is basically infinite. So that's why we need to launch our camera to a position. And we will base all of our edits and all of our shading based on that angle, if we would like basically just keep staring at it as this review, we will never get a sense of how it will look like. We need to position our camera and that's what I'm gonna do. The easiest way to do that, make sure we have your camera and that you didn't delete it in the first video and just click on 0 and basically blender right now we'll change to the view of the camera that probably the camera is right now is basically staring at emptiness. So make sure to hit N and go to the View. And you will have here an option called camera to view. By the way, there is a really useful shortcut that you should be using, which is Control Space bar, which will basically maximize the editor that you are working on. So this way we can see the 3D viewport and a better way, click on this option camera to view. And right now wherever you move your 3D view port, you will be moving the position of the camera. It will scroll down something like this. And there is a problem happening, which is I guess it is related to clipping. So let's hit Control Space bar to get back here. Notice that blender or actually the settings of the camera inside the properties editor, the end clipping is starting at 100. This means that the camera inside of Blender will only see 100 meter away from the frame. And if you think about it, our surface is actually 200 meter. It is super big for this camera, we need to change the settings unless it just change it to something like 100000. And bam, we can see our desert right now. We increase basically the end two kilometer. That's pretty good. Let's get back to the 3D view port Control Spacebar to maximize it. And let's just start moving our camera until you get a view that you are satisfied with, which I actually think I like this view. It is super cool, so I will just leave it at this position for now. We might change it later, but for now it's super good. Another thing that you might want to do to save more memory, hit Control B and just drag a square around this thread square. So basically we created a render region. So blender right now, we'll only render inside this frame, and we will save a lot of rendering time later on. Now just hit Control Spacebar again to get back to the normal view. And another thing that you might want to do is basically to change the focal length of this camera to something like 24 because it is more suited to basically landscape shooting. And as you can see, I need to zoom in a little bit like this. That's nice. And the last thing before we finish is that we might want to change the aspect ratio of this shot. If you're watching a movie or something, you will notice those black bars on the top and the bottom. They are little bit cinematic. Do we need basically to create the same effect here in Blender. What I'm gonna do is to go to the Render Settings and you will notice that I have a resolution which is 1920 by 1080, which is the basic full HD aspect ratio. What I want to do is to give it more of a cinematic look. If you do a little bit of research, you will find that the cinematic aspect ratio is actually 2.39 and we need to recreate that same aspect ratio inside of Blender. So what I'm gonna do first of all is basically to change from full H22 for k, basically by multiplying by two. And I will copy this number and put it right here. And basically right now we will have a square frame and I need to give it the 2.39 aspect ratio. To do that, all we have to do is just to click on this y-axis or resolution in the y and divide it by 2.39. And Ben, we got our cinema scope aspect ratio. And as I can see, there's still a little bit of eclipsing going right here. I'll just zoom in a little bit, just like this, That's super good. I might also go over this part right here. So let's just zoom a little bit more. That's looking super good. Maybe also there is a little bit of clipping that is going right here. So I will move my camera to something like here, and that's a little bit better. And by doing that, we will save a lot of resources, so our blender will work a little bit faster. One last thing before I finish this video is that in case your computer is a little bit slow and it can't handle basically the aspect ratio. Just drop this value to send elect 50% and you will have the same aspect ratio. Makes sure to plug those numbers and just basically divide it by 50%. And you will get basically the same resolution as full HD or the equivalent of full HD in cinema scope. I will see you in the next video where we will actually create the small waves. See you there. 6. Create The Small waves: Welcome again everyone. And as I mentioned in this video, we'll create the small waves. First things first, I'm just going to take both of those two nodes and move them right here just to basically leave more space for the other nodes and to create those small waves. I guess you probably already guessed the node that we will be using, which is the Voronoi extra. Let's just zoom in right here and go Shift a to add a new node and just look for Voronoi. It Control T to add the mapping note to it. And let's visualize this Voronoi texture by clicking Control Shift and clicking on it. This is our Voronoi texture and I will probably bring this scale to something like 100. Alright, I guess it can be a little bit more, let's say something like 150 because they are a little bit small. And actually I think what is the value that we used right here? It was 120. So this number is a little bit bigger, so this will make them basically smaller. I will keep it at 150. And to give the illusion that they are basically waves, we need to stretch them. So I will take this y-value and it something like five. And this basically gives us the effect of those swirling lines. Or let's say just give us the illusion of waves. One thing that I like always to do with those types of details, it is to change the type from 3D to basically to 2D. I will change this to 2D. And just this basically create this different type of effect that I feel like it is more suitable for the details that we're going for. Another thing that I always figured out that kind of work with those kinds of textures. Actually, we best kind of workflow is to map the nodes at the same way we did right here. Basically just adding more variety to the way the Voronoi texture is mapping. All basically do a similar effect, which is by adding a noise texture search for noise. Let's put it right here and hit Control T to add the same mapping node and just change this type of the first mapping node from generated. Let's just change it to U, V. So we're using our UV map as a texture coordinate for the noise texture. I will keep it as generated, not uv. Let's see what this noise texture look like. Control Shift and click on it. This is how it looks like. So let's make bring the scale to something like 50. Let's maybe make smaller 40. Yeah, That's more of Warum like looking for. Let's try, for example, change the type to 2D for the details too is a little bit too much. I will basically divided by half, which is one in further roughness, Let's see, this is to graph. Let's just drop it to 0 and let's add a little bit of distortion to it. Maybe 0.2 will do the job. Let's look in pretty good actually. And notice that we're getting those swear length of the way that we want them. And what I'm gonna do is basically mix the original mapping that belonged to the voronoi texture. I will mix it with this noise texture. So I use the word mix, so we will probably need to make snowed shift a search makes RGB put it here and just take this factor and basically slam it to the color to socket for the blending modes here, make sure to change it from mix, change it to overlay, which is this one right here. And for the factor, Let's just see the effect that we're getting. So Control Shift and click on this node, it is a little bit too intense. So what I'm gonna do is basically to change this value, Let's drop it down, still too strong for my taste. Let's maybe even drag it a little bit too. Let's try 0.1. Still too intense, Let's say 0.01. Yeah, that's way, way better. Actually, that's way better. And let's see how it looked like by basically plugging the principle be SDF. I will just move it right here so it is closer to where I'm working, Control Shift and click on it. Now probably lying is visible. And the main reason for that is that we didn't mix this block right here, the small waves with the rest of the nodes. So let's just add a new mixed node pretty fast shift a mix mixed RGB. And as I said, we will mix those with these. So let's plug this one right here and just take the distance and plugging it to the color too. We get the same fact, the SpongeBob effect, those big things. The SpongeBob effect, I don't know, it looks like a sponge. What I want to do is basically to change the blending mode. That's why we're getting those peaks. So let's just change it from mixed to overlay. As usual, it is definitely looking better. And let's just drop the fact we're way, way down. Let's say something like 0.01, maybe. Let's try 0.1. No, this is too intense. 0.01. Yeah, I guess that's good. We're getting like a slide bumpers, if you know what I mean, that will basically represent those small things that are. Those small waves that are on the dunes. One thing I always like to do is to add a math node after this block. So I don't have to change all of those values again and play with them. If I want to change the intensity of the small waves, I only want to change one value. Let us go to shift a search Math node plugged right here. And for the operation, I will change it from air to multiply. And let's say for the value I will put 0.1 for now, keep itself for now and later on off we need to basically boost it. We can do that. What I want to do right now is basically to select all of these hit Control. J hit F2, and let's call them small waves. Nice. And we're now we basically created a small ways shader. I might add more variety to this. And to do that, I will just basically, let's take those nodes here again. And I will mix all of those nodes, all of those groups with another noise texture. What I'm gonna do is basically go here, shift a. Let's look for noise, noise texture. We'll put it right here. Let's visualize this node how it looked like we have this. Let's change the scale to something like 20 and the details, let's bring them to something like five. And for the roughness, I'll just bring it up. And what's this basically, it's given us, notice that there is a lot of details right now on our mesh. So this will be good to create the illusion of the sand and that's what we want. And basically in right now, all I have to do is to add a mixed node, shift a mix, mix RGB and put it right here. And what I want to do is to take this factor and plug it into color to let us get back to our principal, BSD f, it is way, way intense. I need to change the blending mode. And instead of using mixed, I will try to use this time the lighting blending mode, which is this one right here. The main reason for that is that because when we use the overlay blending mode is like we're carving into the mesh. What I want to do right now is basically to just give the illusion that this noise is just on the surface. So to do this, just make sure that you drop this factor. Let's say something like 0.05 still. I don't know. It looks good for now. It's enough and I will keep it at 0005 for now. Even though if you focus right here, it is still a little bit too intense for my taste. So maybe let's just drag it to something like 0.02 and that's really nice. I feel like it is more settled. One general rule that I always keep saying, Actually, I didn't mention anytime of the course, but I always say it in real life. If you combine a lot of subtle effects together, they will form a bigger effect. And that's what we're trying to do basically in this course, we're adding small details, more and more and more layers of those small details. And until we have a whole basically environment and that's the right a way actually to approach those 3D environments. That's it for this video we basically created for now our basic mesh for this desert. What I wanted to do basically in the next video is to create those little rocks that are popping from the sand will give the illusion like there are some rocks actually in those sand dunes. That's what we're gonna do in the next video. See you in the next video. 7. Create Small Rocks: Hello everyone. In this video we'll create some rocks on those dunes. One thing I wanted to mention before we move on to creating the shader, I want to change some parameters or some properties in the render settings just to optimize our scene and to make it basically faster in case it is getting slower. So let's go to our render settings. And right here you will have an option inside of subdivision is called dicing camera blender right now is calculating everything from this view to the last basically point of this plane. We're just calculating everything. Yes, we added a subdivision surface, but still blender is still basically kind of calculating everything from this point to the end of the plane. So we might want to add the dice and cameras. So blender will do all of its job from this angle, but we're looking at, so let's go to dice and camera and basically pick our camera, the camera we're using to capture the scene width. This will make everything faster. And another thing there is this option which is off-screen scale, which is basically the amount of how much blender is doing subdivisions inside is actually outside. This frame. We probably want, need a lot of details right here on those dark areas because they're not actually in the field of view. So they are basically unnecessary details. So this value work kind of inverted. So if you drop this value down, you will be adding more details. And if you bring this value up, you will remove a lot of details. So we need to remove a lot of details. So let's just change it to something like ten. And this will basically make your blender way faster. It will help you and you should always look for those kinds of tricks basically to optimize your scene and work faster. So now we're ready to tackle the rock shader. We have right here, our node network that we worked on it in the last video is starting getting bigger and bigger with time. But that's good. Let's select those two nodes, which I actually think that I kept moving them away the whole course. So I will just put them right here and I will never change them again. To do this, I guess you will probably know what we're going to use another Voronoi extra shift a and less look for voronoi. Alright, let's add a mapping note to this by hitting Control T. And let's change the texture coordinates sayings from generated to UV. Alright, let's visualize this node how it looked like, Control Shift and click on it to see it. And let's way, way far from what we want to fix this issue, Let's change the scale from five to 40. That's looking better. If we crunch it, we might get the illusion like they are basically rocks. And let's add another noise texture. Let's serve for noise just basically to add more variety to this. And I think I don't need an individual mapping node for this. I will just basically make the Voronoi texture and noise texture. Basically just both of them use the same mapping network. And let's just first of all mix them. Shift a and I will add, for example, is NMF node after the Voronoi texture just to control it. And let's go Shift a and add another math node and put it right here. And I will basically multiplying this setup, which is this one with this setup right here, which is the noise texture. A lot of you right now, my ask, why are you using a math node y? You just didn't basically use our typical mixed node. The main reason for that, if we think about it, we're taking black and white data from the Voronoi texture, black 0, white one. And we're taking black and white data from the noise texture. Black is 0 and white is 12. Will make more sense if we use mathematical operations to mix them, read with and basically our typical mixed RGB node. So that's why I'm using a math node. I will plug this value to the value one, and I will take this factor right here. Before I move on, I will change this from air to multiply the one that control the Voronoi texture and maybe drop it. Let's try drop it by a half, which is 0.25. That's better. And I feel like the noise texture needs to be a little bit like basically more contrasty to do such thing, Let's go shift AD and let's look for color ramp, the almighty colorRamp, probably one of the most peripheral nodes inside of a blender. And I will basically just try to create more contrast. I will click Control Shift and click on the Color Ramp to see the noise texture. And when I see right now, I feel like it is a little bit too big. So let's just make it 40 also. For the roughness, I will bring it up to one and maybe let's add more details, something like five or right? And let's basically just crunch the contrast of this picture, something like this. Maybe let's scratch it even a little bit more. Yeah, That's even better. Those basically white parts will be these points where the rocks will be sitting. So let's scroll down. And what I want to do right now is basically to mix it a setup with the rest of the nodes. And one thing I just noticed is that the operation, I actually, I want to change it to multiply. So we use some data from the Voronoi texture and from the color ramp. I don't want to add them. I want to multiply them. One important thing when you're using a multiplying or actually a math node, the combine two different, Let's say nodes or shaders, make sure to use clamp. The main reason you're using clamp is that you don't go over one and you don't go below 0. That's why, and why if this nodes basically, you know what? Yes, I said that I'm not going to move those, but I'm going to move those. Let's just move them right here, G and put them right here. I'm going to add another mixed node search mix and put it right here. The main reason I'm adding is to basically combine all of those with the rest of their network and just take this value and plug it into color too. That's looking really nice for the blending mode right here. I will change it from mix. Let's just change it to think about it. The rocks will be pumping, not carving into the mesh. We need, let's just change it to screen. We need to see the effect. Let's just get back to our principal BSD F Control Shift and click on it. The effect is still a little bit to settle. I feel. So let's bring this value up. And if you focus right here, they're a little bit more details of the road going right here. Maybe let's just put a 0.7. There is not much rocks distributed, so I might want to change the location right here. Basically just change the location of the map so that maybe we can get some more details. Let's just changed, for example, let's say one. Let's just try it. Five. Yeah, we will have a little bit of rock that is going right here. Maybe change it to ten and disappeared, but we have some rocks going right here. All right. I'm not going to pull a lot with this shader. Later on. I might basically just change the contrast and all those stuff and it will basically add more rocks. I want basically waste a lot of time on this part. Let's just select all of this network control J at F2 and color two rocks actually. Yeah, this is our rock shader. And ladies and gentlemen, we basically finished creating a basic mesh of our desert. The only part that we still didn't do is basically to shade our desert. And in the next video, that's what we will be doing. See you in the next video. 8. Displacement Node Network Overview: Hello everyone. In this video, I just wanted to do a small recap for all the work we did to create this basic mesh. And also one thing, sorry guys, I changed the location all of those nodes and I basically had to change also the location of those two nodes. Sorry for that, I failed you. Here's a bonus video for you. So first of all, we started with this dunes basically network. What this node group is doing is basically creating the basic form of the dunes. After we created the basic form, we moved on to basically adding more and more details to it. To do this, we first starting by creating those small waves, basically using the Voronoi texture and just basically blending it with the first setup. And also by the way, the main takeaway of the first setup is this idea right here. Have you mix the original mapping with, with another noise texture? If someone asked me, this is probably one of the most important techniques and really useful things that you should always keep in the back of your mind. Basically this node setup right here, mixing the original texture with or actually changing the original mapping with a noise texture. That's really nice. Strike the second. We went through the, we went through the waves. Let's go right now to the small waves. The small waves, we use a similar technique right here, which is basically mapping the Voronoi texture based on the original mapping of the UV and also of the noise sector. We basically mix them together to create some more variety which, which are those small waves going right here. After doing that, we created this small shadow right here. And unfortunately, I didn't add a mapping note to it, sorry for that noise texture. But anyway, this noise texture is men basically to create the illusion of the grains of sand on the, basically on the dunes. Let's why we're putting it there. It is just really subtle effect because notice that the factor is actually super small, 0.02. So it's not doing that much, but it just add more details, as I said before, when we add a lot of small details, we basically create the illusion of big details. Let's write now move to the last part, which is the rock texture or actually the rock node setup, which is pretty basic. It is just basically combining of ordinary texture with noise texture and driving this noise texture through a color ramp to basically create more contrast on it. And just make sure to mix it with a screen blending mode. So it gives the illusion of some bumps that are basically looking like rocks. Later on when we started basically coloring this, those dunes, this desert, they will give us the illusion like there are small pieces of rocks distributed on the surface of his desert. And the last thing this whole setup is basically driven by this displacement node. We didn't do that much with this node. We kept all the values the way they are except the scale will change it to ten. And this node will basically go to displacement. And this is our shader or our displacement nodes that are contributing to creating the shape of this desert. Let's sit for this video and the next one, we will basically create the color or actually color this desert in a realistic way. So yeah, see in that video. 9. Create The Main Desert Shader: Hello everyone. In this video we will basically finish shading this desert has been a long journey through it and it is time basically to finish it. So first things first, let's think a little bit about how we want to shade it, because that's really important. Here's how I'm thinking about it. I will just quit my camera view first things first, I want to have different color for those like lower parts. I want them to feel like they are wet, like they are basically were covered on water or something. So those parts right here and the shadow that are little bit dark, there will be little bit darker, slightly darker than the areas that are on the tongue. Because the areas that are at the top, they are basically more headed by the sun. So that's the first thing that I wanted to do. Also, if you remember, we added this rock module right here. So it is important also to consider this or actually to color those rocks with their own material. In general, we will be creating three different colors or three different setups. One for the sense that are on the top, one for the wet sand and the other one is men for the rocks. We're not going to create another material which all going to happen right here. Let's just get back to our camera view by hitting 0. What I'm gonna do is, first of all, is to change the base color. For the base color, Let's just maybe change it to something. Or at this part is always annoying finding the right color. So I guess I'm just going to use the value that I used for the trailer, which is basically this code right here. So I will hit Control C and just basically put it right here, guys, I didn't want to bother you with other values. And basically looking for the right value is just a matter of basically is picking the right color. So please just use this code which is B7, D 51. It will give you the same color. I remember the first time I created it was really annoying and just blink trying to find the right color. So just use this color, it will just save you some time. But yeah, if you want basically to do with the right way, just do it and just look for the scalar. Yeah, I will use this color for now. And actually I'm gonna use a really useful trick that I learned, which is basically by adding a for now to drive this principle, BSD F, which will basically create some really nice effect on those dunes. It might not be the most realistic thing in the world, but it looks sick and that's what matter. So we'll edit for now. I will put it right here, and I will add a mixed node search mix and put it right here. And I will plug the factor into the corner one, move your cursor or above the scholar and it control C to copy the scholar and go right here and hit Control V. And what I want to do is basically to take this color and just plug it right here. Notice that it's kind of give some more life to this desert. Those kind of basically creating some darker parts for the metallic. I will keep it at 0. I will also drop my spec or up to 0. And also for my roughness, I will just take it to 0 and we have this result. It is looking super sick actually. Let's maybe also add 0.6 just to make the effect that is coming from the color to a little bit more intense and reduce the effect of that. For now, this setup is basically will be used for basically the upper parts. Now we need to create another variation of this shader, which will be the darker parts. So what I'm gonna do is select all of the setup and just hit Shift D and put it down here, maybe move both of them up. All what I'm gonna do is basically to just make this color as a little bit darker. So click on it and just make it a little bit darker just slightly. This will be good for now. And to see what does this look like, just hit Control Shift and click on it. And yet it is just the same shader, just a little, just a little bit darker. And for this one I will maybe bring the roughness a little bit up. Maybe let's suggest say 0.8. And what I need to do is to mix those two shaders that mixed RGB we're working with shaders, so we need to use mixed, mixed shaders. Shift a mix shader and put it right here, take the first and plug it here, take the second and put it right here, and click Control Shift on the mixed shader to see the final result. Now, as you probably remembered, I said that I want the dark parts to be right here and the light parts to be on the top. But this is not happening. The main reason for that is that blender natively doesn't know like Hey, this guy once, basically the darpa, the dark parts right here and the light parts on the top letter doesn't know that. So how to tell blender to do such thing? It is actually super easy by adding a factor which basically will tell blender where to use each setup, where to create the setup. I will try to explain it as easy as possible. It might feel for a second a little bit too complex, but it is actually not what I'm gonna do. First of all, let's add any texture coordinate, but it is not meant for coordinate, it is actually meant for geometry. So we'll add a node that is called geometry. This node will basically give us information about the position of basically the real vertices of the geometry. I want basically to distribute those to texture based on the position of them. The ones that are here. It will be dark, the one that are here will be light. So what is the axis of that control? Whereas up and down, it is the z-axis. So I will go Shift a and add separate x, y, and z. The main reason because I only want to work with the z-axis, I will plug the position into the vector and let's see what does the z-axis looks like. Notice that it is basically given us the parts that are really low. What I want to do basically right now is to add MF node math and put it right here. And I will change it to multiply. The main reason I'm adding this multiply node is basically if I want to make or actually to add more contrast to the separate x, y, and z, or remove more contrast from it. So maybe let's just drop it a little bit down. Let's do much, maybe something like 0.2. Yeah, that's nice. So it is like more even distributed. If I mute this node by hitting M, this is the before. There is not much details on those areas that are right here. But if I hit M again, notice that we added more blank, which means that more of those basically wet parts will be right here. And yeah, now we can basically take this multiply and just basically plug it into the factor. And let's see how it looks like. And as you can see, straight drink now it is inverted. The parts that are dark there on the top and the parts that are light there on the bottom. How to invert that? It is actually super easy. If you invert both of these, you will get the illusion we're looking for here. Dark up is basically looking good, but I freaking hate those kinds of colliding lines that are right here. So what I'm gonna do is basically do restore them the way they are. I will go Shift a and add a color ramp. This is actually guys, this is unnecessary, but just because I hate those crossing lines that are right here and just go here and basically flip color ramp. And basically right now we've just created another node just to fix this crossing lines that are right here. It is super dumb. I know, but I mean, it is just more visually appealing. So yeah, let's just move this setup somewhere right here and move this mix shader right here, and we're good to go for now. The last thing we want to do right now is basically to add another color to this small rocks that are on the surface. And to do that, let's just take this setup right here. And let's suggest add a diffuse BSD if we don't need principle BSC, if let's just edit the USPSTF, put it right here, and I will copy the same color, control C and control V. And I will make it darker. This will basically become the color of the rocks, maybe even a little bit darker. One important thing right now, we need to mix the color of the rocks. Well, there are sort of the shader. How to do such thing, mix shader, you guessed it. Let's put it right here. Why it's not connected? Yep, it is right now. And let's plug the second one right here. And as you probably know, blender right now is using 50% of the scholar and 50% of the other setup. The main reason for that is that we need to tell blender where to put the color of the rocks. We need to basically tell blender that, hey, this diffuse BSD F should be on the rocks. Again, super easy if you remember, we created actually a node network which is meant for the rocks. So if we take the positions are actually the setup of those Iraq's, all we have to do is basically to just plug it on the factor. I will maximize this editor and it will just take this value and just plug it into the factor right here. Let's see how it will look like. Let's just hit 0. Probably nothing is visible right now. You might see a little stuff that are going right here. And actually we need to bring a little bit more contrast to it. That's why we don't see it clearly. So let's hit Shift a color ramp, put it before the mixed shader, and let's just basically increase the contrast to something like this. Yeah, that's way better. Notice that we basically created the illusion of small rocks right now. Yeah, that's super epoch. So right now we have our old shader ready. Let's, that's looking super sick. That says for this video guys, we basically finish creating the whole desert. And the next couple of videos, we will basically finalize it for the final render. In the next video, we will fix the world lighting of the scene and light it for the final render. See you there. 10. Desert Shader Overview: Hello guys. In this video, we'll just discuss the whole node setup that we created to basically texture this desert. Basically quick overview before we move on to the lighting, just so you know the mechanism of how this works. It is actually super easy. As you probably knew that I basically combined, Let's just maximize this one. I combined the light color with the dark color. For that I use a for an L, which basically, as I said, will basically create those kinds. Basically just add more contrast. I don't want to get super detailed. What do we mean by for now? But it is simply that on if you see a circle, basically most of the time the reflections on the edges of that sphere, actually not circle on the edges of this sphere will be more intense. For nail is basically simulating that effect. If you want, just Google it and you can know more about the physicality of what do we mean by for now, but that's basically what you need to know. We combine those two shaders with a mixed shader and a factor. Basically this entire node setup, it is super basic. I think that this node set up, you probably need to kind of memorize it and understand the basics behind it. Because you will always need to put some elements on the top and some elements on the bottom. This node setup will basically allow us to do that exactly. We said that we take the position, we only need the z-axis because it does the axis that control up and down. We're plugging it into a multiplying to control basically the intensity of that map getting from the separate x, y, and z. And we add, adjust the color ramp to invert those two colors just so we don't have those crossing lines right here. And the last thing, we mix this entire setup with another mixed shader, which is men basically to color the rocks, we just use a diffuse BSD super basic shader inside of Blender and one of the oldest. And we just added this dark map or actually black and white map that we get from the rocks. We made it super contrasty and we plugged it into the factor. So let's diffuse be SDF is only applied on the dark areas. And the last thing it is all goes into the surface, which is basically our material output. So we can see the beautiful desert that you're seeing right now. This video is basically the final recap of how we created this environment from going from just a plain to displacing it and finally texturing it. In the next couple of videos, we'll focus a little bit more and how to optimize the scene. Add more details like sky, some dust, some background elements. But for now, this is it for the foreground element of this desert. See you in the next video where we will start basically preparing it for the final render. 11. World Lighting: For lighting the scene will be using an HDRI. So to do that, let's just change from the object to the world. This is basically where we can, we can control the lighting of the entire environment and we were here. So make sure to find those two nodes and just say dot to move to them. So as I mentioned, we basically need to add an HDRI. To do that, let's just go Shift a and add an environment, texture, environment. The picture actually I'm going to use it as a super famous VRI calls Fruit Sunrise by Greg's zones. Sorry Greg, if I pronounce her name wrong, it is such a really nice HDRI and it is the one that we will be using. We'll go open and basically you will find it in inside of the resources folder to care resolution will be more than enough. I will plug it into the color and also hit Control T to add the mapping node. One thing you might notice right now is that why we're not seeing the effect of this node? The main reason for that is that we basically didn't disable the world lighting right here. So you need to enable sin world. And Ben, we're seeing right now the effect. One thing I might change the rotation of this mapping node. Let's just try to find a nice angle. Let's, for example, hit one hundred, one hundred and fifty. All what I'm trying to do is basically to just try and find a cool angle or a cool lighting setup for the scene. 150, I guess we're good. I will just type 155 because I kinda like this shared or it is going right here. And also another thing I just noticed, it is a little bit too saturated for my taste. I will probably drag the saturation a little bit down. And so let's just look for saturation, hue and saturation and put it right here. And let's drag this to something like 0.7. So yeah, that's way, way better. And for the value I want to make it brighter. So let's take it to 1.2 and that's way better. One thing, because this background coming from the HDRI doesn't make any sense in our situation. We will probably need to replace it. But for now, let's just go to the render settings and inside of film makes sure to just check Transparent and we will basically remove it. And this is our desert in its full lowering. One thing you might notice is that it is kind of a little bit flat and doesn't have a lot of details. And the main reason for that I feel it is probably because we don't have enough geometry into it. And where it comes, probably the tricky part. If you know that your computer is a little bit slow or you don't have trust in your hardware, makes sure to save your file right now. Please do that so you don't lose your work. If you find that your computer right now is super slow, then you don't need to do this step. It is just basically it to push everything further. I'm gonna do it because my computer kind of handled it pretty well. So what I'm gonna do, let's just get back to the solid view or actually the Solid V, which is this one. Hit tab and hit a to select all of your mesh and just click and hit sub-divide. What I wanted to do is basically to sub-divide it twice and just hit tab. We're just subdivided our mesh just a little bit more. We added a ton of geometry right now. So there is that if I hit 0 and render the scene right now, it will look way, way better. And as you can probably see, even my blender is slowing a little bit down and see all of those details that were in the visible before. They are now super, super pronounced, which is really nice. So yeah, that's it for this video. Actually, that's how we light the scene and that's how we added more details into it. This basically desert right now is ready for rendering. The only elements that we will try to focus on the next couple of videos is basically to add some background elements and the sky. And then we will render this shot. See you in the next video. Bye everyone. 12. Adding Background Elements (Dunes): Our journey along this desert is coming to an end. So yeah, this video, I will show you how to add some background elements to this desert. This probably going to be the only part where we will need an external software to do our job. So here's what we're gonna do. We think about it in a logical way. We should see more kind of dunes that are here far, far away to create those dunes, there is actually a super easy technique to do that. First of all, I'm gonna add another camera shift a. The main reason I'm adding another camera is that I don't want to ruin this. The main camera, the position of the camera is already perfect. I don't want to ruin it. I'm gonna go to my scene settings and change from camera to camera zeros 01 at 0, and go to camera view. And what I want to do is basically to kind of shoot this desert from far angle, which would be something, let's say like this. You don't need to make it super close. Maybe just try to estimate the position which would be something that looks kind of like this. And we're going to render this exact angle. Let's hit Control Space again to get back to the normal view, let us go back to the Render Settings. I will bump this to 100% so we get more quality. And the main reason I'm rendering this part, because we're going to render it, then put it in the background. Some people might say, hey, why just duplicate the main setup, which is why don't you like just basically duplicate this desert more times, but the rendering time will be crazy and I don't know even if the computer will handle it, That's why it will be way, way easier and it will save you a lot of time to just render a small plate of it. And basically just later on important into the project and put it on the background, nobody will notice that it is just a 2D plane. So basically after having this element right here, so I will go to Render and Render Image. Alright guys, might render just ended. And what I'm gonna do is basically to go to image and save, make sure it basically to just save it inside of the renders, let's just call it as a sad background elements and make sure those settings are RGBA and basically eight and the compression is 0 and save image. Nice. And I will close right now in the render tab. Right now we're going to need an external software. You can use some free softwares lying Gim to do the work that we're gonna do right now. But just because they have Photoshop, I will just use Photoshop for that. And also if you don't know how to use them, you will probably find in the Resources folder at this image basically to use it after I edited it. So what I'm gonna do is basically open the image inside of Photoshop. What I want to do is basically because I have this separation line that are right here. I need basically to hide that separation line just so we have a smooth transition. Alright, I just finish it. I will go to File Export, Export As I will make sure to export it as PNG so we keep the transparent background and we'll go to export and just save it. All right, So now back into Blender. Let's just get back to our main camera, which is basically the camera zeros 01 and hit 0. And basically we need to add those elements right here. And right now we're going to use another really useful add-on which is called import images as plane. So hit Shift a and inside of image you will have Images as Planes will go to where I saved this image, which should be basically inside the Resources folder. Background element is super tiny right now, so I will scale it a little bit up. I'm bringing it up, scale it a little bit up. It's 0 to move it. And basically what I'm trying to do is I'm going to put it somewhere here on the background, which should be right here. I'll rotate it this way and put it somewhere right here. Let's see. Let's just maybe drag it, put it here. That's looking really good. I guess. Let's put it right here and maybe I will duplicate it another time shift D and put it maybe right here, Let's see 0. Let's put it maybe right here a little bit, bring it up just a little bit, and maybe add another instance also right here. So Shift D, move it right here, 0. Let's add another duplicate right here. Shift D, put it right here. Here. Yes, So basically right now we extended the background a little bit further. You can go wild with those planes because they don't take much time to render. So if you want to add more planes, you can do that. In my case, I think that this is enough, but you can probably go as I said, you can probably add more details in the background like duplicating those planes a little bit more. One thing that I'm going to do right now, which is that if you go to the material settings of those, basically of those planes are in the background elements. I will go from world to object. This is the basic setup, the import images as Blaine was, We'll do one thing. It is really important make sure to also plug the color and do the emission. And the main reason for that is to make those planes look the way they are supposed to look. And one important thing that you might want to do is basically to add curved node. So let's add curves, RGB curves, and put it right here. And what I want to do is basically to reduce the amount of light coming from it by just dragging this a little bit down. And actually I probably should also connected to the emission like this. This will make it a little bit darker. I'm just trying basically to give the illusion like it is far, far in the background. It is supposed to look something like this. Yeah, that's way, way better. Probably even add more contrast to it. Yeah, that's even better. And that's basically how I added the background elements of this desert. There's just about rendering, small, quick render of a side view of the desert edited in Photoshop to remove the bottom part of it and fix some issues with those edges and just import it here using import images as blame. Don't forget also to basically add a curve, adjust the lighting coming from these ones, and plug it also in the base color and the emission. That's it for this video. This is how I added the background elements. And in the next video, I will show you how to add the sky. 13. Adding The Sky: Hello everyone. In this video we will add the sky, as I mentioned. So yeah, let's just do that real quick. It is super easy. There is a technique that I want to mention it just so that you know about it. If you remember when we jump into the world settings, we basically use the best brutes and rise HDRI, there is actually a built-in node and blender that can stimulate the sky and we will be using it. But just for this video, just so you know about it, if you want to experiment with it, I will cut this selection by hitting control and dragging over it. And if we go to Shift a and go to sky, there is this guy texture, which is basically a tool in blender that will allow you to create the sky. I will plug it into color and I will go to film and basically uncheck this option transparent. And it is basically just a matter. You can adjust the sun intensity right here. You can adjust the ST elevation will basically control the time of the day. To be honest, I was able to get some really cool results with it. Not in this particular example of the desert, but as I said later on, we will be using it a lot. For example, this is kind of a sunset look or something. You can experiment with it. But for now, I will stick to my HDRI because it gave me better results. This is a technique that you can use in case you don't want to use an HDRI, I'll just plug it into the color and make sure to check Transparent. The method that we will be using is basically just importing an image of a sky and put it out really, really far in the background where to get nice picture of the sky. There are different resources. One of my favorite is basically Unsplash. So if you just look for dark sky, you will find plenty of really, really, really nice pictures taken by professional photographers. Just pick one that works for you. Maybe change the rotation from any orientation to landscape. And here as you can see there plenty of different options, plenty of different really nice picture that you can use for this particular video. I will choose a different one from the one that I used in the trailer of the scores, which will be this one right here. I really like this blue color right here. I really like it. I will go to Download and I will original size, make sure to download it as high res as possible. If not, you can basically just find it inside of the resources folder and basically go to shift a image. Image as planes blends. It is probably instead better sources folder and it is called Storm seeker. That's such a really nice name actually. And we'll get back to this view and scale it way, way up, way, way up. This guy should be huge. I will just hit seven to move it and make sure to make it aligned with the direction of this camera. So it's gonna be something like this. Will probably put it somewhere right here. Let's hit 0. It is little bit too small, we need to scale it even up. Let's just do that. Scale it at 0, and maybe right now we can move it really, really far. Let's hit 0, and we need probably to change the clipping of our camera. Let's get back to the camera. Let's add another 0 to it. I will draw, take a little bit up, make it a little bit further, maybe also somewhere here 0. And the thing that I'm gonna do right now is basically to rotate it a little bit on the x-axis because in the real-world, the upper part of this guy should be closer to the camera. So I will hit our x twice and just rotate it slightly like this, just to give it like some kind of more distortion. Maybe bring it a little bit up to something like this. And let's look super good. I guess the thing that I'm going to do right now is basically to go to the shader settings by going to Object and I'm going to change a couple of settings right here. First of all, I don't need the alpha because there is no Alpha for this picture. And I'm going to plug, or actually before that, let's add a hue and saturation. Note you saturation. And I'm just going to reduce this iteration to something like 0.5. So it has more flat maybe let's try 0.7. And I'm going to plug it also into the emission, which is little bit down right here. Let's stay color and plug it into emission. And probably I will have to change the Emission Strength. Something like 0.4 will be good and maybe add a little bit of saturation, something like 0.8. That's even better. Yeah, that's looking actually pretty good. I guess it is looking pretty good. Let's just drop it a little bit down. And as you can see, there is a little bit of clipping going just right here. So to fix that issue, Let's just probably I'm not going to duplicate this another time. I will just maybe take my camera lock camera to view and just zoom slightly just to hide it. Yeah, this is perfect. That's really nice. That's basically yet for almost everything. Yeah. See you in the next video. 14. Adding Background Elements (Mountains): Another thing guys, which is that I feel like the background is still empty, so I want to add more details into it. There is another picture that you will find inside the resources folder. So shift a Images, images as plane and I will go to the Resources folder and there is this mountain. It is also another basically picture of a mountain that we will try to put it really also far in the background. I will go to the top view and basically just try to rotate those mountains and the same direction of our camera, maybe something like this. I will scale it a little bit up and I will put them behind the dunes. They're not visible right now because I need to bring them a little bit up. But yeah, as you can see, they will add way more details to this picture. I will maybe put them right here and just basically the oblique gave them a bunch. So Shift D, Let's put the other one right here, Shift D, Let's get back to the camera view. I could've added another view, but I just too lazy to do that right now. Seven Shift D and other time maybe put it behind 0. Yeah, that's looking nice. One last one, shift D, not unless one accidentally to shift D and just put it right here. Shift D input in here, make sure to select one of those mountains. And as I said, let's add curves, do it, curves, RGB curves. I will put it right here and just basically bring the contrast up. Also, let's go to the red channel and add some red to it and go to the green and go to the blue. Actually remove a little bit. So basically tried to make it look kind of similar color to the rest. I guess this will do the job for now, and that's it basically for this video, we added a lot of background elements to fill the background. And in the next video we will add like some kind of more atmospheric depth using some other planes. And yeah, and after that, this scene, we'll be ready to go see you in the next video. 15. Adding Dust: As I mentioned in this video, we will basically be adding some fog to add more atmospheric depth to the scene. When it comes to adding fog and atmosphere, there are two big approaches that we can use or if there are two big techniques. The first one is using the principle of volume shader. If I look for principled volume, which is this node right here, and it is basically the main technique you that you might want to use if you want some super realistic results. But to be honest, the only problem with the principal volume and volumes in general inside a blender is that they render really, really slow. Use this principled volume node and factor the size of our scene, which is something like over 200 meter. It will basically take ages to render. You will need a really beefy machine to render such an animation. That's why we will be using another technique which is closer to cheating, but it will allow us to get somehow similar results. But at the same time we'll have like faster render, like really fast renderers. How to do this thing, it is actually super easy. Let me do this. First of all, my principles, volume node, I will drag this down to have more space in the 3D viewport. And I will go shift a image, image as planes, and I will go to the Resources folder. And here you will have an image called Font. Double-click on it to import it. And if you click on the dot, you will basically have this plane in the middle of the scene. The technique that we will be using it is actually super simple. We will distribute those funk elements or those fog planes on the entire desert plain. This practically will give us the illusion of fog or does the desert. So here's what we're going to do. I'm going to shift a mesh Blaine and make sure that the size is 200 meter. Some of you might ask, hey, why are you creating another plane? Why don't you like just create the particle system on the desert layer. This actually will cause some problems later on because we already have like a super dense mesh for the desert. And it will be really helpful if we just use a simple plain like basically just four vertices to distribute our geometry, this will save a lot of memory. So after creating this 200 mirror plane, which is really simple, make sure to rename it so you don't lose track of it. I will call it, for example, for particle. And maybe let's hide the object of the desert. And we have our simple plane. It is basically just four vertices. I'm going to add a particle system to this plane by going to the particle tab, go to New and just call it funk or let's just call it a dust, double-click on the particle system and hit dust for whatever reason this bug, when you change this name, it doesn't change this name. It's still going till blender 3. So it is really weird. I will change the type from emitter to hair. Make sure to check advanced. And we need basically right now to change the type of the elements that are used as particles, because right now it is using just paths. So go under the Render tab and here you will have render as path. Let's change it to our object. And our object is the element that we call it fog. It is basically the plane. If you zoom really close, you will have little tiny planes right here. So our particle system is working. It just needs some settings to adjust it to, to, uh, resolve that suits us here what we're gonna do, make sure to check object rotation. So right now, basically Blender will use the same rotation as the main fog playing. All the small planes are right now rotated the same way as the big plane. And after doing that, make sure to select your plane, then go to scale. And right here you will have a slider for the scale. If you start changing that, you will basically make your planes bigger or smaller. We want somehow resolve that we can see. So let's jump the camera view hit 0, and right here let's switch to the render view, and we have this. So let's make them a little bit bigger, something just like this. And probably they need to be basically pointed to the position of the camera. So make sure to check rotation. And if you open rotation and here you will have orientation axis, which basically will control the angle of those planes. If I change it from orientation exit from the velocity in hair to the object z and I sat, randomized Phase, I will basically be able somehow to change the direction of all of those Blaine to a result that somehow fits my needs. And using also the phase, I can basically changed their rotation the way I want. I want them to be basically pointed to the camera, something just like this. Don't worry about those basically block parts right here. We will get rid of them later, but right now let's just focus on the size and the randomization of all of those planes. I might add a little bit of randomized phase just to make more variation in the rotation of those because nothing in nature is perfect, it is all kind of random. And also I might check the scale randomness. So I will have big ones and small ones. So it will be more realistic. And here's something we will encounter which Are those black parts that are right here. They are actually caused by Blender not being able to calculate the transparency really, really far. If we go to the render tab here, you will have an option called transparent. And we have basically eight bounces. This number basically control how far lender can calculate the transparency of layers. So if we start dragging this number AMP, we will get rid of that. Keep it at 40. It is pretty good number I guess. And let's get back to our particle system here. I might want to change the emission because I feel the number 1 thousand we do have actually 10000 plane. It is a little bit overkill. I think I will change this number to something like let's start by 750 and see what we will have. Yeah, that's kind of cool. I guess I will just stick to this result. And here's another problem which is that all of those planes are literally just White Plains. We don't see any kind of font. Let's get back to our shader. Select the main fog element and let's see the material we have. Maybe click on the dog just so you can zoom on this element really, really close. And let's just see what we have. We connected the alpha, the Alpha, and we're good to go and we have the color into the base color. The problem that we see all of those planes as white, it is not actually coming from the shader. Whereas the other problem, what might be causing this problem other than that, it is actually probably because the color of this plane is y and the focus also wine. That's why we're not seeing the fog elements. So let's get back to our fog particle element and go ender basically viewport display. Inside the Viewport Display, you can basically control whether you want to see the emitter, which is displaying all of those fog elements are actually popping from the plane, so we need to hide the plane. You will have an option called show emitter. If you uncheck it, bam Blender will basically hide the plane or the emitter of those elements and also make sure to hide it also from the render. So later on when we render our scene, the plane won't be visible. And as you can see right now, we do have a small problem, which is that our fog planes are kind of flipped and that's actually due to the orientation axis. To fix this problem, you can basically visual with all of those settings right here. But to be honest, it will always lying doesn't work the way you expect it for whatever reason. So the easiest way I think to fix this problem is if you click on the fog element and just hit Done to zoom on it, and let's just click on the tilt so we only see it. We can probably hit Tab. And if we rotate this plane, the y-axis 90 degree, we will be good to go. So hit R, Y and hit 90. And we basically flip this plane right now if we get back to our normal view by hitting the tab key again, we will basically have the result that we will expect, which is that all of those planes aren't oriented the way we're expecting that to be oriented, let's say 0 and band, as you can see, they're rotated the way we want them to be rotated. Only one problem right now is that we can see where they ends and it doesn't look realistic effects this issue, we will basically need to stretch all of those elements a little bit to do such thing it is again, super simple. Make sure you're selecting your fog elements. I will zoom on it. I'm hitting the dot. So what I'm gonna do is basically to scale this plane on the z-axis. So it will give us the illusion like this folk is actually stretch. Again, if you can't see clearly or fog elements, just hit on the Tilt key, you will jump to this local view where you can only see it hit S scale and on the z-axis and make it a little bit stretch. Something like this, I guess will be enough. And to get back to the normal view, hit the tilde key again. And if we go 0, yeah, that's way more like it. And that's looking actually good. Let's make our desert object visible. Uh, probably right now it will take some time to render because we have a lot of degrees of transparency right here in the scene. Let's see. This is the result that we're looking at right now. There is a big problem with it, which is that this focus inside the sand and that's not realistic, that's not how sand is supposed to look like. The main reason for that is the position of those font elements. So we need to fix that problem. The easiest solution, it will have two options. Either you can move the fog particle system up and this will basically give you the result that you want. If I go G grab and move it on the z-axis, you will basically move all of this fog up. There isn't another approach which is more correct to be honest, and it is basically by going to the fog element, Let's hit the Tilde key to see it. And you need to basically put the anchor point, this orange dot, somewhere right here. Let's go tab, grab on the x-axis, and let's move it somewhere right here. And we have this result. We basically move the anchor point somewhere right here. Maybe even let's make it somewhat somehow on the edge which is on this line. And we will have this result hit tab again to exit and the tilde key to get back to the normal view. And let's just wait it to render. You will have the exact same problem. So make sure to select your fog particle, grab it by hitting g z axis and just move it a little bit. Basically just try to fiddle with it until you get a result somehow that you're cool with it. And in my case, I think that this kind of look good also you can probably play with this see to have different kind of pattern or a distribution of those fog planes. So yeah, you can play with that. In my case, I would like just keep it at two. And the final thing, the fork right now it looks more like clouds because it's not color. Let's just check our fog element and we need basically to colorize it. And the easiest way to do such thing is basically by adding a color ramp right here and color our main fog element. I will get back to the local view just to focus on this plane. And let's go shift a color ramp and edit after the color right here, I want to basically create a certain color to this element. So just click on the black and let's maybe make it brown, something like darker brown like this. Probably even something like this. I guess, hover your mouse over the color and hit Control C to copy the color and go to the white one and hit Control V to paste it and make sure to bring the brightness way, way up, something like this. And as you can see, probably I have to drag this iteration a little bit down, just so I get this really bright color. If we get back to our normal view by hitting the tilde key again, wait for it to render. We work in only a huge scene right now. So that's why it is a little bit slow to render. And yeah, as you can see, we basically added this kind of dusty looked at those elements. So it kinda look more like dust on a desert, which is to be honest, way, way more realistic. You can probably play a little bit more with the color ramp and all of those nodes play also with the fog particle system settings until you get somehow Arizona that you're really happy with. I don't want to bother you with a lot of members in details in this video. Make something that looks good to your eye. Of course, based on the references, those four planes would be super easier later on to render. And I will show you the right way to render them. That's it for this video. This desert environment is basically right now finished. In the next video, we will add some camera animation to the scene. And after that, I will show you how to render it based on different layers. And for the final video, we'll learn how to composite. That's it for this video. See you in the next one. 16. Camera Animation: As I mentioned in this video, we will create the animation of the 3D camera inside of this scene, it was actually super simple. The only problem that I stumbled upon is that I can't see it in real-time because the scene is super heavy right now. So that's where we will basically need to just somehow adapt to that and expect how our camera animation will look like. So here's what we're gonna do. Let's just jump back to the Solid View. Click on n to hide this tab. And let's exit the camera mode. And let's maybe collapse this one to something like here and change the editor to the timeline because that's what we will need to create this animation. Let's select our camera. Our camera will basically move. If I jump to the top view, it will look something along this axis. That's what we will try to do in this video. The easiest way to create this animation is actually not by using the camera elements, by actually by parenting the camera to another object that will act like a controller of the camera because I don't want to ruin the position of this gamma. So here's what we're gonna do. I will go Shift a and inside of empty, I will have an object called plain axis. I'll just click on plain x's and maybe you can scale it a little bit up so you can see it better, something like this and maybe click on Control a and apply the scale. I will go to my camera and hit Shift S. And you will have here an option called cursor to select it, which will basically move the 3D cursor to the schema. I will go to this object Shift S and selection the cursor. And basically right now blender move the empty element that we added, which I will call camera controller, moved it basically to the position of our camera. If I go right now to my camera properties here, I will find that it is actually the rotated 155 degree on the z-axis. So I will hit Control C. I will go to my empty object and hit Control V, just so that both of them are actually rotated the same way on the z-axis. And basically I will pair on this camera to this null object. I will select the camera, then select the null object, it Control P. And then we'll have the menu set parent to just hit onset parent to object. And right now if I move this axis or this empty object, I will basically move the camera with it. If I animate this empty object, I will animate the camera. Let's jump to the top view to see everything better. And I will select my empty object. I will go to the location and just hit I to create a keyframe. We basically saved the position of this empty object and therefore the camera at frame one, it will be at this place. I will have a ten seconds animation. Let's say I will go to 240. Those are actually frames and a normal video is 24 frames per second. If I want ten seconds, I need to multiply 24 by ten, which will give me 240. So make sure to change the end to 240. Right now I need to save the position of this empty object in a new position. So I will go G and make sure to hit y, which will give you the normal y-axis. I want to jump to the lock and y-axis hit Y again. And as you can see, I can move right now this camera on somehow or normal line to it. It is kind of diagonal will the position of this camera. So I'll go Gy, WY another time and just move it maybe a little bit similar right here. Don't go so far because we're basically dealing with Somehow meters right here. So I don't want the camera to be super-fast camera animation. I want it to be settled and super slow. After doing that, make sure to go to your timeline, hit again and select all channels. And if we go to the frame 0 and hit Play, as you can see, our camera is animated. One important thing right now, as you can see, the camera will start slow, then start to go faster and faster and faster and faster. And at the end it will slow down again. This is not the kind of animation that I want. I want it to be basically linear, so it will keep the same velocity along the animation path. To do that, make sure to select both of your keyframes, hit T and just change it from busier, which is the normal interpolation, just change it to linear. And right now it will always give the same velocity when it's moving as a warning to be. Now we come to the tricky part. Yes, we can see the animation of the camera, but we can't see what does the camera exactly see the main reason for that because as I said, if we go to 0, you might be able to watch the result basically from the solid viewport. And that's basically what we will use. But you can see it in real-time using the render view because the scene is so huge and blender can play it in real-time. Unfortunately, that's why we'll just rely on our soul view. I will jump back right into it. I would go to frame 0 and just try to judge how fast the camera is moving. The only way to do it. Unfortunately, there is no other way. So let's just hit Play. All right, Let's actually in my opinion, looking super good and I really like the velocity and the speed of this animation. So I'll just keep it at that. And by doing this, we're basically ready right now to render the scene. The only thing that we still need to do is basically to adjust the render settings and break down this entire scene two layers and prepare it for rendering. Yeah, see you in the next video. 17. Render Layers: First of all, let's just discuss why we need to break our scene into layers. If you try to render this scene as a whole by basically just render it as one image. This is not an ideal solution because you want to be able to later on, for example, to adjust the color of the sky on its own, maybe adjust the intensity of the FOG may be addressed the intensity or the color actually of those dunes. You won't be able to do such thing. And that's why it is important to break this scene into layers, which will basically allow us later on to composite and change some settings in each element on its own. That's where basically it is important to break your scene into layers to do that, it is actually super simple. All we have to think about is what do I want? For example, I might want the sky to be on its own layer. So what I'm gonna do is basically let's just make this way, way bigger. And this view layer, I will change at the sky and I will just click on Enter. And on this layer I only want to see the sky. Let's move our mountains, all of our mountains by selecting them, hit em a new collection and just call them mountains were basically just organizing all of those elements we have right here. So this is our mountains and also the background elements. Let me just select all of them. Hit M and let's new collection and just call them dunes and hit Okay, Both of the dunes and the mountain are both our background elements. So I will create a new collection, New Collection and let's just call it background elements and basically move the dune and the mountain inside it. We have right now a collection that is meant for the background elements. Let's create a new collection and let's call it sky. And I will move this one which is the sky. I will move it basically inside the sky collection. I might also rename it to sky. I will take my fog elemental particles and let's select both of them, hit em new collection and let's just call them fog and hit Okay, the last thing, new collection and let's call it desert and move the desert element inside it. And maybe also let's just change the name of this collection to scene. So right now we do have multiple collection for each element of the scene. Scene is basically we'll hold our cameras and controllers background elements. It is a desert and the mountains in the farm background, the sky, it is the sky. The fog is that us, that we edited the sane and the desert. It is basically our main desert shader or our actually our main desert element. This layer is called sky, so I need to disable all the other collection except the sky. One thing I just want to mention that in case you don't have this checkbox right close to the name of the collection, you will have plenty of options that you can show. In my case, makes sure to check the select box also maybe you want to check this, which is like cold holdout. Make sure also to check it because we will be using it later. All disabled desert, I will disable fog, I will disable the background elements, and I will only have this guy invisible. And that's basically it. I will duplicate this layer and just choose New. And let's call it, for example, background elements. And it is self-explanatory. We will only have the background elements in this layer. So make sure that the select all the objects that you don't need. Yeah, we only see the background elements right here. So we're good to go. Let's click on this button New, and let's call this a desert. And we only need to see the desert right here. So make sure that it's able to fog, is able sky and disabled by ground elements so we only can see the sky. Lastly, but not least, let's just do New and I will call this dust it enter and I only want to see the fog. So all disabled desert, disabled sky, disabled background elements, and we only can see the dust elements. One important thing right now is that I might want to clip the desert element from this layer. Because if you think about it in a realistic way, the desert would probably be carving some parts right here because that's the shape of the dunes. I don't want this dust or fog to be visible right here. The easiest way to do that is basically by enabling an option right here, which is called holdout. If I click on it and if I disable the desert layer, so I will see it. And you check this option which is holdout. If you click on it, Blender will basically hide some parts, the fog element that are supposed to be covered, let's say hidden. So that's what we exactly want in this case. I will just skip it like that for now. So basically right now we broke down the scene into different layers. So it will be faster and easier for our computer to render. And also we will have the option later on to adjust all the different settings and colors and hues of all of those different elements on their own. Because it will probably take a long time to redo the whole thing from scratch. Otherwise, if you wanted to change, for example, the color of the sky, you might need basically to get back to Blender. Adjust the color of the sky from the shader editor and re-render this in again. And that's definitely not practical. And it will take you ages to find allies one shot, and we don't want that right now, let's just talk a little bit about how we're going to render the scene. I'm not going to break down our render settings in this video. I will keep it on its own video, which has the next video. But there are a couple of options that we might need to check before we render our scene. So we'll move our this editor a little bit up, something like this. And right here I will go basically to render passes, which is the step bright here, and makes sure of all the settings, make sure to check the node using data. This way we will be able to use more data to do know is our renders. Here's how we will render the scene. We want. For example, this kind renders are the sky images. Do we own their own folder? We want the background elements, images or renders to be on their own folder. Same for the desert, same for the dust elements. And one important thing, make sure to check the noise in data for each and every single layer the sky. We checked denoising data, background elements check denoising data, desert, check denoising data in our final layer, which is basically just make sure to check denoising data. It is kind of weird thing inside of blender that you need to check this option for each renderer layer. That is just how blender works. So after checking this option, makes sure to go to your compositor and select Use nodes. And that's where the magic happen. And it is actually where we will use different nodes to tell blender where to save each render. Let's just move this component that right here, I might hit Control and the right-most button to cut this link. And I will go Shift a and select file output. It is kind of self-explanatory file output, which is the node that we will be used for rendering. And I might make it a little bit bigger, something like this. If you focus a little bit on this render layer node, it will tell you which layer Blender will render. So right here I have Skype. This render layer is responsible for rendering. Let's guy, I will link the image to the image. And as I mentioned before, we check the denoising data property. So we will need to add the noise in data or actually denoise and put it right here. And just link the denoising normal with the normal and the denoising albedo, albedo. This node right now is basically ready for rendering. The only thing that I'm going to do is make sure to select your final output. Click on n. And you will have here this small menu. If you go under properties, you will have here an option called base path. And this option basically will tell blender where to save this render. And here's what we're gonna do. We want to save this sky to its own unique folder. So I'll go here and I will go to my resources, may be a little bit up and I will create a folder and we'll call it renders. Later on you will find this folder and inside it, I will hit Accept. And inside here you will have an option called file subpath, which basically Blender will create a folder inside that render folder that we created that will contain our render. So I will just rename it to, for example, sky and hit Enter. This right now is basically our sky layer. By doing that Blender will render right now all of the images that belongs to the sky layer with the word sky in it. And this will save us later on because we will not just have image one image to image of three and it will be basically just a mess trying to organize them. We will have all the images that belongs to the sky layer called Sky 001002, etc. The layers, for example, that belongs to the desert will be called Desert one desert to etc. So basically it will basically save us from a complete chaos. The only thing right now that we still need to do is basically to duplicate all of this setup and adjusted for each layer will go select all of them, hit Shift D, move it maybe right here, and just change the render layer, for example, from sky background elements and go right here, make sure to keep it at renders, hit Accept, and right here let's just change it to background elements and hit Enter. Let's duplicate it again, shift D of it right here. I will choose right now the render layers, which is desert, go right here. Actually, it is inside the renders and I will change this to Desert. And finally, I will duplicate it one last time shift D put it right here. It is the same path, so we're good to go and change this to dust. And let's call it dust. Hit N again. And if you want to maximize your editor hit Control Space bar. And we have this, and we basically adjusted all the different layers to be rendered on their own. Basically set up another thing that I forgot to mention. Make sure after you create a dual whole notes setup for the rendering layers, make sure to like basically select one of your file output nodes and to open the site tab. And here makes sure to check the base path, makes sure it is the basically the best that we want. And also really important make sure to check the file format, make sure to put it as PNG and check RGBA. That's crucial. We want to render the RGB, our color channels, and also the alpha channel, which means that our images after rendering will contain the transparency data that are basically crucial for compositing for the color depth. Keep it at eight. We don't need it for the compression mixture, it is 0%, please guys exchange all of those settings for all the different file outputs. It is crucial if you don't do that, the final images that you will get after rendering, they are basically unusable, so yeah, just change those settings. And that's basically it for how to prepare your scene for rendering. The next video will basically adjust the render settings based on the power of your own computer. And we will be ready to go and render our scene. So without any further, I do see you in the next video. 18. Render Settings: As I mentioned in this video, we'll change some render settings to make our render basically faster and optimize it for rendering. So first things first, make sure to get back to the solid view. Actually when you leave it at render view this we'll use some computing power. So just to be safe, make sure to change it to the viewport shading so you save a lot of memory by doing that. Next thing, I'm just going to maximize this a little bit and go to our render settings. They render engine, it is cycle, as we mentioned, we need the micro displacement option, so experimental be crucial in case you do have a GPU, makes sure to use GPU, compute that in case your computer crashes while you're rendering or it is out of memory, just change it to CPU. In my case, I will just keep it to GPU compute for the viewport sampling and all of that. We don't need it because it will be rendering the scene. And here you will have an option called samples. And that's where it will get a little bit tricky when header than 28 is actually a safe number and it is actually what I will be using. But in case your computer is a little bit slow, you can change this number, for example, to something like 64. And I tried actually this render and it's still kind of look good. Also 32 in case your computer barely can handle this scene, 30 d would be the way to go, but in my case, I will just change it to 128 basically samples. So depending on the power of your computer, just adjusted the way I said. Other than that, I will keep the advanced the way it is for the light path. It used to be 12, we change it to eight so I will keep it the way it is transparent. Make sure it is 40. And other than that, I will keep all the other settings the way they are. I will make sure to go to my desert element, which is inside desert. Let's just select it. I will go to the Modifiers tab, and right here you will have final schedule, render, render one pixel viewport eight. I actually might want to change the dicing scale from one to a smaller number, something like 0.7, let's say, which will basically make more subdivision for my desert objects. So it will look just better in case your computer doesn't handle it. Just keep it at one. If it doesn't work with one, just start experimenting maybe 23, and just work your way up until you basically find the perfect combination for your gear or your computer. In my case, I will leave it as 0.7, which I think would be good. Another thing that you might want to check is actually in the output properties, which is your resolution. And as I mentioned before, in case your computer won't handle it, just drop this to 50%. And that way you will basically drop from four K to the full HD aspect ratio. Not full HD, but actually the equivalent of full HD in cinema scope for your frame rate, make sure it is 24 FPS. That's actually the frame rate that I'm using, the same one used in movies. And it will give you kind of the cinematic look that our eyes is used to, should just keep it at 44 and you will be ready to go. For my frame range. I have a ten seconds animation, so it goes from frame one to 240, which means I will have basically ten seconds for the output. We're not going to bother a lot with it because we already set up everything we need inside of our composite. The only thing that you might want to check it is actually your file format. By default, we have PNG right here, which is not that practical because it will compress your files a lot. If you want more flexibility later on when you use composite, you're saying you can probably use Open XR or Open XR multilayer. In my case, I'm not going to basically use any of those. I'm just going to keep it at P&G. And another thing I forgot to mention also the full work, but as I said, I will just keep it at P&G and just by default it will be 11%, just drop it to 0%. So we have the least amount of compression on our final images and also make sure to have RGBA so you render also the alpha channel. That's the crucial option to check. Other than that, there is nothing much to go through that set. And that's basically it for the output properties. Other than that, make sure to save your scene right now. So in case blender crashes, you won't lose all of those settings. So make sure to go to File and Save it. And the other thing that I found while I was rendering the scene the first time that the desk elements will take most of the time when it comes to rendering. There is another approach that you can use even though I don't highly recommend it, but you can do it and it will save you a lot of time, which is basically by using multiple rendering engines. Certain layers will be rendered as cycles and other, and other layers will be rendered by EV. The only way to do such thing is basically by deleting. For example, I want to render the desk elements using using EV. I will select all of those anterior setup render layers, dust and all of that. And I will basically just delete it, literally just delete it and render the elements that you want them to be rendered with cycles. And later on, reopen your file, hit Control Z to restore the node setup that we deleted and right now delete all the other setups that you render them using cycles and go to the Render Settings and change from cycle to EV and just hit Render again. And this way, you will only render the desk element. This way, you will have certain layers that are rendered using cycles and other layers that are rendered using EV. Generally that's an escape and it will save you a lot of time. So by having that in mind, we're basically right now ready to render our scene, adjust your settings, recheck them again. So once you start rendering, the last thing you want is that in the middle of the render or something, you've discovered that you did a mistake and you will have to do everything from scratch. That's a nightmare. Recheck your settings, make sure everything is perfect. Check again all of your render settings. And when you're ready to go, just go to Render and Render Animation. And basically blender right now will start rendering. You're seeing, it will probably take you sometime. I will highly advise you just leave your computer rendering at night and probably at the morning, depending on the power of your computer you're seeing, you'll be ready to go. That's it for me right now. I will keep my computer rendering and I will see you in the next video after the rendering is finished. See you there. 19. Compositing Part I: Hello and welcome everyone. In this video, we will like basically compose our desert. The first thing that you will notice is that whereas my scene did I delete it or what? I rarely do the compositing in the same blender file that I created this scene in an all of that because at this point the scene is already heavy and I don't want like basically to add more memory and all of that to the scene that I'm working on. So that's why I would like just open a fresh blender scene and do all of my compositing here. The good thing about compositing that basically has nothing to do with the 3D data that are in your scene. We don't need that right now. We already have our images. There is nothing we can do to change them. And the only thing, as I said, it's still that we can do is basically to tweak it a little bit more to get the result we want. So, yeah, just to start a new blender scene. And after you do that, the good thing is that blender offer a workspace that is meant for compositing. So I would like to change to compositing and you will have this nothing is visible yet. And the main reason because we don't have like some sort of data to tell blender that what we will compose. So that's why make sure to check this box called US nodes and it will open this. The first thing that we're gonna do right now is basically to go Shift a. And by the way, most of the shortcuts that you use in the shader editor, almost all of them like also works in the composite because both of them are actually node-based workflow. And you will find like they are pretty similar in terms of the way you work in and we need an input and right here you will have an option called image sequence. If you remember, we actually rendered our images or our desert, a different image sequences for the sky, for the main desert element, for the background elements and the fog, I will click on image sequence and blender automatically will open this menu. And all we have to do is basically to navigate to your folder. And here's a general advice. Think of your scene from the farthest element to the closest element to you, the farthest element in our basically seen it is actually the sky. It kinda makes sense like to import it first. It doesn't matter for now, but you will know why we need this kind of order in our mind to make the process of compositing easier. So I will click on one of the images and just import image sequence. You will have this node which basically will tell us that we imported our image sequence it is. And actually if you can hit Control Shift and click on this, it will show you actually your image. They're rendered that we've got out of the 3D scene. One thing that a lot of people will suffer is that basically why I can't scale this picture down. And it is for whatever reason it is not something like easy to do or actually it is easy, but no one will think about it. If you want to zoom out, all you have to do is to hit V and you will make the images smaller if you want to make it bigger, hit Alt V, and this will make it bigger or smaller or bigger. And in case you want to move it, make sure to hit Alt and hit the middle mouse button or the scroll wheel to basically move it. I don't know why they did it this way. It is what it is after we do this, we have our skies right now let's just go shift a input image sequence and I will import my background elements, click on one of them, import image sequence and just put it right here. We go shift a input image sequence and let's go to our desert, desert important image sequence. Let's put it right here. And finally go shift a input image sequence and open our fog element fog important image sequence and put it right here. Alright, So right now we imported all of our different footages or all of our different image sequences. We have the sky in the background, the desert and the fog. Why it is looking like this. We're going to fix that in a second. What we need to do right now is basically to tell blender what to put over. What, for example, I want this background elements to be over the sky. That's why there is a node called Alpha over it is this one. Why is it called Alpha over? I don't know why, but it kind of makes sense. You can remember it by the word over. So I will open this node and here's how it works. Image number two or the image that will be in the second socket will be put on top of the image that is on the first socket. So if I want the background elements to be over this, I will take the image and put it into image two and take this image it into image one. And if I hit Control Shift and click on the Alpha over to see it, notice what we will have. Basically we put our background elements over the sky. And one problem that you will probably notice right now, which is that you have like this kind of white stroke around your element. The main reason for that is that there is something that we call pre-multiplication. And I don't want to go in deep like where it is, pre-multiplication and all of that, but it is easy to fix. All we have to do is like to just check this box called convert pre-multiplied. Click on it and bam, we hide that white stroke. We won't see it anymore after we do that basically right now we want our desert to be over both of these. What to do? A at alpha, alpha over put it right here and take the image and put it right here. And bam, you have your result and make sure to check convert pre-multiplied to hide the white stroke. It is actually that easy. And here's why I mentioned when we were importing our footage is that you should think of the hierarchy of your different image sequences and they are positioned in 3D space. Because as you can probably see, we start from the farthest element and get to the closest elements. So having this organization in your mind, it will make your job easier in compositing and you will not lose yourself in different nodes. That tells you where each object is supposed to be an olive. That by doing it this way, you save yourself from being chaotic in the compositing process. And believe me, when you are working in a huge scene, this can be a nightmare. So probably the last thing we need to do is basically to put the fog above all the other elements, but I'm not gonna do it right now. I want basically to fix the lighting or actually to shift the lighting and all of that in our scene, then I'm going to basically just add the fog element on top. So yeah, let's just do that. And here's just one simple trick mixture, electrical lips, all of these so they become smaller to save more space so that we can see our scene. So we'll have this and yeah, alright, we have this guy, Right? Also, you might want to delete this rendered layer because we won't need it. We won't be rendering like any sort of 3D data. So there's deleted right now. Here's what we're gonna do. I feel like this guy is a little bit too blue for my taste, so I want to make it slightly darker. So let's go to our sky and just go Shift a. And let's add the curves, RGB Curves and just put it right here. If I start changing this curve, notice that basically the data from the sky will go to the RGB curves. This way we basically only affecting the sky. So I want to make this guy kind of like, let's boost the highlights. Maybe it looks something like this. That's better. And maybe like just and make it a little bit more dramatic by doing this. Maybe also let's add a little bit of light, are actually remove a little bit of contrast. So we have it looking like this. Maybe let's go to the red channel and add a little bit of red because our deserts is a little bit going into the red color and go to the blue and removal a little bit of blue because when we remove from blue, we're basically adding yellow. Let's collapse this and let's go Shift a and add hue and saturation value. It is basically almost the same note that we use in the shader editor. And the only thing that I want to do is basically to drag the saturation a little bit down, something like 0.8 for the hue may be also, you can play with it a little bit. Maybe our life, I don't know, like just keep it almost at the default value, which is 0.5. And the value, of course, it will basically just control how dark or light your image or just keep it at one. I'll collapse this. And right now let's move on to the second element, which is like those background mountains and dunes. Let's go Shift a and add an RGB curves. Let's just keep on working on this RGB Curves. Maybe I want to make the background mountains a little bit less contrasty. Let's say I will just bring this up. So basically we give the illusion like they are actually really far in the background and maybe we can boost a little bit of highlights. So they looked like this, maybe like do like this. The Let's zoom out V. Yeah, and that's actually looking way better. I think the last thing that I might want to do is basically to add some sort of like a yellow tint to them. And to do that, as I mentioned, go shift a, add a hue saturation value, put it right here, and let's just shift the hue a little bit. Let's say something just like this and maybe drag the saturation a little bit of yeah, 1.15, that's actually looking pretty good. I think the last thing is basically that we need to work a little bit on this main deserts. But before that I actually noticed something which is that these mountains there was like a really harsh line separating them from the sky. So I might want to blur them out a little bit. So to do that, go Shift a and add blur. There are different types of blur. The one we need is like just the simple blur and maybe like ranked this number to something like two. Let's try to also in the y-axis, maybe let's try 33. If you click on the node and hit empty muted, this is the before, this is the after, this is the before. This is the after the transition right now, or actually the edges of those mountains are less pronounced, let's say which like they look kind of better this way, I will collapse this node. And let's, as I said, move on to the final element, which is like the big desert. The desert I will go, as you probably already guessed, a shift a and just add an RGB curves. Put it right here. Let's maybe add a little bit of contrast to it, something like this. Let's also maybe add a hue and saturation. You saturation, put it right here, maybe drilling down like this iteration to something like 0.95. And what about if we shift the hue a little bit? Let's say something like, yeah, that's way better. I think maybe 0.950.45. That's a lot. It's 0.495. Yeah. That's actually looking pretty sick. I think the last thing we're gonna do is basically to finally add the fog above the rest of the image. So we'll go Shift a and I will add the Alpha over again, alpha over, hold it right here it is right now, like just putting whiteness above our image. So we needed to put the fault like the fog right here and make sure to hit pre-multiplying. And you have this, of course, you can probably play a little bit with the contrast of this fog elements. So my goal shift a curves. I like curves when working with images because they give you a lot of freedom more than just like for example, the color ramp, because it is simply just the Level Slider. The RGB curves will give you the chance to basically manipulate each and every single color of the way you want, or actually in this case channels the red and green and blue. I might add a little bit of contrast to it. Let's say something like this. And also maybe add a little bit of red, maybe removal little bit of blue. And basically you're FOG will look something like this right now in terms of coloring or render and fixing the level of contrast and lighting and all of that. It is basically finished, but we might want to add other small effects above this image, and that's what we're gonna do in the next video. See you there. 20. Compositing Part II: Hello and welcome everyone. In this video, we will add some extra effects to finalize our render. The first thing that I will add is basically to add some sort of a vignette. The vignette is basically like making the edges of this image a little bit darker than there were. Save the image to do this, there are multiple approaches. Some people might choose to create some textures inside of Blender and venues them in the compositor. In my case, I will go with the easiest approach, which is basically just don't loading an image from the Internet of a gradient and I would like just slap it over this image. So we'll go Shift a and look for image. If you hit open inside the resources folder, you will find an image called gradient. Import it by double-clicking Control Shift and click on it to preview it. And this is basically our gradient. What we want to do is basically, as I mentioned, we want to overlay it over our basically main render. And a lot of you probably already know like just scream, use the Alpha over, but actually we won't be using the Alpha over. We will use this slightly different node and this node actually we are really familiar with hit Shift a and look for mix. Unlike just put it right here, a lot of you might say, Hey, are you just using the same mix node? And the answer is yes, I will take the gradient and put it right here. And you will notice that it is acting a little bit weird. Everything is black. And the main reason for that is that we need to basically change the blending mode of the mixed node. We need to change it to multiply. And you will see that it is looking like this. The first thing that I need to do is basically to bring the scale of this image up. So we'll go Shift a and like look for transform and put it right here. I need to bring the scale up because this is my render and this is my basically gradient texture. I will start scaling it up. And notice by doing that, I'm basically showing more and more of my render, scale it up a little bit up. And we have this right now. And I feel like it is like really darkening more than basically need to change the nature of this grid in texture list just hit Control Shift and click on it. Or maybe at the transform node, I will go shift a search and let's look for curves, RGB curves. I will put it basically before the Multiply node right here and Control Shift to preview the RGB curves, nothing is changed right now, but if I start basically bringing this to white and drag this a little bit to black, you will notice that I will basically make this gradient a little bit more contrasty. Let say if I preview right now my mixed node by Control Shift and clicking on it and start basically changing the levels of this curve. You will notice that I'm able finally to change the main focus of this gradient texture the way I want. So probably I want it to be something, maybe like this, let's say, yeah, that's looking good. If I mute this gradient texture, this is the before and this is the after, this is the before and this is the after. If you ask me, it looks better, I will just collapse this. And right now what I'm gonna do is basically to add some sort of lens distortion. Our render is basically right now like somehow took with a perfect lens and a real life. There is some sort of like we call it lens distortion that happens also in the edges of your image, of course, because of physics and how the light hits it like basically the edges of the lens or something like this. The good thing you don't need to understand over math behind it, there is actually a node that would like just do that inside of Blender. If you go Shift a and look for a lens distortion, you will find a note card lens distortion, but it after the Multiply node. And like just take this number, for example to something like 0 to nothing much is happening. Let's try minus 0.02. And yeah, if you focus a little bit on our desert, this is the after and this is the before, this is the after. This is the before. Notice that basically there is like some slides that is happening right now in the edges of the image. You can probably just crank this number to something like this to see exactly what it does, but be careful to change your render to an egg. So I'll just skip it at minus 0.02. And there is an option called dispersion, which basically will give you like some sort of like shift of the red and green and blue channel. Let's just put it at one, which is a lot just to see the effect and that's the effect it creates, as I mentioned, it like shifts the color on the edges of the image, or let's say shift every channel, the red and green and blue on its own. Most of the time you will find yourself like basically plugging the same number as the number you're plugged in the distort collapse this, That's basically it for how I compose this desert. If we scroll down to see our entire node tree, that's what we did. It is actually super simple and basic old what we're doing is like overlaying stuff over other images and change some different settings on those images, like contrast colors, the curves of every different channel. And that's actually the main core of compositing. We're not doing anything complicated. We're just changing the images after we created them, or in our case after we render them. The last thing a lot of you in right now might ask, all right, how are we supposed to render this image? The easiest way is basically to go right here as we saw before, go Shift a and look for file output, put it right here and plug your lens distortion to the image. Open the sidebar, like just to see all of your different settings, pick your file output and inside of node properties here, all the properties that we will need first things first, let's just call it final desert render. Let's choose a folder to save it. For example, in Southern resources folder, I will maybe go right here instead of renders new folder, Let's call it final desert. And hit Accept, choose of course, your different settings and all of that. I would like to just save it as PNG. We don't have an alpha channel, so it is basically just RGB. Maybe bring the compression to the back to 0. If you don't want any sort of compression going are happening on your image. Even though that doesn't make a lot of sense because we already composed our images, so we won't need the extra data for now unless of course you're planning to grade it in other softwares like Da Vinci Resolve or something, then just bring this number back to 0. And after you do that, save your file, as I mentioned before, go to Render and render animation. And it will happen really fast because we're only like just saving images. It won't take that much of time. It will probably take a couple of minutes based on the power of your computer and you will find your final image sequence after rendering and all of that ready for you. That's it for this chapter on how to create your desert. We finally finished it and good job for like basically finishing it. I'm really proud of you and please make sure to upload your renders so that we get the chance to see them and maybe give you some feedback on them and maybe how you can make them better. Also, you will probably find other videos after this related to Chapter desert where we might want, for example, to add some grass to this desert and how to animate them. Basically just some other smallest topics that you might want to check in case you want to take your render to the next level. But for now, that's it for the chapter. Thank you everyone for tuning into this chapter and I will see you in the next one. See you.