Create a Stylized Fantasy Environment in Blender

1. Introduction to Class: Hello, everyone, and welcome to this new course, creating a stylized fantasy environment in Blender, where you will learn to create a beautiful fantasy scene, heavily inspired by Genshin Impacts loading screen from start to finish just using blender. This course includes over 4 hours of information packed content, along with all the required files like the blend files, textures, HDRIs, everything. We will cover every step of the process from blocking and modeling, to texturing, lighting, and final rendering, learning how to achieve that stylized fantasy look along with the immersive atmospheric effects, while also creating multiple variations along the way. We will start by modeling the main assets of the scene using some references from the game itself, creating the central fantasy gate, the bridge, and a lot of different pillars that surround and support the scene designed to add scale, structure, and visual rhythm. Once the main elements are built, we will set up the initial layout and lighting, creating the foundation for our environment. Then we will dive into texturing, designing materials for the gate, pillars and bridge with a clean stylized look using blenders material node system. After that, we will work on the final stylization phase, adding volumetric fog, cloud layers, and cinematic lighting to create a bright ethereal mood. These elements give the scene its amy anime inspired feel and truly bring the fantasy world to life. Then we will create two additional time of day variations for our environment, a warm, golden evening version, and a cool, mystical night version. Finally, we'll do a bit of compositing and post processing using blenders compositor and Photoshop to push the visuals even further, adding effects like glare, color grading and subtle tweaks to enhance the final output. And then we will wrap up the course by rendering out portfolio ready shots of our environment. Whether you are a beginner or an experienced blender user, this course will guide you through the process of creating polished, stylized fantasy environments that stand out. So I hope to see you there in the course. Thank you. 2. Blocking Out the Gate: Hello, A, welcome, guys to this new course where we will create a stylized fantasy environment in blender. So I'm sure you guys have seen in the trailers that the scene we will be creating was heavily inspired by the loading screen of the video game Genshin Impact. I also have it currently open right over here, so let me just show you. So, I always like the atmosphere and the ambience this scene had. So I tried to recreate it in blender with my own style. And another thing that I really liked was that the lighting of this scene would change according to the time of the day. So it is currently like morning where I live. That's why we have like this type of bright lighting. So if you open up the reference images, you can see that I've added, like, a couple of more reference images of the same scene. If you open the game at a different time of the day, let's say at evening, then you will get this type of orange yellowish lighting, or if you opened it up at night, you will get a totally different look. So yeah, I really like that thing about this scene that it has various different endless variations depending upon when you open up the game. So, we will be using this scene as our reference and try and recreate it in blender. I'll just close this now and we can just start with working on the scene. I have added, like a couple of reference images of different things like the door that we will be creating and some other things like the pillars that I created myself trying to match with the style of the game. So yeah, we will be creating some of these things. Other things are like textures like the cloud texture or the fog texture. I will be adding some more things over here, obviously, as the course progresses. So let's just start by working on the door because that will be our focal point of the scene kind of. So let's start working on that in this course lecture. So now back in Blender, I have opened up a new blender file, and I've also turned on my screencast key add on so that you can see all of the shortcuts that I'm performing. As you can see, they will all pile up right over here so that you can easily follow all of the steps that I'm doing. So I'll press A now to select everything and then press Delete to delete all of the default objects. So now we need to bring in the door reference image into blender so that we can start creating it. As you can see, I have added two different reference images for the basically, both of them are exactly the same door. The design is exactly the same. The only difference is of visibility. The night version, I think, has a bit more visibility along the edges, as you can see over here, while the day version kind of line blows them out a little bit, making them like kind of hard to distinguish. It's totally up to you whichever one you want to use, I think I will be going with the night one. So we can just also drag and drop it like this into blender. But you can see it will be added at this weird angle. So the best way to do it is just press one so that you can go in the front orthographic view, then press Shift A, go into Image reference, and then select your Door reference image like this. And yeah, now you can see it is added in blender perfectly. You can select it, press G, and then Y and move it back a little bit. Press one once again for the front view, and to start creating it, we basically need to trace out the shape of the door. It is pretty simple. It has, like, a lot of elements to it, but if you break it down completely part by part, it would be like, really simple. So we can start by just pressing Shift plus A and adding in a plane. Press R then X and type in 90 on your number pad to give it the exact rotation of 90 degrees. Once again, press one for the front view, enable Xray. And what we will do is we will just move this plane around and just try to match it with both of these edges, the one on the left and the one on the right. Press S then X, scale it up a bit, and just match it perfectly. Along with the edges like this. And you can see it is pretty much fitting perfectly now. Now press tab, go into the Edit Mode press Control R and hit right click so that the edge loop gets added right in the middle like this. You can see it is exactly in the middle of our door. We can select this right side of the plane, press X, and delete it. And the reason we are doing this is so that we can just simply add in a modifier, go over here and add in a mirror modifier so that you can easily duplicate the right side so that now you create the left side, the right side would be done automatically. And I will select this edge, so press two, select this edge, press X, and delete the vertices. So you only have this edge right now. We can select this, and now it is just really simple. You press E and just move it around to match with the reference image. We press E to extrude the vertice and then match with the reference image. And we just need to do it constantly to match it with the image that we have. So press E and just extrude it out like this. You can also press E, and while you are moving it around, if you hold shift, you can see it will move really slowly so that you can place it perfectly wherever you want. So it is like a nice little thing to know about. Whenever you are moving things around, if you hold shift, they will move a lot more slowly than normal, helping you to make a precise movement. And now just keep on pressing E and match it over here right at the center. You will notice that when you try to touch it over here in the center, they kind of go past each other. So we don't want that. We will enable clipping now and when we connect them both at the center, they will join and not go past each other, which is exactly which is exactly what we want. And I think the door over here is looking fine. Let's move down, press tab, select this part, and just move it around a bit. Again, press E, extrude it downwards. And right now, you just keep on pressing E to extrude the base design of the door. We don't really have to worry about all these designs, indentations, everything. We are right now just creating the very basic shape of the door. Press E, once again, press X to lock on the X axis and move it till here and connect do here like this. Now you can see we have got the shape of the door. Press tab, and maybe I'll select this part. Add vertice right over here. If you want to add a vertice wherever you want, in between, you can press Control R and just add a single vertice like this. You can also use your scroll wheel to add multiple, but I will be just adding one and just move it a bit up like this to create a little bit of smooth like edge. And you are perfect. Now you can press Tab, press A to select everything. And if you press F, it will fill out this phase, and it will give us the very basic shape of our door. I'll undo it right now. We will keep it this way only. What we want to do next is we basically want to create this part like this inside part of the door because currently the door is completely flat. So now to create this inside part, let's just press tab. And once again, we can select any of the vertice, press Shift plus D to duplicate it and place it anywhere you want. I will place it just along this edge. Right over here. And you will notice that if I just select it now, press E, and let's say I extrude it once again along this inside edge. So this time we are creating this part, it will automatically copy using the mirror modifier. So once again, we can just quickly trace this out. Press E then Z and move it downwards because it's completely straight. Just move it a little bit on the X axis, press E once again and again Z and match it exactly right over here. Then you can press E then X and connect them both this way. And now you can see we have created the sorry, the top part is still left, select it once again, press E and extrude it over here as well. I'm not going to worry about this small shape right now. I'll just connect it simply this way. And yeah, perfect. As you can see, we have created the inside part of the door as well. We just need to now fill out the space between them. So how we can do that, you just go into the edit mode, and now you just select this vertice and this one, then press F to connect them both, you can hold Alt and click over here, and then you can select this complete loop, press F to fill out this space, and you can see how easily we filled out the space between them, creating the shape of our door. What I will do is this vertice right over here looks pretty sharp, so you can select it. Press Control Shift and B to bevel it out like this. As you can see, you can use your scroll wheel as well to make it smoother. But I will just add two vertices and make it something like this. This feels a lot better to me. And yeah, now we can select our door, press Tab, press A to select everything. Maybe we can press E and extrude it backwards like this. To create the actual shape of the door. You can right click and shade or to smooth this, and we can go over here and just enable cavity. Cavity will just help you view the edges a bit better. As you can see, it gives, like, help with visibility. And yeah, I think that door is looking really nice. We can maybe add in a bevel modifier, as well to smoothen out the edges even more. Select this move by angle modifier. Click on this pin icon and just move it at the top. Then you go over here and you can see we have these shading issues. To fix them, just go under your bevel modifier under the shading tab enable hard normals. And yeah, now we get this perfect shading. If you want to improve your shading, a bit more, you can also add in something like, let's say, a weighted normal modifier. That will also improve the shading a bit. And yeah, I think now it looks pretty good. So let's press one for the front view and check it out. As you can see, it currently goes completely straight down like the door. So just hold At and select this complete loop of yours. Press one, and then you can press S then X and scale it inwards first. This time, we are matching it with this line right over here, this inside line. So just make sure of that. So you can press maybe something like STN Z to bring it down to match it right over here, then press SN X, and you can see it is not really working properly. And the reason for that is, I think because we are in the mirror modifier currently. So let's try just moving the mirror modifier to the top and you can go over here and hit Apply. And now what will happen is basically, you can see now you can edit the complete object like the right side as well. So just hold Alt and select it like this, then hold Shift and Alt and select this right side as well. And now you can press STN X, and you can see now it is working perfectly. Press STN Z. And now we can easily match it with the reference image. Enable X ray, press STN Z and match it with this line right over here. As you can see, it does not really work perfectly. But what we can do is we can now manually edit it like ourselves, select these two edges and move them down. We don't really need them that high up anyways. So you can see this edge is fitting perfectly. It goes wrong right over here, so just move it one by one like this. A And yeah, now you can see the left side is pretty much fitting exactly like how we want it in the reference image. But the right side is still pretty bad because we have applied the mirror modifier, now the right side is not really working automatically. But there is, again, a nice and easy fix for that. You just press Tab, press A to select everything. You go into mesh and then select symmetrize. Basically symmetrize is a manual mirror modifier and you can see, as soon as you did that, it has fixed the right side as well automatically. Just one thing, I will undo it to show you if you go to mesh symmetrized once again. Make sure to select the proper direction. So currently, we have the right direction right now from minus x to plus X. If you selected plus X to minus x, you can see now the right side is being copied to the left side. So make sure you are selecting the correct axis because you might have something else. I'll select minus x two plus X, and that gives me the best results. And we can see now if I disable my X ray mode that the door is looking pretty good. You can select it press controll and apply the scale as well to make sure there are no issues with bevel or any other thing. I'll press tab, and I see a bit of shading issue right over here. And I think it is because there are like vertices very close to each other. As you can see, we have a couple of vertices right over here. There is a very simple fix for this enable X rays, select them all. That we have right over here, and then you press M and merge at center. This will make sure that we only have a single vertice right over here. These things can happen sometimes when we have miral modifier and whatnot. We had a couple of modifiers that we applied. So that's why we get a couple more vertices at the center, which can cause some issues. But now I have selected them all and basically press M and merge them at center. You might or might not have this issue, so yeah, just make sure to fix. Let's see if we have something over here, any problems. Yeah, everything is fine right over here. It was just around this corner that we have the problem. And rest everything, I think is looking pretty good. Maybe select these vertices, press G twice. So by pressing G twice, you can slide them across like this. The reason I'm doing that is to kind of, like, smoothen out this area a bit. As you can see earlier, the shading was feeling a bit too weird to I think this edge goes right over here, and then we can just move them all downwards accordingly. We just press G twice to slide them along the edge and just fix it. And, personally, I think this looks like the perfect shape. Here it was feeling a bit too weird. Now all of the edges are going straight and properly. And this is what I like. Now I'll press Tab, press A to select everything and go to mesh and select symmetrize so that we can fix up the right side as well. And now you can see our door is looking very nice and everything is coming along pretty well. Let's just hit Control plus to save our file. I will go in my blender files folder and save it as fantasy underscore environment. It's save and I think this merge is pretty good for this first lecture, we'll continue working on our door and detail it up even more in the next lecture. So thank you guys for watching. I will see you in the next one. But 3. Detailing the Gate: Hello, I'm welcome, guys. So let's continue working on our door. I'll press one enable Xray. And let's see. We can create this part next. We have a little bit of extruded part out of the door. So once again, we can just select maybe the door itself, select any of the word Cs, press Shift plus D to duplicate it, hit right click and press P and separate the selection. This way we get this separate vertice, like as a different object. I'll select it and place it somewhere around here and maybe we can start extruding it up a bit. I will go into the wireframe mode so that we can actually see the image clearly. And also, yeah, we need to add the mirror modifier as well to copy it up on the other side. Because we use this object for the verticee, you can see the origin point is right at the center only, so the mirror modifier will work perfectly. Just go over here and add a mirror modifier and you can see it's working exactly how we want it to. So we just now press P and extrude this out completely. Once again, make sure to enable clipping. I'll move the mirror modifier to the top and enable clipping so that we can just connect the vertices at the center like this. Let's see. Let's move down right over here. And honestly, you can just skip this part ahead because it is pretty much a very repetitive task, so you guys can finish this up on your own quickly. I won't be creating this thing. I don't really like this design, so I'll just keep it like in the shape of the like this arc only. Now just move this down along the straight line. Make sure it's fitting perfectly. Yeah, press E then Z move it down straight. Then again, we have a bit of curve right over here, and then let's see. We cannot really see what goes on right over here, but because we will be creating this design anyway, so it does not really matter what we create behind it. So what I will do is I will just extrude it out like this and give it a general shape of the door, move it down till here, and then press E and X, move it over here, and then E and Z and move it back again on this line itself so that we can trace out the inside part now. Just move it straight up like this. Just create this section now and we only have to create the inside part of this trace out this the shape we have right over here, and then we can finally just connect it in the center. I like this. And yeah, now this shape is also done. Let's move back to the solid mode, press tab, press A to select everything, and then fill out this phase. This one is fairly easy. We just press E and extrude it out a little bit. And yeah, perfect. I think it looks fine the way it is. We also have already added the bevel modifier as well, so it works perfectly. Make sure to just select the object and press Control A and apply the scale. So that the scale is fixed for it, and then we can just maybe extrude out a bit more, and then just press G then Y and push it in the door like this. And yeah, you can already see this detail adds a lot to the door, and it is already starting to look really nice. Obviously, this part over here looks a bit weird, but when we will be creating a design on top of this, I think it would look fine. Let's just hit save, and what I will do is I will select the door and make sure to decrease the bevel amount for it. So from 0.1, we can go to something like 0.001, maybe, not that small. 0.01. Yeah, that feels good. Also, I think I did not mention in the last lecture about applying the scale. I just want to quickly explain the concept. You might notice that whenever I, change the scale of the object, I always press Control A and apply the scale. So let me just quickly show you why I do that. It is really important. I have these two cubes, so let's say I have these two cubes. You don't really have to follow me for this. This is just for explanation. So let's say I select this cube, press, then X and scale it up by three times on the X axis. So yeah, press S then X and then type in just three on the number pad to scale it up by three times. Once again, then X and scale it up by three times like this. So yeah, now, both of them are scaled up by three times on the X axis. So for one of them, let's say I select this one and press Control A, apply the scale. But for this one, I won't really apply the scale, so you can see the difference between the two. Now if I select this object, press Control B. Control B is to basically bevel like any of the edges you have selected. So let's say I press A to select everything and then press Control plus B to bevel it out, you will notice that the bevel right over here is really stretched out. You'll see the difference when I do it over here. Now, once again, do the same step for this cube, if you remember we applied the scale for this, select everything, press Control V, and bevel it out. And as you can see, the bevel is a lot more uniform right over here, but over here it looks like really stretched. So the reason it looks stretched is because we scaled our cube like this, that's why it appeared stretched and we did not apply the scale. So you should remember this that a lot of blender functions depend upon the scale of the object. So whenever you change the scale, so let's say if you increase the scale or if you decrease the scale, make sure to always press Control A and then apply the scale. Another thing that I can show you with an example, there are a lot of different functions that can be affected with this. Let's say if I try to insert this phase, so press three, select this phase, and press I to insert this. You will see the inset as well, is not really accurate on all sides. Over here, it is really wide, while over here it is really thin. And if I do the same over here, you can see the inset is totally uniform on all sides. So yeah, this is just a quick explanation to always remember to apply the scale whenever you change it of any object. So let's just delete it now and we can continue working on our dough. Let's see what we can do next. Let's just add this simple cube right over here, press shift and add in a cube, scale it down. Scale it up like this, move it down over here, and then move it inside the dough. Perfect. Next, what I will do is we want to create the inside part of the door, so as you can see this edge right over here. So really simple, I'll press tab, press one and hold At and hold Shift andaugt and select this entire loop. Because as you can see, it is following this completely, so it will really help us a lot. We can easily create this part. Press Shift D, as we have already done, hit right click and then press P and separate the selection. Now we have this as like a separate object. Press tab let's enable X ray. I will delete this part because as you can see, this edge that runs along over here, we don't really have it at the bottom. It finishes over here. So you don't really need this part. So select it and make sure you press X and delete the vertices. All right, so now to give it thickness, like we have right over here. So first, we can just press three for the right side view and then press E to extrude it out, press Y, and just give it a little bit of extrusion, and then you can press S to scale it up and match it with the alignment of the door this way. Perfect. Now what I do is I will just simply add in maybe a solidify modifier. Select this strip that we have created. Go over here and add in a solidify modifier. Move the solidify modifier just below the smooth modifier like this, and then you can increase the thickness. And now you will notice that we are facing a little bit of an issue. If you press slash on your number pad, you can isolate any object. So you can select any of them and press slash on your number pad to easily isolate them so that you can work freely. You can once again press slash to come back into your normal mode. I will select this press slash and let's see what is the problem with this. So basically, whenever you get something like this where one thing is going over here and one thing is going in different direction, that means the normals are incorrect for the object. So just to show you this in action, you can go over here and enable face orientation. Just quickly disable the solidify modifier for now, and you will see half of the side has red over here and half of the side has blue over here. That means the normals are incorrect because we should have either red on both sides or blue on both sides. So to fix this, press tab, press A to select everything, and then press Shift plus N. And yeah, now, as you can see, the normals are fixed because we have blue color entirely on one side of the strip and red color entirely on one side. Now enable the solidify modifier, and you can see it is working perfectly now, exactly how we want it to. Obviously, we need to decrease the thickness. Now, make sure to enable even thickness and also set this to complex, and now it is working exactly how we want it to. Let's press ash to come out of this. And also let's select this, press tab, press A to select everything, press Shift presen once again to fix the normals for this as well. And yeah, now everything is blue colored on all sides. That means the normals are correct for everything. Let's disable the face orientation mode now, and we need to adjust some things for this. First is we decrease the bevel amount so that it does not look like really fluffy as it is looking. Press one, enable X ray or just straight away go into this wireframe mode and you can play around with the solidify value and see how much you want to extend it. You can see it is pretty much fitting exactly how we want it to in the like what do you say, the reference image as well. So I think I'm happy with how this is looking. It's come back. And yeah, this part of the door is looking really nice. And yeah, with that, we have created this part as well. What we can do next is I'll select this press tag and just move it totally till here to the backside of the door. Then we can start working on this inside part as well. So once again, I'll press tab, press one, hold out, and let's say we select this edge completely, press Shift plus D, right click and press P, separate the selection. So that we can get this. Now just scale it in. We might have to do a bit of fixup here and there ourselves, but that is not that big of a deal. So just scale it down till here maybe. Let's do it till here, and then we can press tab. Quickly select everything, move this up. Move this part up over here as well. I think this feels pretty good to me. Obviously, we have to fix up the right side, maybe we can just delete it all. Let's just delete the right side, completely, press X and delete the word C, and we can simply add in a mirror modifier for now. That will make our lives a lot easier. Let's remove the solidify modifier from this. We don't really want to work with that. Right now, let's just keep these ones only. And now we have ourselves like the outline of this. Let's see what we can do. Maybe we can press tag, press A to select everything, and then let's just press F to fill out this phase. It is not really filling correctly because of this edge. Select this vertice, press E and X and join it. Make sure to enable clipping and join it like this. Then you can press A and press F to fill out this phase. We basically now have to just detail the like inside part of the door. Maybe I will just scale it up a little bit so that we don't really see any space between the doors. Just like that. Pretty good. Once again, selected. And the next thing that I want to show you guys is enable X ray. You will notice that we have this partition in the center. So for this, I think we have to disable the clipping so that we can actually disconnect them over here. So just select the cent apart and move it apart a little bit so that we can actually create a little bit of space between them. As you can see, if we don't disable clipping they will join at the center and connect together with each other, so we have to create a bit of space in between. That's why I have did that. And yeah, I think this merger is pretty good for this lecture. We still have a bit more to do with our door, but we'll continue over here in the next lecture. Thank you for watching. I will see you in the next one. 4. Adding More Details to the Gate: Hello, and welcome, guys, let's continue modeling our door. I'll just select this part. So we'll be working on this first and then I'll select the image, and I will press slash to go into the local mode so that we can work a bit more freely. Press one for the front view Enable Xray. Now as we know, we need to create this extrusion first. So how we'll do that is I'll press tab, and what we can do is we can press Control R to add a single Word C. So just press Control R and add a WordC over here. Just bring this up, so press G then z and bring it right over here, just close to this part so that we can match it like this. And now you can press K. K is for knife tool, so knife and now you can press K on your keyboard to use the knife tool. So basically with using the knife tool, we can cut out this part onto our model like this. There are a lot of different ways to do it, but I will be doing it this way. So yeah, just press K, and then you will see this knife tool. Click on this vertice that we have just placed at this point. Click on it so that you can start creating the cutout. And then one by one, just place the vertices. It is very simple, and I will place it like this, this over here, then we can go over here. And now maybe if you want to move around your screen a little bit, you can hit right click. So you will see it will disconnect now, and then you can move around your scene and place it over here. Then once again, click on this, click on the last thing where you left off and you can just easily continue. It is very handy. And now if you like press, you will see it will lock in the z axis that you can bring it down in a straight line. Let's say till here, then hit right click. Once again, click on here so that we can continue bringing it down till here. Again, hit right click. Now, once again, click on here. You will see it still coming down like this. Press. Press once again, and it will turn off the lock on the axis mode and you can once again just freely click around. I'll hit right click again, so that I can move my screen and once again click on here and just continue. And then just finally connect it right over here, hit right click. And now when you have created this entire cutout, hit Enter, and as soon as you do that, it will be added onto your model. You can see this by pressing three. You can select this phase by clicking over here. Yeah. And now we can easily extrude it out. Let's just undo it first. Sorry not undo it, but undo the extrusion part, press one once again and enable X ray. And maybe you want to if you want to move around a couple of wordss just to make it a bit more precise, you can do so right now. Because using the knife tool, it might not be like completely accurate. So you can later on just move around them. If you want to fix up some of the areas, we can do that for sure. So I'm just tightening up the vert Cs. I'll select this one press X and dissolve the wert C. We don't really need it. Place this one over here. Maybe we can select this press Control Shift and B to smoothen it out like this. I'll remove this one. Yeah, this feels much better. Let's check if the straight line is fine. You can also, I think it is looking good to me. Yeah, now everything is fine, so we can press slash to come back into our normal mode. Let's disable X ray and select this press tab. First, press A to select everything, and then you can press E to give it overall thickness to extrude it as a whole object. Then you can just select this phase. So press three, select this phase, and now press E to extrude it out outwards like this. And you can see it looks pretty good to me. I'll maybe select this part and move it down just a little bit, not much. And I think I will just select this, move it out a little bit, and select them both. Maybe just press G then Y and move them a little bit further along the and I think we might have to scale them up a little bit as we can see like empty spaces here. So just select them both and just scale them up a bit so that you don't see any empty spaces along your door. And now I feel like the door is starting to look really good. I'll maybe select this part, so press tab, enable tray. And let's just select this part and maybe we can move it up a little bit. Select this whole bottom part and just move it up so that it does not really, you know, collide with this box right over here at the bottom. I think it is fine. Obviously don't have to follow the reference image exactly. I think even this looks pretty good to me. One thing that we can also see is that in the reference image, we also have square shape over here. So press Shift, add in a cue, scale it down and just make it the scale of this, scale it down like this and scale it up on the X axis. And then what we do is we just move it behind like this. Make sure we just move this space in so that we cannot really see it like that. And I think now our door is starting to look really nice. I'm pretty happy with how everything is turning out. I'll maybe select this and we can just increase the bevel amount of tad wig for this to something like 0.01, or maybe a little less 0.008, I think. For this part, you can select this, and we can see there is a little bit of tightness over here, so just enable X ray. And I think it is because there are a lot of edges close to each other. So just select this edge and also select this edge over here, press X and dissolve the edges so that we can kind of smoothen it out a little bit. I think this looks a little bit better. And now the door is looking pretty good. Let's just hit save, and next we can start working on this part right over here. So now I will just select this part, press tab, and maybe we can select any of the wort C, just press Shift plus D to duplicate because it also has the mirror modifier as well, and I can place it over here in the corner. And as we have done already, press P and separate the selection. So we have this vertice, select the image, like the reference image, press slash to go into the local mode, and let's start creating this now. Select your vertice, press tab, and place it right over here. Press E and extrude it out like this and start tracing out the image. Something like this. I think I will create this move like shape separately, select this biz and move it down. Let's move it down to here, press E and X and move it out. Now what we can do is we can just move this part till here like this and press Control R and connect it together to this. Select them both press F so that we can create this part separately. What I will do is I will select this all press P and separate the selection so that this is a different object. Now select this and just press E and extrude till here and now you can go along this edge. Perfect. We have created like three different separate sections of this design. Select them both press F to join them together. All right. I think that's pretty good. I'll select this now, press tab and we can select this completely like this loop. And then press Shift plus D. Sorry, make sure to select this as well. And then press Shift plus D, hit right click, press P and separate the selection. Once again, just select this part. They cannot really select it. Yeah, let's move it apart a little bit, and then I can just select this edge that we have just separated. Press tab now and just trace out this section as well. Pretty simple. We are just following really basic modeling techniques, just trying to extrude and just connect them so that we can create these shapes. I think it is something like this, so I can connect these two now so press F and just join them together. Cannot really make out the shape that well, but I think this is fine. It looks pretty good to me. I'll extend it up a little bit like this. Yeah, it looks pretty good to me. Now I'll just select all three of them, press Control J so that we can just join them together, press tab, press A to select everything, and then F to fill out this vase. You can press E to extrude them out to create your shape, press lash to come out of the local mode, and now just bring them out like this so that you can see them on top of the door. I'll select this part and move it a little bit like this. Now you can see when I move it around, it is also moving on the right side. So instead, press tab, enable X ray, select everything, and then move it on the left side. So press G, the next. When you move it in edit mode, then it is working as we want it to. But if you move it in the object mode, so if I press tab, now I'm in the object mode, if I move it to the left, you can see it can be placed weirdly along the right side because of the mirror modifier. And the reason for this is because the origin point moves along whenever you are moving in the object mode. You can see the origin point is also moving. But if I press tab and then just select it all, and then move it around. Then the origin point is not really changing. So that's why the middle modifier can work properly. So just move it on the left like this so that you can actually see a little bit of it on the outside like this. And I think it is looking pretty good. I'll maybe just press tab and we can select the backface of these two also for this as well. Let's just press slash to go into the local mode. I think that would be better. Yeah, select this back face, press slash again to come out of it. Now let's just press G then Y and move it back till here. That we have this going through entirely. And now our door is starting to look really, really good. Hit save, and let's take a look at it. I'm pretty happy with how everything is looking. The only thing that is left to create is this whole entire design that we have in the middle. And I think that is also going to be really simple. I'll select these two press control J to join them together, and we can add in a bevel modifier to them as well. And as you can see, the bevel is kind of stretched over here because we haven't applied the scale. Press Control A and apply the scale. As looking pretty good. Let's adjust the bevel amount, enable hard and normals, and yeah. That's pretty good. Had save, and I think this money is pretty good for this lecture, we'll continue from over here in the next one, Thank God watching. 5. Finishing the Gate: Hello, and welcome, guys. So let's try and wrap up our door modeling in this lecture. So let's just start. The only thing to create is this a little bit of complex design that we have in the middle. So let's just select this object right over here, press tab, and once again, we can select any of the word Cs press Shift plus D to duplicate it and just place it right over here. Then once again, press P and separate the selection so that we have this separate object. Now we can just go into the wireframe mode and make sure X rays enabled over there. Press tab and start just extruding it, so press E and trace out the outline for this as well. Personally, what I will do is I will select this and I will select this reference image, press lash to go into the local mode so that we can work a bit more freely. Press tab now and just start extruding. Because we copied it from the other object, it already has the mirror modifier and the bevel modifier. All the modifiers already set up properly like we want. So we just have to trace the reference image out. Maybe we can select this part, press control shift in B, and just bevel it out a little bit to smoothen it out like this. A You can go something like this over here to create the hole in the shape like this. Then just press to bring it straight down and just make sure it is like matching the reference image correctly. Press again, press and bring it down. Honestly, I would just suggest you guys to, like, quickly skip through this part and create this thing on your own because it is not really even that difficult. And we have done this a couple of times in this course. Let's just extrude it up till here. I think me personally, I will just go straight away something like this, not like creating this design over here. I think this would look better. Yeah. If you want, you can just follow the reference image completely, but I will be editing out a couple of things here and there. Again, press in and extruded straight upwards like this. Over here as well, what I will do is instead of trying to create something like this, I'll just go straight away like this to create a bit more simple design. Yeah, we are basically done, move it up like this. Then we need to go over here. All right, guys. So now we are done, bring this close to the tic where we started off and now just select them both and press F to connect them like this. And we basically have created a design on the front right over here. Press tab, select this vertice, just duplicate it quickly and just create this very simple circle or semicircle type of shape. And now we can just instead, we can just select these two, press F and join them. All right. Now we can just press tab, press A to select everything, press F to fill it out like this. And let's come back to our just normal mode, able Xray, press slash we have it right over here. Let's select this, bring it out. One thing that we have is press one enable Xray, and we have a little bit of hole right over here. Let's go back into the Wireframe mode, press k for knife tool. So first, press tab to go into the Edit mode, press k, and then you can just quickly create this like this. It's very simple. Just join these two now, hit right click, disconnect, and then enter to create your whole. Press three for face select, select this phase, press X, and delete the phase. And now we are basically done with our door. Let's see. We can select this now, press Tab, press A to select everything, and press E to extrude it out. Just move it a bit inwards. And yeah, I really like how the door has turned out. I think the design looks nice. One thing that we need to worry about next is the bevel modifier. So first, right now, the bevel modifier, I don't think is working that well. You can see it is just working like a little bit. We are only getting a little bit bevel. And the reason for that is there might be some vertices that are too close to each other. So you go into the geometry section and disable clamp overlap. And now we have something like this because there is no clamping on the overlap of geometry. So we need to adjust the bevel modifier manually now. But because we do this, we can kind of adjust and find out where the problem areas are. So you can see it is somewhere around here. So select this press slash to go into the local mode, and then we will just figure it out. Press tab, enable Xray. And let's see. We can quickly just move around a couple of edges. So select them press g twice. And when you move them around, you will kind of figure out where some of the problem areas are. We currently cannot find it, but let's see. Let's try this. Yeah. So as you can see, as soon as I move this single edge a little bit, my whole model has fixed up. So this was like the problem edge. You can just move it a bit upwards a lot of the issues are fixed, not all of them, but a lot of them are done. As you can see, we have a couple of problems over here. So let's try. Not this one, maybe this. As you can see, if I just move it a little bit to the downward side, it has fixed issue. Next, I think it is obviously this one because it is too close to this one. Like, these two edges are too close, so just move this one right over here. And basically, that were all the edges. Just quickly see if you are getting any kind of shading issues as we have over here. Maybe we can press X and dissolve the edge so that we can create a lot more space. I. All right, so now it is a lot better over here as well. Obviously, we won't be using this much bevel, but now the bevel modifier is working a lot better, and we can adjust it a little bit more freely. Maybe I'll be going with something like this, 0.004. We can always adjust these things later on as well. So press slash and come out of the local mode. And I think now the bevel looks much, much better. Let's just select them all. So select it all, press and move this to a new collection. Rename this collection to D so that we can kind of easily classify this. Last thing to do is to just create a very simple shape right over here. For this, I will again, select this vertice, press Shift plus D, move it at the top and just extrude it like this and make sure to enable clipping in your mirror modifier. Join this and extrude it till here and join it like this. Perfect. Select it. Make sure to select it, so hold on, select the loop, press B, and separate the selection so that it is like a separate object because otherwise, we won't be able to use it. So now select this. We have just created and select your main frame of the door, press slash to go into the local mode. And personally, what I will do is I will just scale down the size of this and move it up right over here. Okay, I'll just press slash to actually see how it looks with the rest of the stuff. Maybe we can place it right about here. And once again, we need to use the knife project command. So to do that, I'll move it just a bit down. Yeah. So first select this press tab to go into the edit mode, hold control and select this like select this object. Yeah, make sure it has this orange outline. Now press A to select everything, press F three and search for Knife project and select it. Now we can just basically select this object, delete it because we have already created the Katab now. Press three and select these two faces, and we can press E to extrude them and push it inwards just a little bit. Scale it down a bit. Maybe we can just reduce the bevel a little bit. And yeah, I think the door looks really nice this way. I'll just select this now, maybe increase it a little bit to something like 0.003. Yeah, that's fine. With this, we are basically done with the door. So let's just sit save. And yeah, this much is pretty good for this lecture. We'll continue from here, so thank you for watching. I will see you in the next. 6. Creating the Bridge: Hello, and welcome, guys, let's continue working on our scene. The next thing that you will look over in the reference images, we can see that we have to create the bridge and the pillars next. Those are the next main things important in our scene. So let's start with the bridge first, and then we can work on our pillars next. And after that, obviously, we will be working on the environment a lot, adding, like all the fog, clouds and everything to make it look good. So yeah, in this video, we'll be working on the bridge. So let's just close this or I will just move it to my second monitor so that I can actually see the reference image while working on it. So what you guys can do is if you don't have a spare screen, you can install the program called PureRef. So PureRef is really nice where it will just give you like this hovering screen over your blender. So if I just let's say close my image right now, I can drag and drop this reference image into PureRef, and the great thing about PureRef is you can just hit right click and hold this screen around and place it right over here, and I can actually look at the reference image while I'm working in Blender. So we don't really have to switch again and again. I will float on top of the blender window. So this is like a free program. You can just download it. It is called PureRef, and you can download it from Google and install this. And yeah, it is very simple to use. You can adjust the window size and move it around by using your right click like this. So yeah, if you want, you can just place your reference images over here. Maybe I'll just keep it over here only so that is also recorded in the video as well. We can place it maybe over here somewhere. All right. Let's start now. So obviously, I'll first select this reference image, press and move this to a new collection called F Images so that we can just turn this collection off and we don't have to really see this image again and again. I'll select the door, maybe move it up a little bit over here. Press Shift and just simply add in a cube, move it down just about here. And as you can see, the bridge width is just about the width of the door. So I'll just obviously make it the same size as the door. Place it accordingly and make it roughly the same size as the door. For the length of it, maybe we can go with something like straight up 10 meters, that's fine. And we can just place it right over here like this. Next thing that I will do is I will obviously decrease the thickness over here. So let's just roughly place it like this. We can worry about this later on. I think something like this is fine. Next, what I will do is I will press press Control R and hit right click to place the edge loop right in the middle. Enable tray, and you can just select all of the right side. Because once again, we are just going to delete the right side so that we can add in a mirror modifier. That way we can work really easily on this without having to worry about the left side, we just need to work on the right side. All right, so I think it is pretty simple. We don't really have to create it like very detailed. Press Controller first and apply the scale, as you know, we have changed the scale a lot. So I'll just press Control apply the scale first. Press tab now, and we are creating this section. So press tab, press Control R, and add edge loop somewhere around here. What you can do is you can also go over here and enable edge length. So this will help you see all the measurements appear on your edge. Whatever edge you select, you will see the measurements pop up. So that kind of helps. I'll place this one over here. Press Control R, add one somewhere around here. Like this. And then we can press three for phase select and just select this phase, press E and extrude it out like just we have in the reference image, and let's see how much we want to go for. Let's extrude it till here first, then press S then Y and scale it down. So I'm going with somewhere around 1.9 meters in the width for this section. And let's see. Let's move it a little bit back. Somewhere around here. I think this looks pretty good. Next, what I will do is I'll press tab and select this phase and select this phase, press X and delete the phases. We don't really need them. And as we will be using array modifier, because we'll be just creating this one single section of the bridge, and then we can simply add in like array modifier, set the factor from X to zero, and set it one on the Y. Or maybe minus one, that would be a little bit better. Yeah. And you can easily create this bridge like this. And you only have to work on the first one, and it will automatically copy on the rest of them. So yeah, modifiers like mirror array help reduce your workload a lot. I'll remove it for now because we are just working on one. We'll add it later on. Selected press control, apply the scale press tab, and let's select all of these phases. And now I'm just trying to create kind of a similar design. We won't be going for too much detail like we have in the reference image. First, select all of the phases that we have, and then you can start by pressing I to insert this phase. And you will see that when you are inserting the face, it is appearing over here as well. So to avoid this, you can press I to insert the faces, and then while you're inserting, just press B to turn boundary off. And you can see this will not appear on all of these edges where we don't want the inset to appear. So this way we can like insert it much more freely. I think this much is pretty good, something like this. And now, while all of these phases are selected, just press E and extrude this downwards like this. And yeah, you can see we have a little bit of detail on our bridge. I don't really like how these faces are looking. So I'll press slash first, and you can just quickly select them all, select this select. This right over here and select these two as well. On the front and the back, press X and delete the phases. Yeah, this is much, much better. Let's see. Next, we can just add in something like a Bewl modifier, apply the scale and just decrease the bevel amount, enable hardened normals. Let's see. Next we can press tab, press Control R and add Hub right about here. Somewhere around here. And now you can press Control press B to create two of them, you can use your scroll wheel to increase the number, but we just need to. So somewhere around here, let's see. I'm pressing G then X and moving it a little bit to the right, sorry, to the left. And then we can just press E to extrude it upwards. To add a bit more detail to our scene. What I will do is I will add some kind of brick texture in between here. You just add a little bit more detail to the bridge. You can enable extra right over here, press seven and just select it all, and let's see. I want to place it right about here. I think rest is fine. We just need to delete this phase and this phase that is popping up. Next just to add some random details here and there. You can select this phase, press I, press I once again to insert it again and just extrude it downwards, scale it up a little bit inwards like this, read something like that. We can select this pace to hold all and select this entire loop, and press E and extrude it outwards just a little bit. Press control at two edge loops in between, hit right click and just scale them up a little bit like this. Select all three of these pass and we can insert them downwards just a little bit. Now just select these two faces, press X and delete them. Let's press slash to come out of the local mode, and I feel like the bridge looks fine. Maybe I think I will remove this part, this extrusion that we created, so hold on and just select it all press X and delete the vertices. And now you need to just connect them. So hold again, select this, hold Shift ends like this, press Controllee and you can select bridge edge loops. So we'll basically fill the hole. Then this looks a little bit more cleaner. And when we will add a couple of bricks over here in between, I think that will add a nice bit of breakup to our bridge, and we can now add in array modifier, set it minus one on the like Y, set zero on X and minus one on Y. And we have successfully created a pretty nice looking bridge. And if you want, we can also set up the camera as well. So press Shifte and add in a camera. And now, if you press zero, you are basically looking through your camera right now. So this is what the camera sees. It is really important to place your camera correctly because obviously the final renders are seen through the camera only. So if I move it around you can press zero, and currently this is what the camera sees. So you can always switch between your camera view and your normal view that we have this perspective view by pressing zero on the number pad like this. So there is a really simple way to place your camera around. Obviously, you can move it around, rotate it like this. But I think the best way is to just place your scene in your normal view like this. Let's say I'm just moving it around. I want my camera to look exactly like over here. So you place your normal view like this, then hold Control Alt and then hit zero on your number pad. And you will notice now that the camera has automatically shifted back to that location where you have placed your view. And now you can just press N to bring up this tab and go into the view section and enable camera to view. What this will do is it will basically make your camera view permanent and you can just move around your camera freely in this view. Like, you can place in Zoom in Zoom out, do whatever you want. And when you are happy with it, just disable it so that you can now come back out of this mode. And I think this is pretty good. I do feel like the camera is a bit off center. Yeah, I think that's better. I will anyways, be fixing it up a lot later on as well. But yeah, this is pretty good. This way we can quickly switch into the render view to quickly see how everything is looking. But yeah, right now, let's just switch back to it because it's compiling the shaders, it will take a bit while. Let's just sit save on a files, and I think this merger is pretty good for this lecture. We'll continue from here in the next one. So thanks for watching. 7. Adding Bricks and Basic Lighting Setup: Hello, A, welcome, guys. So in this lecture, first, let's wrap up with our bridge, and then we will be working on the environment a little bit, like adding some light, some background to make it look a little bit better. And then we can finally start working on the pillars and other things. All right. So for the bridge, first, what I will do is if you press zero to go in your camera view, we can kind of see it under it over here. So just select it and press G then Y and move it a little bit back just like this. Yeah, this is fine. And then next what I will do is I'll select this press tab, and then you can press Control R. Use your scroll wheel to add two edge loops and hit Enter. Then you can press S and Z to scale them up like this, and maybe somewhere around here. This way, we can just press three, select all of these faces, press Alt plus E, and extrude faces along normal, and just extrude them inwards a little bit. I think this merge is pretty good. We will see this weird phase popping up over here, so just disable the array modifier and we can press tab, select this phase, and select this phase while holding Shift, press X and delete the phases. Enable back the array modifier. And yeah, I think our bridge is looking pretty good now. The last thing that I want to do is I want to add some kind of bricks over here in the middle. So obviously, there are multiple ways to do it. But I think there is a really easy way to add bricks in blender. So if you press Shift plus A and go on mesh and just look down over here under extras, you will find this wall factory. But it is possible that you don't see this option appearing over here in your menu, and that is because you haven't enabled the extra objects add on. So go into edit preferences, and then you can just go into the add on section and search for extra. And just make sure to enable both of these extra curve objects and extra mesh objects. This will basically add some really nice and helpful extra objects in your Shift plus A menu. If you don't find these two add ons over here, you can go in the Get extension section and over here, search for the extra. And you will find them over here as well. So if you don't find them in the add on section, just search them in the Get extension section. So I will close this now, just enable them both install them, and they are available by default in blendi so don't have to download or anything. And now you can press Shift A, just go over here in extras and select Wall factory. We get something like this type of wall, so we need to obviously edit this out to our liking. So first, obviously, we don't need this window thing. We can just disable the top arc and opening section so that we get a flat wall. Next thing that I want to do is I don't want these bricks to poke out of the wall line, this, so just decrease the edging to zero so that it is perfectly square or perfectly straight over here on the edges. Next, obviously, we need to scale down the wall according to like the bridge. So we just need this wide like this much, so decrease the start and you can decrease the end as well so that we get something like this. Now we have a little bit weird looking wall, but don't worry, we'll fix this. So next thing that you can do is you can decrease the depth. And obviously, we need to create some partitions in between for the bricks, so you can decrease the width. Something like this. Yeah, that's pretty good. And we can see, a lot of space between these bricks. So the next thing is to decrease the thickness of the grout. And this will help us give this type of looking bricks, which I think look pretty good. Obviously, you can play around with these settings however you want and get the results. I'll play around with some of the settings. I'll decrease the variance for the depth. I think something like this, I'm pretty happy with. You can just go ahead now and add in a bevel modifier, and this will really improve the look of the bricks. Decrease the amount of bevel or something like this, and let's press R, the next, type in 90 and just lay them flat. Just push them in into your ground. Let's press zero and see how they look. We need to scale them down like this and press the Z and scale them down like this as well. I. I do feel like that the space over here between the bricks is a bit too much. So I'll just delete this part. I'll delete this press shift A and add it once again. And the settings won't be like reset. We will get them from over there only. So just decrease the grout thickness to zero, sorry, and decrease the variance as well to 0.01. I think that's better. And now we can just simply add in a bevel modifier and decrease the amount of bevel. Yeah, this looks pretty good. Press R then X, type in 90 and laid flat. Decrease the scale of it like this and press STN X and scale it down like this as well. I'll decrease the bevel amount to something like this. And yeah, I'm really happy with how this is looking. Yeah, I think it adds a nice bit of effect onto the scene. And you can add in array modifier to this to duplicate it over here as well. So just set the X factor to zero and Y, no, the Z. Yeah, set the z to one and you can easily duplicate it however many times you want. If you want to increase the size of a bridge, you can do that, as well. And yeah, with this, we have got ourselves pretty nice looking door and a bridge. Let's just it safe. And with this, I do want to work a little bit on the environment, and then we can start adding more stuff to our C. Alright, so let's switch to the rendered mode now. You can click over here, and right now we have something looking like this because obviously we don't have any kind of lights in our scene. So now let's switch to the render properties and change the render engine from EV to cycles. Obviously, it is totally up to you which render engine you want to go for. EV is like a real time render engine. That means it will give you really fast results, but they won't look as realistic and physically accurate. While cycles is a lot slower, but it will give you really a realistic and physically accurate results. Obviously, this is like a stylized environment, so it does not really matter if you want to make it look realistic or not. So it is totally up to you which render engine you want to use. I'm going to use cycles because it was giving me better results, so yeah. Now that we have switched over to cycles, you can already see that when you have selected EV, we do not get any kind of, like, bounce lighting or shadows or ambient eclusion, but in cycles, even without adding any lights, we do get a bit of shadows and ambient eclusionOall, like the corners and crevices of the model. So first, let's start by adding in, like, a very basic light, so p shift A and add in a sunlight. Let's rotate it to a little bit more interesting angle, so you can press R then Y and rotate it maybe like this. Press R then z, and somewhere around here, I think should be pretty good. Let's press zero to look through our camera view. Next, let's select the sun over here and go over here in the object data properties of it. And over here, you can obviously adjust things like the strength of it if you want to make it look even brighter or darker. Let's set it to something like two for now. And the angle is basically the softness or hardness of the shadow. If you said this to zero, you will see that the edges of the shadow are really sharp. But if you keep on increasing this, you will see they get softer like this. So I'll go with somewhere around five or six. We definitely want a bit, like softer shadows like we have over here. So I think four or five degrees would be pretty good. Next, what I want to do is, obviously, I don't want to do much of the changes right now. We just want to add a little bit of basic lighting and HDRI, and then we can add the rest of the models. So yeah, next step to do is to add an HDR to give it like background. So move over to the shading tab and you can enable the rendered view mode. Press zero, and from over here switch from object to world so that you can change the world settings. You'll see we have a background node, and if you change the color of the background, the color of the world would change. You can also control the strength. Let's keep it at default only and come over here, press Shift A and search for environment texture. Select your environment texture, click on open. And if you go in the course wise that I've provided to you, you will find a folder of HDRIs where I've added like a couple of HDRIs that have this stylized animal look that would really go well with our scene. So let's just select this one, HDRI daytime one, and now just plug this color channel into the color channel over here. And as soon as you do that, you will see that the Azure is appearing in our environment press zero to look through it, and this is what we get. Obviously, this background is kind of like a little bit basic. Later on, I will be adding really nice and cool looking cloud textures that we can use in the background of our image. But for now, let's work with this. You can select the HDRI node, press Control plus and by pressing Control plus you will automatically enable this texture coordinate and mapping node connected to this. If this Control plus T shortcut does not work for you, that means you haven't enabled the node wrangler add on. So once again, you need to go into preferences, and in the add on section, just search for node wrangular. And make sure to enable this. This is a really useful one whenever you are working with materials and things. So yeah, just enable this. It would be available in the add on section or in the Get extension section. So I'll close this now, and when you have enabled this, this Control plus T shortcut would work. All right, so the basic use of this mapping node is that when you rotate it on the z axis, basically this HDRI would be rotating like this and you can find a nice looking view for the scene. But first, the colors are looking like really washed out. If you go into the render properties right now move over into the color management tab, so open this up, and now just change the view transform from AGX to standard. As soon as you do that, you will see that the colors are a lot more popping. You can see AGX was really washed out and standard looks really nice and copy. And I found out for stylized and animate type of scenes, the view transform standard works the best. And you can set the look to, like, medium, high or high contrast. I think medium, high contrast would be fine. Yeah. Maybe we'll select the sun and then we can just tone down on the strength a bit to 1.5. Maybe a bit more. Yeah, somewhere around here, 1.8, 1.9. Later on, obviously, we will be doing a lot more light color corrections, adding contrast and things like that when we are compositing our final scene. But for now, this looks a lot better than having it at AGX. So yeah, let's just set this to standard and try to set up a nice looking, view for an HDRI. One thing that I will show you that looks really good is if you decrease the scale of the HDRI on the Y axis, it will kind of be a little bit more compact, giving you that very wide look like the scene is really huge, kind of, not too much, so just set it to something like 0.5. And yet, this looks a lot better than having it at one. Because this way, it feels like small. We want to give the scene a kind of a grand look. Yeah for that reason, I will just set the scale on the Y axis to 0.5 to kind of make it look something like this. I think this looks a lot better. You can even decrease it a little bit more. But then the clouds start to stretch up over here in the corners, which can kind of look a little bit weird. But yeah, let's just go with this for now and we can set the z to something like 40. And we have this first. Next, I will select my camera and we can do a little bit more adjustments to kind of uh make it look a little bit better. And now I will just decrease the focal length 50-35 because decreasing it will increase our field of view. So if we are at 50, or if we keep on increasing it to something like 80, our field of view would keep on, like decreasing. So a high focal length is really good for close up shots, but we want a wide shot. We want to get as much of our scene as we can get in our view. So we definitely want to go for a lower focal length, but we cannot decrease it even too much as well, because then the scene will start to stretch like this. So set it to something like 35 40. That will give you the most realistic results. And press N, go into view, enable camera to view, and just try to play around with the camera a bit. And I think this looks really nice. You can disable camera to view now. And next thing that I will do is you can come over here in render properties or no, I think output properties and enable render region. Basically, this will only show you the area that is going to be rendered and none of the extra stuff, so that you can only focus on this part. Having all this visible makes it a little bit difficult to kind of focus on it, so you can enable this. And as soon as you come out of your camera view, it would be, again, everything visible. But in your camera view, only the render region would be visible. I'll just select the camera now first, press R then Z, and maybe rotate it a little bit like this to kind of give it a little bit better framing. And, I'm really happy with how this is looking. I'll maybe increase it to 0.45 only and see how that looks. I think that's better. And yeah, with that, I think we are done with the basic setup of our lights and our scene. You can also give it a quick render, so just decrease the max samples or something like 100 Make sure to enable denoise from over here on both of them so that the render gets denoise and select render image. Alright, so this is how our render currently looks right now, not much to look at, but a really great starting point that we have. Obviously, it looks kind of weird because we can see all of the bottom part of the sky, like all of this horizon. But don't worry, we'll be adding a thick layer of fog and then some clouds on top of it to give it like kind of a heavenly kind of loop. So yeah, I think this much is pretty good fog This lecture, I'll see you in the next one, thanks watch. 8. Modelling the Pillars: Hello, and welcome, guys. So let's continue working on our environment. And in this lecture, we'll be working on the pillars. So let's just press one for the front view, press shifte and we can add in our pillar reference image. So I'll go into the folder and add this one. Let's move it over here to the left, and let's just start working on them one by one. You can select this and press Shift plus S, then cursor to select it. Basically, this will bring this cursor point right over here. That's just because wherever this cursor point is placed at, whenever you add a new object, it will be created over here. So to change the location of it, you can hold Shift and use your right click to move it around. Or you can just press Shift plus S, then move it to some specific locations like cursor to world origin or the cursor to select it, anything. So yeah, just do this and press Shift A ad in a cylinder. I'll start by working on this one maybe first, and let's see how we're going to do that. Enable X ray, press S then z and first scale it to match the both ends. So this line should be matching just about here, and this one should be just about here. So we need to move it a little bit up, scale it down just a little bit. So I'm just trying to make it fit. Yeah, I think this is pretty good. I'll just go over here and disable edge length now. We do not really need this. So I just match both of the ends so that we can properly add in a mirror modifier. So press Tab, press Control R, and hit right click, to place it at the center, and you can just select the bottom vertices, press X, and delete them, and then just add in a mirror modifier. Set it on the Y or the z axis, I think on the Z and disable it on the X. All right, so now the mirror modifier is working correctly. Let's see. Let's place it roughly at the center, and then we can just start working on it, press tab and select this part, press X, and delete the vertices. I think it is best to just start from this loop. So the way we are going to do this is first let's scale it up, press S to scale it up, and just match it with like this. Now press E and extrude it downwards, scale it up, again, press E. And now just keep pressing E and S to scale it in or outwards like this to match with the reference image. So what I will do now is I'll again go into the wireframe and just make sure X ray is enabled that we can just see everything a little bit more clearly. Again, press E and now extrude it completely inwards and start extruding it. So press E and just scale it down like this to match with the reference image. Honestly, these type of designs you don't really need a reference image for. I'm just doing it to create the exact design. But for these type of pillars, you can kind of freestyle it as well. And you'll also find a lot of these pillar designs on Google as well, so you can get some reference images from there if you want to create something of your own. Scale it down or scale it up like this. Now, press E and just scale this completely inwards to create something like this and then scale it down, maybe a little bit more. Yeah, something like that. All right, guys. With that, this is done. Make sure to enable clipping, press E, and just join them at the center like this. And we have our first pillar done. Let's quickly check it out. Sable X ray, right click and shade how to smooth this. And now to create these partitions that we see over here. Like these ones. For that, you can just press tab, press three for face select and hold all and select this loop completely, then hold Shift and ought and select this one as well. You can press I to insert them. Okay, make sure to press tab, press Control A, and apply the scale first. Now press I and insert them. Now it is working properly. So press I once again. So this will help you to insert the faces individually like this and just insert this a little bit and now I will just press Control Shift and B. So press Control, Shift and B to bevel it out to give this smooth kind of shape. Just bevel it a little bit, and you can give it maybe like three or four vertices to give it the smooth look. And yeah, I think this is pretty good. And now we just need to select all of these faces and extrude them inwards. So obviously, you can just hold Shift and select them all one by one. But I think there is a very easy way to do it. You just select a couple of them and then press Control Shift and the plus key on your number pad. And this way you can select all of them by hitting the Control Shift and plus key on your number pad, like this. So you can see how easily we selected this. If you want to see this option from the menu, it is over here. You can go to Select Menu and over here, select more or less, select next active. And this way, you can just select all of them one by one. I'll just undo it. And again, I whole shift, select this as well, then press Control Shift and again, the plus key, you select them all. Yeah. Now just press Alt plus E and extrude faces along normal because you want to extrude them all inwards in their normal direction like this. Yeah, we have this. Now let's add in a simple bevel modifier to make it look a little bit better. And this is our first pillar ready. Let's just hit save. And the next thing that I want to do is that I want to add a subdivision surface modifier because these pillars will be really huge. So we can clearly see that they are kind of low polly. So just first move this at the top and enable harder normals. Next, add in a subdivision surface, and this might lag up your blender a little bit. And, you can see now all of the pillar area is pretty smooth, but these look really, really weird. So the best way to fix this is to just exclude them from the object. So I'll turn off bevel and subdivision for now is to make it a little bit easier to select them all, enable Xray, and just select this part clearly. Like this. Make sure to select these top word Cs as well, hold Shift and select them all this way. And then you can select this part as well. Now, once again, let's press three for phase select, and then you can press P and separate the selection. This way, this object would be different, so we can just select it and remove the subdivision surface modifier from this and just give it the bevel modifier because that is what it needs. I'll select this back now and you can turn back on the subdivision surface and the bevel. Make sure to press tab, select the top face, and select the bottom face. And you can see we get a little bit of shading issue. Okay, sorry. So this is the mirror modifier, so we just need to select the top face, and you can press to insert this to add a bit of supporting loops so that you don't see any kind of shading issues on the top, as well. I think it is best to just turn it off, turn the subdivision off in real time or in the viewport, so that it only shows up when you are rendering things. So like this way, Blender will stay fast because we have it disabled in the viewport, but it will enable itself back on when we are rendering things. So that works the best for us. Let's just say it safe. And now, one more thing that we have to add is that we need to create these pillars right over here. So first, you select your cylinder press Shift plus S c to select it so that we can add a cylinder at the center, add in a cylinder, scale it down, bring it out a little bit. Move it up over here where we have this empty space or scale this down and scale it up like this. Let's press one for the front view enable X ray and just place it right over here to make sure the scale is perfect. You can also press S, then Shift plus Z to only scale on the X and Y plane. So basically, when you press S and press Y, so it only scales in the Y axis. But if you press Shift plus Y, then it will exclude the Y axis and scale it on the Z plane. So similarly, we just want to scale it up like this, only on the XY plane. So we can press S, then Shift plus Z and scale it up just like this. So that way, its height does not change. Enable X ray just presses, then shift plus Z, scale it up this much. Press press control first, apply the scale, press tab and press Control R to add two edge loops, hit right click, press Z, and scale them up like this. We could have added like a mirror modifier for this as well, but I think it's fine. We can just quickly hold on, select this loop for Shiftenaut and select this as well. Press plus E, and extrude faces along normal. Scale them both on the z axis like this, and we have something like this. Again, I will press Control art, add two edge loops, scale them up, and maybe we can select these two as well in the same way and extrude them inwards just a little bit. Let's add in a bevel modifier to this. Right click, shade or to smooth this. And yeah, that's fine, I guess. Move it in over here. And now the next step to duplicate it over here in a circle, I think the way that I'm going to do that is just by simply using a spin tool. So press seven, press tab, enable X ray so that you can see it, and just select it all and make sure your cursor point is in the center of the cylinder. So just press tab, you can hold all and select this loop. You can basically, select any loop, so hold all and select this press Shift puss, then cursor to select it. This will bring the cursor right at the center of the cylinder. So now we can press seven, press tab, enable X ray. Sorry, make sure to select This Linda. Now press tab, press seven, and select it all. Press D to bring this tool bar up and you can select the spin tool. So the spin tool basically works around the cursor point. That's why it is important to place the cursor at the center to wherever you want to spin it around. So now you can go into the tool section. So press N and bring this tool section up and make sure to select the right axis. Because let's say if you are doing it in X axis, which is obviously the wrong one, it will spin something like this. So yeah, let's undo it, press seven for top view once again and select Z axis. And you can just spin it around this way. This menu will appear, so just type in 360 so that it is fully rotated like this around our cylinder. And for the amount of cylinders, I think we are going to go with this only. I think 12 looks fine. Let's just check it out how it looks. Yeah, in my opinion, I think it looks fine. Make sure to select it, press tab, press A to select everything and press M and select merge by distance because sometimes it can create duplicate of them. So just make sure to always do that whenever you use the spin tool. I'll scale them in a little bit, select it now and add in a mirror modifier to this. So to mirror it right over here, we can either change the origin point of it or just simply select the mirror object as the cylinder and set it on Z axis, yeah. This way, it has mirrored up properly. Yeah, now our first pillar is looking pretty nice. Let's just select it all press shift plus cursor to select it to bring the cursor roughly at the center. Press shift A and we can add in empty object. And now select all of your pillar and make sure to select the empty object at last. The empty object should be the active selection, which can be seen by this yellow colored outline. The non active selections have this orange colored outline and the active selection, which is the most latest selection, will have this yellow outline. So now just right click and go to parent and parent Object. This way, this empty object is now connected to all of them. Basically, it is the parent of all of the objects of this pillar. So you can select the empty and just move it around. The pillar will move along with it. You don't have to select each and every object one by one, select the empty and move it around. Perfect. Let's just save. And with this, I think this much is pretty good. For this lecture, we'll continue from here in the next one. 9. Creating Pillar Variants: Hello, and welcome, guys. So let's continue working on our pillars. I will just select this one that we created earlier, select it all press M and move it to a new collection and rename the collection to pillar underscore one, just so we keep everything a bit more organized, and we can maybe turn off this collection as well so that it does not interfere with our work. Press one for the front view, and let's start creating this one. Press Shift and let's add in a plane. Press R, then X, type in 90. Let's enable Xray. And once again, just try to match both of the edges over here. With the edges of the plane. I think something like this is good. This will help us find the middle point of the object and we can use the mirror modifier. Press tab, press control, hit right click to add it in the center, and select the right side, press X, and delete the vertices and just simply add in a mirror modifier. I'll delete everything. So let's select it all press X and delete the vertices, this one as well. And we can just select this one single vertex, place it over here, press E, the next, bring it out. I just quickly trace the shape out. Make sure to enable clipping, and now you can preste the necks and join them in the center like this. And similarly, just trace out this bottom part as well. Press the next, and again, join them both in the center. And this is like a top part of the pillar. Press tab, select any of the word Cs, press Shift plus D, duplicate them, and place them over this shape that we have, and we can trace out this one as well. I like this, and again, move it over here, press X and keep on extruding. Again, join this in the center and we are done with our basic shape. We just need to fill out the faces now. So once again, we can do something like maybe using the Knife Project tool or we can connect them like this as well. So just select this vertex and select this one, press F to connect them, and select the bottom two ones, press F to connect them. Just do these two only do not connect these ones in the middle because it will create a weird phase. So just select this one and this one, press F and select these two press F. Now you can hold Alt and select this entire loop and press F to fill out the phase. If you have done it right, you should get a hole in between over here, and then we can fill this hole out separately. So now you just need to select the inside part of the loop. So if you hold all and select it all, it will not really work correctly because we have selected now all of the word C, so just select the inside part. You can press C, C for this selection tool where you can control the circle of selection using your scroll wheel. So whatever is in this circle will get selected. This is really good to work with when you have, when you need to quickly make a lot of selections, so I can just drag them over and easily select this loop like this. Now, press F and the face will fill out automatically. We can go over here to the selection tool only. We do not need the spin tool now. So yeah, press A to select everything and press E to extrude it backwards like this. Press tab, press Controlle and apply the scale, and we have the shape of our pillar. Now let's press tab I'll press N to bring out the side view. And just to check how much thickness we want to give this, let's select both of these phases. So press three, select them both, and just move it a little bit backwards. Yeah, I think this smudge is pretty good. Then you can press tab, select this front face and extrude it out like this. Now if we add a Bewl modifier, it should work correctly. Right click, shade a smooth this. Let's adjust the beviel modifier. Move this smooth biangle at the top and enable harder normals for your bebel. And next press tab, select this phase and press I to insert it like this. If you insert it a bit too much, you will see that there is some geometry overlap going on so we need to fix this. Press one and enable X ray, and we can insert this accordingly. Basically, what we need to do now is we just need to fix up the mess that we have created over here. It's pretty simple. We just press one for vertice, select these vertices and press G, and move them around to kind of solve the puzzle and just make sure they are not overlapping on top of each other. I this way, as you can see, it is pretty much fixed. We don't get the weird overlap of geometry anymore. The rest, I think is pretty much fine. We don't really need to match with the reference image exactly. You can select the edges, suppress two for select, press G twice, and slide them down, press G twice, and slide them down like this, just so you can create a bit more space for all of them. And now, I think the shape is looking fine, so press three for phase select and just select this phase, press E, and extrude this inwards. Or something like this. Yeah, select this press Shift plus S c to select it, and we can start by adding in a cube, scale this cube down and place it right over here. Again, enable X ray press tab, select this part, moved right over here, and select this and move it over here. Now just press three, select this packface and move it till here like this. Then we can just simply duplicate this. Select it, add a mirror modifier and select the mirror object as this one so that it mirrors properly. Also add in a Bevel modifier, as well. Apply the scale and adjust the bevel modifier. I'll select this phase and maybe bring it out a little bit. Let's enable edge length from over here and see the thickness of this. I'll apply the scale press tab for both of them. Select them both ptab Enable trays, select all of this at the backside, and just move it till here to give it a bit more thickness. Now we can just press Shift plus A, add in a cube to scale this cube down according to the size of our pillar. Just make sure it is somewhat fitting the pillar like this. Now press tab, and scale it accordingly. Move it up, press the next, scale it up, press E to extrude it downwards and scale it in. Yeah. We have something like this. Again, just press Control, apply the scale and add in a Bbel modifier as well to this. Now, this bottom part is fairly simple. We just add in a cue. Scale it according to it first and just make sure it is like fitting a pillar properly. Supres STN Y and scale it down. I think this mach is pretty good. Press tab now and just bring it down till here. Now, press Control A, again, apply the scale, press tab and just select all four of these edges. So again, there is a shortcut for this. You can hold Control and aught and select all four of them like this. Press one, enable X ray and just press Control B to bevel it out like this. Make sure you have only two divisions. So if you use your scroll wheel, it will be a lot smoother. But we don't want that. We just want to create two of them and just bevel it out till here, and it will give you a pillar this kind of flow. Be I'll select them both and scale it up just a little bit. And with this our pillar is pretty much done. Let's just add in a bevel modifier to it and reduce the bevel amount. Enable harder normals, and let's create the bottom part. So I'll select this first go to object set origin origin to geometry to fix the origin point and press shift plus cause it to select it and press shift a add in a cylinder, so that the cylinder gets added right in the center of this so that we can properly create it. Enable X ray and bring the cylinder down. Press tab, select this bottom edge loop, press G and Z, and move it up and scale it outwards. Now pressE and just scale it inwards like this and just keep on pressing extrude and scale it according to the reference image like this. And this way, I think the pillar looks pretty good, and we have created it. So right click and shade out to smooth this as well. We can maybe scale it outwards a little bit press control R, add a edge loop, press three, and four lots this complete loop, and extrude faces along novel. Yeah, I think this is pretty good. Let's just finally add a bevel modifier to this. Apply the scale and adjust the Bel amount and enable hard abnormals. With this, our second pillar is also done. I think both of them look pretty good. Yeah, I'm happy with it. Let's just press Shift A, add in plain Axis empty as well. And let's disable this one so that we can select this freely and make sure you select empty at last, so hold your shift and just select the empty so that it is the active selection. Right click and go to part and select Object. This way we have created the empty as the parent object for all of them. Now just select it all, press and move it to a new collection pillar underscore two. And yeah, guys, I think this was is pretty good for this one. We have created a second pillar and we'll continue moving ahead, creating the rest of them. Thank you for watching. 10. More Pillars: Hello, and welcome, guys. So let's continue working on our pillars. I'll quickly just disable the earlier ones and press one to go into the front view, and let's just start quickly. Press Shift, and you can add in a cylinder. Let's place the cylinder right over here and just try to match it with the reference image. Yeah, that's pretty good. Press tab, select the bottom vertices and move them up right over here. Now, press E, extrude it inwards. And this one is, I think, pretty simple. We have already done this a couple of times now. So let's just quickly work this one up. Yeah, I'm not really talking much because we have done this, like, a lot of times by now. So in this video, let's try and finish up with the pillars. Gain risky and extrude this quite a bit inwards and just extrude it downwards like this. Maybe I think a bit more. Yeah. Now extrude it outwards and down like this. Let's select this loop, presal plus C, and extrude faces along normals like this and just select the bottom word Cs now, so hold all and select these ones, and now once again, we can just continue. Y Yeah, we are basically done with this one. This one was pretty simple in my opinion. We just have to add a couple of details, right click and shade or to smooth this first, and then we can add in a beviel modifier. Obviously, first, apply the scale, adjust the bevel amount, and enable harder normals. Let's scale it out towards just a bit more so that we get a hard angle. Okay. I think this is pretty good. So let's press one now for the front view, select this and go to object set origin origin geometry. Press Shift plus because there to select it, and now just press Shift plus A and add in a cylinder. Let's scale the cylinder down. We can go into the wireframe mode and just scale it up on both ends like this. All right, so now let's just press Control R and add two edge ops like this, hit right click and press S then Z and scale them up. You can maybe just match it like this only. Now again, press Control R, add one edge loop over here, and again, add one right over here. Press three for face select, hold select all of this and select all of this, so hold Shift naught and select both of the loops. Hold just a bit up like this. And now you can press T plus E, extrude faces along normals and just extrude it out. Now, once again, just hold t and select this loop, then hold Shift en aught and select this salt plus E, and extrude them again like this. I think this is pretty good. Let's press G and Y and bring it out. Right, click in shade or to smooth this. Also add in a Bble modifier. Apply the scale and enable harden nomals. Now press tab and press two for select, hold on, select this loop. Let's just move it downwards a little bit like this and maybe this one as well. We can add one more edge loop over here and extrude it out. Just to add a bit more detail. But yeah, I think this much is pretty good. We can once again just select this, press seven for top view, press tab, and enable X ray press A to select everything. Go into the spin tool and just make sure your Z axis is selected. So press N and make sure in the tool section, Z axis is selected. And now when you spin this around, you will see duplicates are created. But make sure you put in the angle as 360 so that they totally rotate around like this and definitely reduce the number of them for this one. I think I'll go with eight Yeah, I think it is the actual number in the reference as well, so I will be going with it. And yeah, this wheels pretty good to me. Again, enable Xray, and let's create this part now. So for this one, just add in a plane, rotate the plane by 90 degrees so press R, the X, in 90. Let's scale this down and move it right over here. I'll just select the plane and select the image pre slash to go into the local mode so that we can work a bit more freely. We just match it with a reference image like this. Press Control A, apply the scale press tab, press Control R, and add edge loop right in the middle. So hit right click and select the vertex and just move it up over here somewhere. So that when we select this edge, so we can press two, select this edge, press Control B, and bevel it out, and you will see it will create a similar curvature that we want. So do something like this, now select it all and just move it up. Perfect. So the reason we are doing this is because I'm trying to create a cutout. So to do that, first, let's come back to our Select tool and press E and extrude this still here so that we can, use a Bullion modifier to create a cutout out of this. So now push this in. And the way we're going to use the boolean modifier is obviously we can go in the modifier stack, but there is a nice shortcut for this. So first select this and then select this one, then press Control plus minus. And you will see now we have created this cut out inside of our object. So basically, this is the boolean difference operation. Now, I'm sure, for some of you guys, this shortcut might not be working where you select this one first, then select this one, press Control minus. This might not work because you haven't enabled another add on. So go into preferences in the add on section search for Bool to add on. So make sure to enable Boto add on either from the add on section or the get extensions one, enable the Bolt add on, and this shortcut will start to work. So yeah, I'll just select this and press Control plus minus. Select this first, then select this press Control minus, and we have created cutout So now to create something similar like we have in the reference image, let's move this out over here. Then we can enable X ray, press Shift plus D to duplicate this and scale this down and maybe just once again, simply use the Boolean modifier. Select this, select this, then press Control minus, and we have created this cutout. Now you might notice that we are getting some shading issues, so let's try and fix them up first. Select your model, and let's try moving the bevel modifier at the bottom. Yeah, as you can see, this fixes up most of our issues. So with the Boolean modifier, you should always remember that the bevel modifier will stay at the bottom. We can also add in maybe a weighted normal modifier to fix up some of the areas. And with this, I think it's pretty good. Maybe I'll select this and move it out a little bit. You don't want that deep of a hole. And yeah, this is pretty good, I think. So once again, just select these two. Press press A to select everything, press seven for top view, and we can just select the spin tool and spin it around. It might get a bit laggy and give you some errors, but don't worry. We'll first set this to 360 and just reduce the number of them, obviously. So maybe something like six would be pretty good. Press tab now, and I think we are done with our next pillar as well. We do get some shading issues over here, but you can fix them up by pressing Control R and adding a edge loop just like really close over here so that it can kind of contain the shading errors. But with this, I think this is pretty good. We do get some shading issues still around the edges over here, but I don't think these will be even visible in the render. You cannot even see them from this distance. And when we add, like all the materials, fog and everything, I don't think they are going to be that visible by then. So yeah, I think we can definitely work with this. So let's just sit save now. And now we can just again, press Shift A in empty. Select everything, so make sure to select everything and then at last, select your empty, and then hit right click, go to parent Select Object. And this way we can easily control this object by moving just this single parent object around. You can even scale and rotate this. Maybe I'll select this press statab and create a bit of hole right over here. Yeah, I think this is pretty good. So let's just sit safe and select it all, press M and move this to a new collection and rename this to pillar under score three. You can delete this Boolean cutters collection that is created. It is basically for these extra objects. So when we apply all of the modifiers, then these two won't be needed. That's why they do get in a different collection so that you can easily delete them later on. But we have just moved everything to a single collection only that is the pillar three. Well, later on, like we apply all of the modifiers, then we can just simply delete these two, then they won't really matter. So yeah, we'll worry about that later on. Head save, and I think this much is pretty good for this lecture. Thank you as watching. I will see you in the next one. 11. Finalizing the Pillar Designs: Hello, and welcome, guys. So let's continue working on our pillars and try finishing them up in this video. So let's work on this one. We can start by pressing Shift plus A, and let's add in a cylinder. Let's move this right over here, enable Xray, and scale this down, and just try to match it with this one right over here. You can go into the wireframe mode as well. I think this is pretty good. Let's press S then Z and scale this down. Now press Tab, press one for what C select, select all of them, and move them up over here, press E and then press S to scale it up outwards. Then press E and just move it downwards like this. Then we can just keep on pressing E to extrude it out, and then press S to scale it inwards or outwards depending upon the reference image. All right. So now that we are done till here, just select this bottom loop, select it all, press Shift plus D, then press Z, lock on the z axis, and just bring it down over here. You can scale this down just a little bit, then press E, and again, do the same thing. We can create the pillars in between over here later on. First, let's work on this. All right. Once again, just select this bottom loop and press Shift plus D, press Z, and bring it down. Scale this down a bit. Press E, and extrude it downwards. Just like this. All right. We can maybe just hold on and select the top part and again, extrude it upwards as well because we can see like there is a little bit of extrusion upwards as well. And yeah, this is pretty good, I think. Now what we need to do is we need to create all these windows type of structures in the middle. So let's do that first. Select this right click and shade out of smooth, and let's just add in a Bevel modifier as well. Move this to the top. And you can also kind of see that the shading is really weird around some of these edges, and I think it is because we haven't really applied the scale. So just select press Control A and apply the scale. As you can see, this has fixed the shading and then let's adjust the bevel amount. We can maybe disable clamp overlap so that we can just adjust it a bit more accurately. Yeah. That's pretty good. Let's just select this press Shift plus S and cause her to select it so that the cursor is brought over here right in the center of the cylinder. Okay, first I'll select it, go to object set origin and origin to geometry. Then you can press Shift plus S, then cause her to select it, and let's start by creating these Window like designs in the middle. So press Shift A, and let's start by adding in a plane. Press R, then X, type in 90 and scale it down. Let's bring the plane right over here in the front. I think somewhere around here would be good. Press one again for the front view, let's bring it down over here. Enable X ray, press tab, and just scale it up according to the reference image. I think this much would be pretty good. Yeah, I think this feels pretty good to me. So let's scale it up a bit more. We can obviously hide the area with adding a cylinder on top. Press control, apply the scale, press tab, and let's just select one of the word C, so just select this, press Shift plus D and duplicate it. Let's bring it right over here. Go into a wireframe and enable X ray, and let's just trace this window shape out. We can also add in a mirror modifier as well to do that quickly, but I think it is a pretty simple shape, so it would be really fast to just do it like this only instead of adding a mirror modifier. A, we are done as well. Just select them both and press F to connect them. Press S the Z and type in zero so that it flattens it out. Basically, whenever two vertices are, let's say, like this, you select them both and press S and Z, type in zero. You will see that it will basically flatten them out in a same line. So just bring it down over here. Ana, it is pretty good. Hold, select this complete loop, press P and separate the selection. This way, it is like a separate object. I'll just select these two and press slash to go into the local mode. And let's see. We basically want to create the Window cutout now. So now just select the object we have just separate it out, press G then Y and bring it out over here. And now to follow my steps to use the knife project tool properly, press one for the front view and select the plane behind. Press tab to go into the Edit mode, and now just press one so that you are in the vertice select mode. You can hold Control and click on anywhere right over here so that your window object is selected and you will see it is being highlighted in this orange color outline. So when it is selected like this, then you can press A to select everything, press F three and search for knife project. Enter, and you will see that the cutout is created over here. You can now select this one and delete it. And let's select this, press tab, press three for phase select, select this and press E to extrude it backwards like this. And you are pretty good, press tab and you can select these two faces and press I to insert them like this. Maybe we can press E as well to extrude it backwards a little bit like this as well. Right, shade or smooth this and let's add in a bevel modifier. Adjust amount of bevel. We don't want it too much, set it to 0.0 007 maybe. Yeah, I think this feels good and enable harden normals. And now what we need to do is we basically need to copy this window in the circular fashion. So let's do that. I'll select it, press Tab, press A to select everything, press seven for top view, and make sure you select the spin tool. It was already selected because I think we were using it earlier as well. So select the spin tool and make sure you go in the tool section from over here. So press N to bring up this tool section and then select the Z axis. Or whatever axis is the correct one for you, obviously, we should be spinning it in the Z axis because then it will give us the right results like this. So yeah, just press seven for top you and rotate it like this. And now we have something like this. So select the angle and set it to three 61st, and make sure to enable use duplicates because that will, make them not connect with each other, so we will get the proper shape and now start reducing the steps according to how many windows we want. So ten or 11. Now, as you can see when we use 11 steps, there is a little bit of space that we can see in between. So if we increase it to 12, then it starts to, like, kind of overlap with the other windows. So we don't want that. Instead, what we can do is let's just undo this and press one for front view, enable Xray and just select this left side and select the right side as well, and press S and X and just scale it up a little bit. Just a little bit so that when we use 11 steps, it fits perfectly. So press A to select everything now and again, use the spin tool. Let's type in 360 over here. Enable use duplicates and decrease it to 11. And now it is almost fitting perfectly, which I think is what we want. Press tab now, and we can definitely run with this. I think it looks pretty good. If in your models, a little bit of space is left in between, you can use another modifier. That is pretty good. You can go to Add Modifier and search for weld. So what weld basically does is it will connect the vertices that are really close to each other. So as you can see, these vertices are really close to each other. So if you increase this distance, yeah, as you can see, when it increases past that distance between them, it will connect them both like this. But I don't think I need to use that because it looks fine this way as well. So I will remove the weld modifier, press one, and let's scale this down obviously, according to the reference image. Press asthin Z and scale it up like this. Perfect. Now we can just press Shift plus D, duplicate it over here on the top, and then select them both and duplicate at the bottom as well. Yeah, that's pretty good. Let's just press Shift plus A and add in a cylinder, scale this cylinder down and place it in between them, it kind of does not fit properly, so just select all of them. And I think the reason for that is because the origin point was not at the center, so let's just undo it quickly. So now we can just go to objects set origin, origin to geometry. That way, the origin point is right at the center. So when we scale it down, I think it would stay at the center only. This way, it won't cause those issues. So if I now press Shift A and let's add in a slinder You can see that now it fits perfectly because the origin point is correct now. Yeah. So let's delete this and first duplicate all of the windows. Press shift D and place it over here and again select them both and duplicate it right over here. Now press shift A, add in a cylinder and let's create this part right over here. Press control apply the scale, Sought to smooth this, press tab and select both of the bottom and the top faces, press I to inside this, press salt plus E, and extrude faces along normal to extrude it this way. Let's add in a bevel modifier to this and not just the bevel amount. I think it is a bit too much so I will scale it down like this. I'll just move the window downwards. We obviously just enable X rays, select it all from over here and kind of increase the height of it according to how we want. Yeah, that's pretty good. Enable X rays, select the bottom part and just increase it like this. And that's pretty good. Let's add another cylinder, scale it down. Scale it up like this, and press ist in Z, and scale it down on the Z axis. Again, shade, smooth this. For this one, I will just press Tab, press Control R, add to edge loops like this, apply the scale first and scale it up like this. Press all T and extrude faces along no. Yeah, that's fine. Again, add in a bevel modifier to this. Let's select this one, press shift D, and press Z and bring it down over here. And yeah, with this, our window part is basically done. I think it looks really nice. So let's work on the pillars on the top over here. Press Shifte add in a cylinder, scale this down. P it like this and press a thin z and scale it up. Press controller apply the scale to stab, and let's add one edge loop over here and one edge loop right over here. Press three, hold gt, hold Shift enough, and select both of these loops, presalte and extrude faces lung normal. I'll just scale them both downwards like this. And in my opinion, I think something like this is right. You can maybe add a couple more loops if you want to. But this part won't be that much visible, so we don't have to, like, put in too much of effort into it. Just to add a bunch of loops and extrusions, and I think it would look fine when we add the bevel modifier. Just apply hardened normals and decrease the bevel amount as well. Let's bring it out over here. And once again, seven for top view, press tab, press to select everything. And you can select the screen tool and just rotate it like this. Let's set this to 360. And obviously, I will reduce the number of steps. I think six or seven is fine. So I'll go with seven. This looks fine. One thing, make sure to select your windows that you have just created. Also, we can do see, like, a little bit of space. So I'll just select this press shift D and duplicate it and place it right at the top over here. So now just select your windows, press tab, and press A to select everything, press M to merge, and select merge by distance. Basically, this command removes all of the duplicate vertices. As you can see, it shows removed 80 vertices. That means some of the vertices like overlapping on top of each other, and that can happen sometimes when we use the spin to. So just select all three of the windows, press tab, press A to select everything, press M and select merge by distance. And you can see it shows removed 240 vertices. That means we did have overlapping vertices. You should do it over here as well, but I don't think it will happen on the pillars, so press M and select merge by distance. I think it happens when let's say, if I add in a cube, I'll just quickly show you. Let's place the three Gaza right over here. So shift and right click place it over here, press dab and you spin it around like this. So when we are spinning it normally like this, it does not really happen, but when you enable use duplicates, let's say I put the angle in at 360, hit Enter and you will see this cube has doubled vertices. The rest of them would be fine, but the initial cube that we had has these double vertices because we use the use duplicates option. So yeah, for situations like this, just press A, press M, and select merge by distance. This will fix your issue, and all the overlapping vertices would be removed. So let's delete this now and with this R, this pillar is also done. Let's hit save and continue on creating this one quickly. Press Shift A and let's add in another cylinder. Let's move it right over pillar five and just scale this down according to the reference image. Let's eng a IFrame mode and scale it down till here like this. Now you can press tab, press one for Word C select, select this, press E and extrude it in, and then just extrude it upwards. Let's just go till here only, and then we can press C, and again, press E, and just keep on tracing out the reference image. Yeah, something like this. Let's go downwards as well. Select this part, again, press E and S to scale it down, and just press E and Z and move it till here. Scale it up, press E, and again, scale this down and match it with the reference image. Perfect. I think this is pretty good. So now I will just select this loop, press Shift plus D, press Z, lock on the Z axis and move it right over here. And now press E and now press S to scale it down just like this. Let's do the same right over here as well. Select it all, press Shift plus D, press to lock on the Z axis, and now just scale it up, press E and scale it down. With this, the basic shape, and with this, the basic shape of the pillar is done. So let's just press tab, select this part, press Shift plus D, and scale it down. To create this section right over here, we just extrude it towards the top like this and scale it up. And then there is a really simple way to create this. Just press Control R to add Edge loop right in the middle, hit right click and just scale this down like this. Do it something like this, and then you can just press Control B and bevel it out, maybe a little less to scale it up. And now press Control B and bevel it out. To create something similar shape. Yeah, I think this is pretty good. If you want, you can press L. So you can press L to select individual objects within a certain object. So if I press L over here while hovering over here, this will be selected if I press L right over here, so this part will be selected. Scale it up a bit and now press Shift D, press Z and lock on the Z axis and bring it down right over here as well. Maybe I think we can press R then type in 180 and rotate it like this. Or I think it is fine this way. Yeah, I think this is pretty good. So hit right click, shade out of smooth and press Control A and apply the scale as well. So yeah, that fixes the issue. Let's add in a Bbel modifier to and let's adjust this part as well. We can just create something like this by pressing Control R, add one edge loop over here over here, and one over here and over here. So press three, hold, select this loop, hold Shift and aught, and select this phase loop, and just press I to first insert this a little bit, and now press S, then shift plus z to block on the XY plane and just scale it a bit inwards. Something like this. Maybe a little bit more so that we don't get any kind of shading issues. Just make sure to enable hardened normals from over here now. And we can also add in something like a weighted normal modifier. And yeah, with that, our pillar is looking pretty nice. So yeah, now we can start working on this leaf like shape over here. So now for this leaf design, if you look in the reference images, I've added this reference image. So let's just add this into blender. We can press one for the front view, use your shift and right click to place the three D cosa somewhere around here and press Shift A and add in a reference image. Let's add this and let's scale it down. Press Shift and add in a plain, press R, the next, type in 90 and rotate it like this. Let's scale this down. Press tab, press Control R, and add edge loop again in the middle. So hit right click and you can delete the right side, and simply we can add in a mirror modifier. Also, let's choose the tool like the normal selection tool so that we don't have the spin tool showing up. You can press P for this tool bat to bring it up. All right, so let's start creating it now. I'll delete all of this. Let's select it and move it down over here. And I won't be creating this bottom part. I will be just working on the leaves over here at the top. So if you want to add that, you can go for it, but I won't be adding it. I'll just creating this part only. I like this and now just extrude it. All right, guys. So now enable clipping and just connect it in the center. If you press A, select it all and press F to fill out this phase, we are basically done with the shape, but the problem with this is that we kind of want to, like, smoothen it out because we want to create a curved shape for the leaf, but we cannot do this because this complete phase is engon, so we'll get something like these type of results, which look pretty weird. And also, if we add in a subdivision surface modifier to it to kind of smoothen it out, it will give us really weird results, as you can see, because basically it is like a complete engon. So engon is a shape which has like a lot of word Cs, more than four vertices, but this is a complete single phase only. So it has all of these word Cs. So what we need to do is we need to turn it into quad topology. Basically, all of the pass should not have more than four word Cs. And how we can do that, let's see if we have these four word Cs, so you can just select these two and press J to connect them. Now, this is a simple quad phase where it only has four vertices over here. So now we need to do this thing on all over our leaf. So just select this and this press J. And this is also a quad. Select these two press J. Let's select these two. Let's do the simple part first. So just select these two again, press J over here as well. We can select these two and press J, and press Control R and add Edge do or sorry, a simple word C right over here, and we can connect these two and press J. Again, I will add another one, sorry, and just connect these two as well and press J. Clip these two press J and join them over here as well. It's the same. And now we need to work it out from the top over here. So just go over here and apply the mineral modifier, press tab, and now select this word C and this one press J, and join them, and now select this one, this one, press J. Again, these two press J, and just keep on joining them like this. And basically, it will create a quad phased topology that we want. Let's do it over here as well. These two and these two press J. Now we just need to fix these ones right over here. So press control and add edge group over here. Let's press K and just create a cut like this and connect it over here. And now it right click presenter. Click over here now and a cut on this word C, it enter, and we have something like this. Now, I think it is almost pretty much done. Just select these two and press J. And with this, almost all of the word Cs, I think are quapology. A little bit of gone here and there would not matter that much. We just need to copy it all to the right side, so press A, go to mesh and exhibitize so that it gets copied up on the right side as well. And now you will totally see the difference when we add in something like a subdivision surface modifier. You can see it is working perfectly now, like how we want. And yeah, with this, our leaf shape is done. Now we can add in something like a solidify modifier. Make sure to move the solidify modifier above the subdivision one. Brightly and shade or to smooth this. I think something like this is fine. If you want to add in a bevel modifier as well, it's to it below the solidify and above the subdivision. It will give us something like this, which I think looks pretty good. All right, so now to create a bit of curve in the leaf. So press tab, and let's say we select this loop over here. So hold Alt and just select this completely. And if you move it like behind this, it will look pretty weird. So for this to work properly, we can enable proportional editing. What this will do is it will move the other areas of the leaf as well, along with this part. It totally depends on the area of effect which you can adjust by using your scroll wheel. So whenever proportional editing is enabled, you will see not only the parts that are selected will move, but the area around it will move as well, and you can increase or decrease that area depending upon this circle that you can adjust with your scroll wheel. So let's just select this loop, press G, and Y and adjust the circle somewhere around here and move it like this to create a bit of curve. Then you can press tab and just select all of the peak points of the leaves like this. That we can just press G then Y and move them backwards. Decrease this area of effect, just want it a little bit. It looks a bit weird right over here, so let's try turning off the bevel. I think with the bevel turned off, it looks a bit better. So I'll just remove it. Yeah, I think this way it looks pretty good. So let's just scale this down. Type in 90, now let's just bring it down right over here, rotate it up a bit. Let's just select it and simply add in a mirror modifier and select the mirror object as this so that we can duplicate it on the right side as well. And just select it now press Shift plus D, pre Z to lock on the z axis and bring it down. Maybe for the bottom one, we can just increase the scale of this a little bit. And with this, honestly, I'm pretty happy with how the pillars have turned out. What we can do now is just add in like a parent object for these two and move them to a separate collection. So let's just select this first and this image, press M, and move this to the reference images collection. Let's turn off the first three pillars. And select just this one. Make sure to select all of the parts pre shift plus S cause to select it and pshift A, and let's add in empty. And once again, just select it all and just make sure to select the empty object at last so that it is the active selection, right click and parent and Select Object. And yeah, it is done, select it all once again. Press and move this to a new collection and rename this to pillar underscore four. Let's turn this off and select this one now. Press shift test cause it to select it, press Shift A and add in a plain axis. And once again, select it all, select the empty at last, right click and parent it as well, and then press M and move it to a new collection, redeem this two pillar, underscore five. And with this, basically, all our pillars are done. And I think they turned out pretty good. They're looking really nice, so we can finally start to add materials to our environment. After we add materials to, like, all of them, we can start placing around the pillars around our scene to kind of, like, populate it a little bit and add details. I'll select all of the pillars and just move them behind over here, our camera so that it does not interfere with our scene. Let's just move them right over here, maybe scale them up a little bit because they are going to be pretty big anyways and hit save now. And this is a pretty long lecture now, so I will end it over here. Thank you guys for watching. I will see you in the next one. 12. Texturing the Bridge: Hello, and welcome, guys. So now that we're done with our modeling, let's start with texturing environment. So first, in this lecture, let's start by texturing bridge. So what I will do is, let's just extend this and we can click over here and change this to the shader editor so that we can add our materials. So let's just click on New and rename this two bridge. And before we actually start texturing it, there are a couple of very simple things that I want to go over. Probably most of you know this by now, but yeah, just a couple of things. First, you should go to edit preferences and just go into add on section and search for node wrangler and just enable it and turn it on, because we will be using a couple of shortcuts in the Shader editor that require node wrangler add on. So yeah, you can just find it over here in the add on section or in the Get extension section. So yeah just enable it over there. I'll close it now, and the first thing is if let's say I add a simple noise texture, press Shift and search for a noise texture. You can connect this to the base color. We get something like this, which is pretty weird because it has not been UV unwrapped. So we can change the texture coordinates of this texture by selecting it and then hitting Control plus which is one of the shortcuts of node wrangler add on only. So just hit Control plus and we will get this texture coordinate and mapping node connected to it. So now right now it is selected generated. So plug in the object one. So now we are using object texture coordinates, and you can see they are much better and uniform now. Mapping node, we can control the location rotation and the scale of the texture. So let's just select the scale completely, and let's say we decrease this to 0.5, so that the texture is a little bit bigger over here as we can see. Next is if we press Shift A and add in something like maybe a color ramp node, and we can put it between the noise texture like this. So basically the color ramp, we can control the hardness between the white and the blacks. If you just increase it, you can see if I'm increasing the black slider, it starts to increase, and if I increase the white one, the white parts start to increase. If you kind of meet them both in the middle, we now get pretty harsh fall off. And earlier we were getting really soft fall off, so we can really use color ramp to control all of these things. You can also change the color for them if you want to, like this. And we can also click on This plus icon. With this plus icon, you can basically choose, like, a totally different color. So we can add it in between our black and white color or between these sliders. And you can add as many colors and create some very cool effects with your materials. So yeah, that is all about color ramp. Let's just undo it. We will be basically using it to kind of control the fall of our texture. That is mainly what I will be using it for. You can hold Control now and use your right click to create a cut like this to just disconnect it, and let's move it up. Next is if you press Shift A and search for something like a mixed color node, so just add a mixed color node. And as the name suggests, it will basically mix two colors or image inputs. Basically, it can mix two textures. So if I plug the result right now in the base color, we get the same color. So let's say I set the A two completely red and B two blue. So basically what is happening is it mixing both red and blue colors and giving us this purple color because the factor is set to 0.5. So 0.5 factor is basically mixing equal parts of A and mixing equal parts of B. If I set this to zero, it is basically completely taking from the A input only, and if I set this to one, it is completely taking from the B input only. And anything in between is like a mixture of them both, as we can see the gradual transition. From zero that is red to B, that is blue. And now, what will happen if I plug something like our noise texture that we have right over here into the factor. So currently, the factor is just a numerical value, but we can also use it as a mask by using any of the black and white textures that we have. Let me just show you once again. So right now we have something like this where our noise texture has these very harsh black and white spots. So if I just plug this into the factor over here and now plug my result into the base color. You will see basically what is happening. Now, instead of directly mixing the A and the B color, it is mixing them both according to the black and white color of the noise texture. So that is what I mean by using this as a mask. And now, basically what is happening is that this noise texture is driving this mixed color. Wherever we have the white color, we have this blue color and wherever we have the black in our noise texture, we have this red color. And we can see that we can control it as well using the sliders or we can play around with the noise texture itself. And if let's say press shift A and go into textures and search for something else, let's say, a brick texture, and I plug the brick texture into my A. Now, the A input is totally like the black color is the brick texture, while the B, that is the blue color is still the blue color. So the white color is the blue color, and B is the brick texture. I think it would be better understood if I use something else instead of colors only. So yeah, now you can see the black is basically the brick texture. While the white is the worn texture that we have used. So yeah, I think it is pretty self understood now that you can use any of your black and white textures as a factor for the mixed color to basically drive that particular node and control where the A and B inputs should be showing up. If you don't use the factor at all, it is basically overlapping them completely. And we have this very linear way of mixing them by overlapping on top of each other. Zero means A and one means B. And anything in between is like mixing them both like this. But when we use it with something like this type of texture, it is like mixing them in a very controlled way. We can control it however we want to mix these two textures. So, these are some of the basic things that I wanted to go over, so let's just delete this now and finally start by texturing our what do we say? The bridge. So let's go over here. And let's see if I just select the base color and make it a little bit darker. I do want to go for something like a grayish type of color if I look over in the reference images as well. The color of all of the pillars and the adored bridge is kind of grayish or kind of beach depending upon how the environment is. I will be going with this type of, like, grayish type of color. So let's do that. I'll select this and we can just decrease the value, and we will be going with kind of like this type of color. But we do want to add a couple of things to this texture to make it look a little bit better. So let's press Shift tape and search for ambient occlusion mode. So ambient occlusion is basically it will add shadows on all of the corners and crevices of your model. So if you plug this in directly, you can see it has added, like all these shadows and stuff over here in the corners. You can enable insight from over here, and you will see that you can even control the distance where you want to add these shadows. Something like this or if you want a little bit darker like this as well. But we won't be using insight, so let's just disable this and set the distance to one for now. And the way we are going to use this is once again, press shift and search for a mixed color node, and just plug this into the factor and the result into the base color. Now, basically, if you set one of the colors to white completely, you can see, we have created these highlights, which are being controlled by the ambient occlusion. So if you want to create shadows in your model, you can turn it completely down, making it black, and you have added some ambient occlusion or some shadows onto your model. But instead of that, I will be making it completely white so that we can add these highlights onto our model, giving it that stylized look. So yeah, this is what I will be going for. Even by doing something like this, which is very basic and simple, our material looks a lot better than just giving it like this totally flat look, as you can see, just adding a bit of ambient clusion and giving it like these totally white highlights gives that stylized look that we are going for. So let's do that. Next, what I want to do is if you go back into your textures, I have a very simple bridge texture that I will be basically overlaying on top of this. So let's just bring this in into our material. So just drag and drop it and hold control, and let's just disconnect this first and plug our bridge texture to see how it looks. So this is how it looks right now. As you can see, it does not even, like, work properly. It is stretching up all over the place. So first, let's just select press Control A apply the scale. And what we want to do is we quickly want to go to UV editing and press A to select everything and just press U and give it a simple UV and wrap maybe something like a projection, so that we have a little bit of UV and wrap instead of its stretching. So now if you go back to layout, I think it would be a bit better, as you can see, the texture now feels a bit more uniform and better than earlier. You can select press Control plus T, and using this, we can basically control the scale of this. So if you want to, like, make the texture smaller, you can increase the scale from over here, which will make the overall texture smaller like this. Or if you want to make the texture look bigger, you can decrease the scale to something like 0.75, something like this. I think this looks pretty good. So let's see how we are going to overlay this texture on top of it. So the first thing that I want to do is obviously the color of it is very, like brownish, which we do not really want. So press Shift and search for a hue saturation node. So you can plug this in between over here, and the hue saturation is basically as the name suggests, you can control the hue or the saturation of the color or the value which is like the brightness or the darkness. Let's undo it all back. And first, we want to make the texture look a little bit brighter, so set the value to something like two and decrease the saturation to 0.5. And now just press shift at search for a color ramp and bring it between over here. Adding the color ramp will basically make it black and white, so we don't really have to play around with the hue at all, because if you have any kind of, like, let's say, color info, if you plug the color ramp, it will turn like black and white because the color ramp is being controlled by two sliders only like this. If you want to change the color after adding the color ramp, you can play around with these values, and then you can change the color to whatever you want. But in our case, obviously, we want the grayish type of color only, so it works the best for us. I think it looks pretty good. So now we have our texture that we have and we have our highlights, which we basically want to mix. So as the name suggests, once again, press Shift A and search for a mixed color node and plug this into A and plug this one into B and just plug the final into base color. And yeah, now, as you can see, it works perfectly. We have our highlights as well as we have our texture overlaid on top of it. Now, if you want to control what you want to add more. So if you set this to zero, it is basically all like this ambient occlusion part. And one is basically all this texture part. We definitely want the texture a bit less. So I will be going with something like maybe 0.4. Let's go with something like 0.35. And next, I want to play around with the scale of this a little bit. So let's try setting it to one. I think one looks fine. Don't have to change this up too much. Let's select this part and give this the same bridge material only and select it, press control, apply the scale, press tab, press to select everything, press, and as it is in a similar shape, it is a cube only to select cube projection. And now it works a little bit better as we get like the texture properly projected on top of it. You can see if you undo it without the UV and wrapping, it looks really weird. But after we have just press and selected cube projection, the texture feels fine. Let's hit Save. And I think this is pretty good for our like bridge, I think it looks really nice. You can, play around with the colors from over here. If you want to, like, if you want to make the overall look of the bridge a bit darker, you can go with this, or if you want to make it brighter, you can go with whatever you want. And you can control the overall look of the bridge from over here, like the colors. If you want to change the color of the highlights, as you can see, or if you want to change the color of the bridge, we can play around from over here. Changing the color of this will give you the control of the texture on top of our bridge. But I don't think I want to change it around that much. Let's keep it like this. I think it looks pretty good this way. Let's just select the color of the bridge and make it a bit darker, I think, so something like 0.4. Yeah, I think this feels pretty good. Let's press F 12 and quickly see how our render looks. And yeah, this is how our bridge is currently looking. I think I'm pretty happy with how it has turned out. And yeah, let's just hit save. And I think this much is pretty good for this lecture. In the next lecture, we'll start by texturing our door. So thank you for watching. I will see you in the next one. 13. Texturing the Gate: Hello, and welcome, guys. So let's continue adding materials to our environment. And in this lecture, we will be texturing the door. I will also open up the reference images and just look at the door reference image so that we can kind of create a similar looking material to this. I will just move it over to my second monitor, and yeah, then we can start. Let's select this part right over here, and we can click on new material and rename Distrut Door. So what I want to start with is to give the material a kind of like a stylized look, we want some kind of way or a method to mask out the edges. So in blender, there is a really simple way to do it. Just select the material. So select this door material, press Shift A and search for a bevel node. And along with this, press Shift and search for a geometry node. And now we will just plug the combination of both of them into a dot product. So just track this node like this and search for vector mat dot product and you'll find it over here. Now take the normal part of the geometry node and plug this in over here in the second input. So this very simple setup of nodes, we will just plug this in into a final node called the map range node so that we can map the values. And over here, you just need to switch up the values a little bit. This values, the from min value will kind of stay in between 0.9 and one. You can play around with it a bit more, but I think a value between 0.9 and one would be pretty good and set the minimum to one and max to zero. And with this, we are basically done just plug the result in into the base color, and you will see as soon as we do that, we have easily masked out the edges of our model like this. So the edges have the white color masked out while the rest of the model has the black color. You can also control this by playing around with the radius value of the bevel node, as you can see, and with the from min value, I think you can kind of control the opacity of this, as you can see if you want to make them a little bit fainter or like brighter. I'll keep it at 0.9 for now. I think that's fine. So how we can use this to our advantage. Basically, we plug this result not into the base color, obviously, because we don't want the black and white color. So let's hold control and right click to cut this press shifty and once again, search for a mixed color node. And plug this in into the factor and plug the result into paste color. Right now, nothing will happen because both of them are basically the same color. But now if you start playing around with the A value, you can see the A value is the color of the rest of the model, while the B value is the color for the edges. So using this, we can create a pretty good looking material that has that kind of stylized effect. Next, let's select this and select this maybe, I think, yeah, over here, and this small one. And then at last, select this so hold shift and select the part which has the material so that now you can press Control L and link materials. Basically to copy the materials on the other objects as well. Maybe I'll select this two and select the material and give it the door material. Because this part and this part in the reference image kind of has a bit different material. As you can see, this one is a bit darker, and this one is kind of like a little bit brighter than the rest of them. Obviously, this part has the gold material, so it is totally different. So yeah. Now let's just select this. And now, obviously, we need to select like a proper color for the A value. You can play around with the hue and kind of give it whatever color you want. But I will be directly plugging in a X value so that I get the exact color that I want. You can copy my value if you want to, or you can just play around with it and find the perfect color that you want. So the value that I will be using is this one. I'll just copy paste it, and you guys can also use this one if you want to. It is d2d5, DA FF, basically, hit Enter, here. This is the kind of color that I will be using. I think it looks pretty good. And now, basically we are done with the very simple material of a door. You select this part and give it the same door material. But instead, click on this five icon. So this five icon means this material is being used by five different objects. If I click on it, basically, now it has created a unique material out of this. So if I change the color, it is only being affected over here because it is now a separate material. Otherwise, if I had earlier done this, you will see the color of all of them changes. So I don't want that. I just want to change the color of this so I'll click on here to make it like a unique material, and we can rename this door underscore dark. And very simple, we have nothing to do make the value over here a bit darker so that we kind of get that dark look like this so that we can get a bit of variation in our environment. I think that's pretty good. Somewhere around here is, I think, fine. And for the last one, I will just select this one and once again, select the door material. And for this, we can do something a little bit different. I will just set the metallic up. So now, again, as you can see, if I increase the metallic, it changes for all of them. So before that, click on here again on this five icon and rename this to door underscore metal. And I can increase the metallic of this and let's play around with the color a bit. I definitely do want to make it a bit darker. And yeah, something like this, just to create a bit of variation in the material. I think it looks pretty good. And now at last, just select this, click on here and select the door metal and just rename this two. Before renaming it, just click on this two icon. So that is a unique material and rename this two door underscore gold. And nothing much for this. Just select this and let's try giving it like a gold colour material. And I'll definitely go over here and decrease the radius so that is not as much over here. I think this much is fine. We can set the metallic value to one. No, I think 0.8 was fine. Let's decrease the roughness to 0.4. Ana, I think our door is looking pretty nice now. Let's just hit safe first. And what I want to do is press F 12, and you can give it a quick render to see how it looks and if everything is, like, going well. The render is done, and this is how our environment looks. I think it is coming along very nicely. We do get that stylized look because we have kind of masked out the edges. You can play around with the materials a bit more, but I'm really happy with the look of the door and the bridge. I'll just select the bridge, and maybe if you want to make it a tad bit lighter, you can do so. So it was 0.4 earlier, so maybe something like 0.45. One thing that you can also do is if you press F 11, so you can see your old render. If you press J, so by pressing J, we can switch slots. So I'll press J and press F 12 to create a new render. Basically, what this will do is this way, I can compare the two different renders. One of them was the older one and this one is the newer one. So if you press J now, you can kind of see we can switch between the two and see which one fits better. So this one has the lighter rich color and while this one has darker. So I think keeping it a bit light looks nice, so I will be going with this only. So let's just sit save now. And with this, we are basically done with the door material as well. And in the next lecture, we will start by texturing our pillars. And then we can just start placing them around. And, yeah. So thank you for watching. I will see you in the next one. 14. Texturing the Pillars: Hello, and welcome, guys. So let's continue adding more materials. And in this lecture, we'll be wrapping up with adding the materials, so we will be texturing pillars, which are going to be fairly easy. Once again, we just need two materials. One is for the base pillar, and the other one is for the bold material. So let's just select this first pillar, and I will be once again just selecting the door material only. And make sure to click on this five icon and rename this two pillar. Next, we can maybe select this one as well and give it the pillar material so that this complete pillar has the same material. Now, I do want to change, like, a couple of things for this material. Okay, so the first thing that I'm going to change is the outlines or like these edges that we get are a bit too bright for the pillars, so I will just turn them down like this, so you can change it from the B input of the mixed color and maybe set it to something like 0.8 somewhere around that, so that it is not as bright. And the next thing that I want to do is I want to mix in a bit of ambient occlusion with the pillars to make them look a little bit more darker. So first, just select this and select all of the pillars. So just select it like this and make sure you only select the pillars and nothing extra. Now when you've selected all of the pillars, make sure to select the pillar that has the material at last, so hold shift and select it once again so that it is like the active selection. Then you can press Control L and select link materials. And now you will see the pillar material has been copied to all of them. All right. So what I want to do is I want to add a bit of ambient eclusion as I said, so press Shift A and search for ambient eclusion and just add it. And now, basically we can just press Shift A and search for another mixed color node because we want to mix our bold material with the new ambient dclusion. So the amide iglusion will go into the factor and it will go in the base color, and this one will go in the A or the B input. Let's see where. Change the color of this. Okay, so we need to plug in this result into the B. Now when we change around the A, you will see around the shadows, we get the ambient seclusion that we can control. So make sure you set up this correctly. And now if we set the A color to something like black, you can see how we have kind of highlighted or accentuated the shadows to make it look like really dark and dramatic. If I turn this mixed node off, you can select any node and just press to turn them off like this. You can see the effect, adding this ambienteclusion node adds. So it is a really nice bit of addition to our material. Obviously, we won't be going that harsh with it. We can go somewhere around, I think 0.35 or 0.4, that would be a nice bit of effect. So yeah, as you can see, keeping it like this looks a little bit bland, so adding the shadows makes a lot of difference. Another thing is you can also play around with the distance of the emit ilusion how much you want to control it. You can see if you set it to a really low number, you can control it as well to how much you want to add the shadows. But we'll be going with something like one only. And with this our basic setup of the pillar material is done. So next what we want to go for is we want to add a gold material. Select this so that we can add some highlights to our pillar because right now, giving it just one material looks a little bit weird. So select any of the pillars and just go over here in the material properties and click on This plus icon, and you can click on either we can just click on New or we can maybe once again select the pillar material only and click on here on this 26 so that it becomes a separate material and rename this to gold. First let's just quickly increase the metallic to 0.8 0.85 and change the color for it. To something random for now because we just want to see the effect, you will notice that the material is not really being added anywhere because the pillar material is on top of it, so we need to assign the gold material, specifically where we want to add it. So how we can do that. Let's say if I select this press tab to go into the Edit mode, and let's see. Let's say we want to add the gold material around this loop. So hold on, select it and make sure you are selecting the gold material. And while in the edit mode, just select this loop and hit assign. You will see as soon as you do that, now the gold material is being assigned over just this area. So we need to select the areas where we want to add the gold material. So now, obviously, we need to play around with the color. Yeah, I think something like this feels pretty good. I can maybe decrease the roughness to 0.4. And I will also just reduce the radius from over here to something like 0.3 or 0.4, I think, so that we don't get that much of all those edges. And for the ambient illusion, maybe we can make it a bit darker than the pillars for this gold material. I now what we want to do is before we proceed, let's just select all of the pillars once again and select the pillar that has the gold material at last, hit Control L and link materials so that we can just copy the gold material to all of them. So that way we can easily add it. All right. So let's start. We just want to cover some of the areas and give them the gold material so that we can create a bit of, like, coin of highlights and just a bit of breakup in the material. You will see this one has the mirror modifier, so the gold material is automatically copied on the bottom part. So yeah, let's just start, press tab and we can select maybe just random loop somewhere around here. Then maybe this part here, maybe I'll select this as well, and then you can just go to the bold material and hit assign. And you can see just by adding this the material or the pillar, looks a lot better. Let's do it for the other pillars as well. I'll move here, press tab and select. This parts a whole lot, select it completely and make sure to select these loops as well. Let's select this bottom loop and then hit assign on the bold material. Yeah you can see it looks pretty good. Let's select this and maybe hold Shiftent and select these two loops as well. Hit assign, maybe this one as well. And I'm just randomly selecting the areas which would look good. I don't think I want to add it completely over here. So again, select this one, once again, this one, and select the pillar material, hit assign so that it only gets added to the bottom blue. And yeah, that's good. Maybe I'll select this part as well and somewhere around here and it assign. Yeah, that's nice. Let's move on to this one. Hold on, select this one, and let's select one loop over here. This one, one at the bottom, select the gold material, hit a sign. And that's looking pretty nice. Let's see. For this one, I don't know. Maybe I'll select the top part and sign the gold material around the edges. Maybe somewhere around here as well. And a little bit around here. A solid. Over here, this one needs to get completely the gold material, so you can just select the pillar and remove it by clicking on by clicking on this minus cycle so that it only gets the gold material because we don't really need the pillar material on that. So yeah, that's fine. And for this pillar, press tab and you can just hover over the faces and press L to select this completely and press L over here as well. Select the gold, hit a sign. And let's see where else maybe over here as well. Hit a sign. I'll add it over these two edges as well. Shift enaht hit a And, yeah, that's pretty good. And yeah, I think with this, our pillars are also ready. I think they look really nice with the gold material added. You can play around with, like, settings, like changing around the metallic or changing the roughness, changing the colors. You can do all sorts of things. But yeah, from my side, I think it is looking really nice. And with this, the materials are basically done. So let's just hit Save. And what we will do is in the next video, we will start placing these pillars around to actually set up the environment a little bit. So yeah, thank you for watching. I will see you in the next one. 15. Placing the Pillars: Hello, and welcome, guys. So now that we are done with all the modeling and adding the materials to our environment, let's just start placing around the pillars to actually, set up our scene. So obviously, one way is to just, like, select the pillars, and then we can place them around like this, then duplicate them. But I think it is a bit more tedious, and it would take up, a lot of memory, like, duplicating all of these pillars again and again. And it might slow down our scene a lot. So the best way to handle this type of thing is that we can just add collection instances. So now, as you know that we have added every single pillar into a different collection, there was a reason for that so that we can just, you know, press shift go over here in collection instance, and now we can select any of the collection instance. Let's say we select pillar one. It is added over here. The best part about adding objects like this is by using a collection instance, it does not really take any kind of memory or anything, and it is really fast. So blender will stay pretty snappy. And you can add all of these collection instances easily. Another thing if you make any of the edit to the main object, you will see it will be updated in the instances as well. All right. So let's undo this and the first problem that we have to tackle is whenever we add a collection instance, let's say, if I add pillar four, it is being added over here, it is being added over here and the origin point is far off. The reason for that is because the actual, uh, like the real collection is placed right over here. So there is a very simple fix for this. If you just select them all and press slash to go into the local mode. And basically, what you have to do is you just need to place all of the pillars close to the origin point, so close to the world origin. So let's turn all of them off and enable Pillar one, select it, and just move it roughly close to the origin point like this. You don't have to be accurate with this. You can just place it around this way. Now disable it, Enable Pillar two, select this and place it right about here at the world origin, and do it for all of them. The last, that is the pillar five, we aren't really going to use it as a collection instance. I don't think we will be duplicating it a lot. I'll just place it over here with the rest of them. And we can start by placing this one first because as I said, I won't be duplicating this one, so we can just directly use the real collection only for this one. I will place it right about here. Like this. Like just behind my door to create two of these, nice, fancy looking pillars. You can select this press tab, press A to select everything, shift plus D, press Z, and bring this down to duplicate it. And now we have this type of pillar. I'll select this and go into the mirror modifier. And select the mirror object as this part and duplicate it right over here. You can select these two leaf objects as well, press Control J to join them together, and once again, add in a mirror modifier and select the mirror object as this. And now we have, these two pillars right beside our door, and I think the addition of them looks pretty good. I won't be really duplicating them around in the scene. That's why I didn't really like, create a collection instance of them. And now, as far as the rest of the pillars are concerned, if you press Shift A now and let's say I add a pillar one, you will see it is being added exactly where the three D cursor is present. And it is not being added far away from the three D cursor, so that fixes a lot of problems. We can easily add all of the instances right at the three D cursor only. If I use my shift and right click to place the three D cursor over here, if I press Shift A and let's say pillar three, you can see it will be added right at the three D cursor. And the reason for that is why it is happening now is because I have placed all of the pillars at the world origin. So just to clear it up really quickly, if you enable Pillar two, let's say, right now, as you can see, it is at the world origin. So whenever you press Shift A and add a collection instance of Pillar two, it will always be added at the three D cursor. But if I undo it right now and I move it right over here, now if you press shift and add a collection instance of pillar two, you can see that this time the collection instance would be added at a offset. So this offset is equal to the distance between the world origin and over here. So yeah, that's why it is necessary to place them at the world origin, so that they always get added at the three D cursor and we don't get like this offset because it will create problems when we are trying to rotate it around or try to scale it up. So I think it is best to place all of the pillars at the world origin so that we can add them easily like this. Now you can see how easy it is. All right. So Enable everything back on and disable the pillar two, obviously, and enable the door, as well. And yeah, press zero for the camera view. Use your shift and right click and let's bring the three D cosa somewhere around here, and we can press Shift A and just start by adding in the pillar one. Now, let's see how we are going to place the lids. Let's just place it close to the camera like this, scale it up just a bit. And right now, I'm just roughly placing them around. I haven't really thought of an exact layout. You guys can also maybe just open up the game and look at the loading screen and find any of the setting of the pillars that you find good looking or visually appealing, and you can kind of follow that. I think I will be just trying to P it like a random layout right now, and then we can kind of polish it up later on. So press Shift A and let's just randomly add the pillars here and there. This one I won't be using over here. This one will be at the background. So let's delete this one, press Shift A, and add collection instance of pillar three. Let's see. Let's place this one over here, scale it up a bit. Also, make sure to enable Pillar five because these two are the ones that we are just going to add over here only, so we don't need to do too much for them. Maybe I'll select them and move them inwards just a little bit. Yeah. Let's press Shift A and add in the pillar four. Yeah, let's place it over here. Select this press shift plus D to duplicate it and let's move it far back. And we obviously have to create a layering of these pillars. Like, we need to put them all at varying depths so that whenever we later on add the fog or the clouds, we kind of get a depth effect where the far away pillars are kind of fading into the fog. So that's why we can't really place them all at a single line only. We just need to place them at varying depths like this. So let's just select this and try to place them around. I'll move this one right over here, scale it up and move it a little far back. I'll select this PresifPlusD and just increase the size of it. Yeah, that's good. Let's select this one presi plus D and press it somewhere around here. So I'm just trying to kind of fill out the blank spaces that we have in our environment and try to create a bit of layering effect with them. Let's move this one as well over here. You can see automatically they are all put at at random, distances from the camera, so that will create a nice effect when we later on add the fog and the clouds. Currently, it does not look like that great because obviously we don't have proper compositing, proper effects or like the clouds or the fog. That's why it's looking pretty bad. But don't worry. We will be fixing all of this up in the upcoming lectures, but right now, let's just focus on placing around the pillars. You don't have to worry if some of your pillars are just kind of flying around in the air. Don't worry about that. Because we can kind of hide it up with adding the fog and the clouds. So yeah, don't worry about that. Is place this one a little bit like this. This one over here. Let's silt this. I'll select this one, duplicate it and place it right over here in the corner like this. Duplicate it one more time, and it somewhere around here. Let's select this one, and again, I'll place it somewhere a little bit far back. Obviously, you don't have to follow me exactly for this. You can create your own setup of the pillars, how you want to do that. That's totally up to you. I don't need this one, I don't think that one is good. Let's select these two and move them a bit inwards like this, select this one and this one, move it over here. Maybe, let's duplicate this and place this one at the bottom. And I think this match is pretty good for now because we can't really place them all around properly without kind of having a bit of fog so that we can actually see the fog and effect. So yeah, for now, I think this much is pretty good. Let's just hit save. And in the next lecture, we will be adding a bit of fog and compositing to actually make our scene a little bit better. So yeah, thank you for watching. I will see you in the next one. 16. Adding Fog and Compositing: Hello, and welcome guys. So in this lecture, we will be adding a bit of fog and doing some compositing in our scene to make it look better, because as you can see, right now, it looks like really washed out. The colors don't really look that good. So yeah, we'll be adding a bit of fog and then doing some compositing. So to add a fog, we will be using a volume node in the shaded tab. So to do that, presshift A, and let's just add in a cube. So good mesh, add in a cube. And now we need to scale this cube up a lot because what we want to do is we want to totally enclose our scene within this cube. So that the volume or the fog is added, like over all scene. So that's why we have to do this. Press seven, and let's just press to scale it up and enclose it like this. You will notice that the scene has kind of disappeared, and that is because the cube is really big. That's why the camera cannot really, like view it properly. So go under this view tab, so press N and select this view tab, and the end part that we have over here, just increase it to like one more zero. So it is 1,000 meters, so just set this to 10,000 meters. Yeah, as soon as you do that, you can see, we can view the cube now. Which is actually pretty huge. It is bigger than our entire seam. So that's why the clip start and clay and is important. If this was at a low number, we won't be able to see our scene. So I'll just make sure to increase this, and let's press one. Let's come over to the normal mode. We don't really want to see everything. Let's just decrease the size like this. Yeah, I think this is fine for now. Let's just go back into the rendered view more, press zero, and this is what we get. Obviously, it is totally dark because no light can pass through the cube, so that's why it is completely dark. So select the cube. Let's rename this to something like volume. And now click on the new material and we can rename this to something like Fog. Select the principle SDF, and you can delete it, press Shift and search for a principled volume this time. And now plug the node into the volume node right over here. Make sure to not plug it into the surface node, but in the volume one. So now that we have plugged in, nothing really happens right now because the density is too high. So just start decreasing the density slowly, and when we reach around this 0.01 mark, we get something like this, which is a little bit too much of a fog. So we still need to decrease it. So let's go with something like 0.005 per now. And now you can just select the volume object that is our Q, press G then z and just move it down so that we don't get it over our entire scene, we obviously want it just about till here, I guess. Yeah, I think this is pretty good. So yeah, as you can see, we have added a lot of fog in our scene, and that helps us to hide like this. Bottom part of the HDRI, which we don't really want to see. We kind of want to make it look as if we are on the top of clouds or something. So right now, the fog that we have looks like really dirty, does not really look like heavenly clouds type of thing. So we need to fix that. And for that, we need to increase something like the emission strength. But you can see we cannot really increase it too much because even a little value will make it totally like completely white. So we need to set it to a really low number, something like 0.001 for now. And as you can see, that improves the look of our fog a little bit, so let's increase it a bit more 0.0 025. And now the clouds look pretty good. Let's change the color to maybe something like this for now. All right. So now we have a pretty basic looking fog, but it works. To make it look a little bit better, let's shift A and search for a noise texture. Make sure to select your Q, press Control A, and apply the scale for it, press tab, press A to select everything, and just press U and give it a Q projection, UV and wrap so that now we can plug in our noise texture into the color channel, and nothing might really happen right away. But if you press Shift A and add in a color ramp node in between, let's say we increase the scale of this a lot and now try to do something like this. Sorry, make them both meet at the center like this. You can see we get, like, a lot of noise in our like fog now. It does not really look like really uniform. If I just disconnect it. You can see it is pretty much entirely uniform right now. Everything is the same. But if we plug the noise texture into the color channel, we start to get like a lot of variation in our fog. Maybe it is not really visible that way, so I can just quickly show it like this. Let's just disconnect it right now. Press F 12 to give a quick render to our scene, and let's just wait for the render to finish. And then we can simply use the trick that I showed earlier. We can press J to switch the slot of our render. So this is the first render that we have, and now you can press J to switch the slot. And then connect this now and now press F 12 so that we can get two different slots of renders like this. And when this render is finished, we can compare the difference between the two. Let's wait for it to finish. And yeah, now the render is finished. So if you press J now to compare between the two, you can see that we get, like, a lot of variation in our fog now, and it is not really totally flat or uniform. So this gives it a lot more look like the actual fog, and this is looking pretty weird. So yeah, we will be going with something like this. So you can play around with this scale to see how much of the noise you want. If you decrease the scale, the size of the noise will increase making it look like a little bit less flaky or more flaky with how you adjust the scale of your noise. As you can see if you set it close to zero or one, we don't really get any kind of, like, noise at it. But as we keep on increasing it, the size of the texture decreases. So that's why we get a lot more noise particles. If we increase the number over here a lot. We can go with somewhere around 35 40. I think that's fine. But now what we actually want to do is if you press F 11 to view your render, this is how the render currently looks right now. It looks pretty good. It's starting to come along, but I don't think that this washed out look is what I'm liking. The colors and everything don't really look nice. Nothing is really popping in our scene. For that, we need to do a little bit of compositing in our scene to actually make it look good. So let's switch over to the compositing tag. And for this enable use nodes first. And what I will do is, you can go over here in the corner and this way, you can split the screens up. If you split it up like this, we have two different three D windows. We can switch this one to something like the image editor, go over here and select the render result. So the reason I'm doing that is so that whenever we add any node over here, let's just press end to collapse so ya we can properly see the nodes. Basically now whatever change I make over here in the nodes, we can totally see it update in the render in real time. I will also just collapse these two and these two as well so that we get a little bit more area to work with. All right, guys. So now let me just show you just by adding a couple of nodes, we can make our render look a whole lot better. So press Shift A and search for something like a color balance node. So let's add the color balance node and just plug this over here in between this and this. So if you change around the lift gamma again, you will see it is updating right over here in real time in our render. But we don't want to do that. We just want to go over this lift section and just decrease the lift. And you will see as you decrease that, that white washed out look that we were having in our seam kind of goes away as well. And the colors start to look like really a whole lot better in comparison to the earlier parts. Sure, like some of the areas like the bridge or the fog is looking a little bit worse, but we can definitely improve on that. So now we can just select the color balance node and press M to mute it. So by muting it, basically, you can see the older render that we have, and this is the new one. So you can see earlier the look was really washed out and everything was looking like really white. But now the colors are starting to look really good. You might want to fix up the bridge a little bit and the fog, but don't worry, we can definitely work on that. Now the render is starting to look pretty good. A couple of more things before we do that, press Shift and search for something like a hue saturation value. Plug this in over here, and now we can vase the saturation to make the colors. Even better. Increasing the saturation will make it look a little bit more stylized, so we should definitely be doing that. You can select both of them and now press M. You just kind of see the effect that it adds. So before we proceed, let's just fix up the bridge a little bit, and this gold color over here also is looking a bit too saturated, so we can just go into our layout tab once again. And there is a nice little feature as well that you can enable the compositing in the viewboard as well. So you go over here and just select the compositor. It is currently set to disable. So you can set this to camera so that you can see that in your camera view, and you can also set it to always. So basically, while it is disabled, we cannot really see it. If we set it to camera, we can see it in the camera but not in the viewpoard and if we set it to always, we can basically see it at all times. So we can set it to camera maybe. So press zero and select the bridge and basically just go over here. I think over here, yeah, in this B input and just increase the brightness. So that the bridge is, like, not ready. This dark. We want something like this. I think this looks a lot better. So I'll just do that. With this, we can come back to our compositing. And now you can just press J and then press F 12 to give it like a quick render so that we can again see the difference between the two. All right, guys. So the render is done now. Let's close this. And now if you go over here, press J, you can kind of see the difference we have in our bridge. This is looking like really dark. This looks pretty good and fits well with our scene. So yeah, we will be going with this. Let's add some more nodes to make it look even better. Press shifty and search for a bloom node, or I think it is called the glaer search for the glaer node and add it over here, and we can set it to something like Bloom. Now we just need to adjust the values to add the bloom effect into our render. So bloom effect is basically wherever we have the areas that are being affected by light like over here, over here. If you disable it, you can see it is affecting these parts. We need to make this effect a bit more pronounced. So just decrease the threshold. And you will see as you slowly decrease the threshold. Sorry, I decreased it a bit too much. Basically, more and more areas would be affected by the bloom. So if you keep on decreasing it, everything is totally bright, but we don't want it that much. I think we can go with something like 0.6. And you can see with this added a lot more of the areas are kind of popping and showing that light reflection really nicely. So yeah, that looks pretty good. We can now come back to a layout tab, and I just want to edit out the fog a little bit because the fog is starting to look really dark. So just select your cue, so the volume object. And the way we can fix this is go into the color ramp over here and decrease the black parts and increase the white ones. And you can see as you slowly increase the white part, now the fog is very glowing. So not that much. Decrease it a little bit once again and increase the black part. So this is kind of like you have to fine tune it a lot, adjust the scaling. To find the perfect to find the perfect scale for the noise texture. Yeah, I'm just trying to adjust it to get a good combo. Let's decrease the white a little bit. Yeah, I think this feels a little bit better. So you can again, come back to compositing, just select it press J, and give it another render, so press F 12, so you can render it again. And basically, this will help to kind of, like, work it out your render by comparing it with the old one and just making it better. So let's wait for the render to finish. And you can see earlier the fog was really dark, but we have adjusted it a bit and make it look like this glowing effect. So I think it looks pretty good. And now you can see that we are kind of starting to get a little bit of that layering effect with our pillars. Obviously, not that much. We need to, like, adjust it a little bit on our own. But we'll do that. Close this and fix up a couple more things. You can press Shifte and search for something like a filter. And we can select the box sharpen and plug this in over here. Basically, it will sharpen all the edges. Obviously, we don't want it that much, set it to something like 0.1. This will faintly sharpen our edges, as you can see. It's not that visible, but it does add a nice bit of effect to our environment. And now if you select all of the nodes that we have added right now and just press to turn them off, you can see just by adding all of these composing nodes, we have created like a whole lot of difference in our random. So let's come back to layout Hit say first, and now I'm just going to select my sun, select the sun, and I will just change around the color of the sunlight a little bit. So I want to make it just a tad bit yellowish so that we do not get like this bluish kind of effect. Instead, we get just a little bit yellow to our environment. Not that much just a little bit. So make sure to degrease the saturation, and I will next increase the strength of the sunlight to something like 2.5. You might need to accordingly adjust the rest of the things as well. So we can come back to compositing. Press J, once again, hit F 12 and wait for the render to finish. All right, guys. So the render is done now. Let's close this and you can see now the bloom effect is a bit too much. So come down over here and increase this threshold, maybe to something like 0.75 0.76. And now if you just go over here, press J, switch between the two. Earlier, it was looking really blue, but now we get a bit more yellow in our environment, and I think that looks pretty good. Obviously, if you like the earlier one better, you can totally go with that, but I will be going with something like this instead. And also, now the fog is looking a little bit weird and, like, really dark because we decrease the threshold of our bloom, now the fog is again, back to a little bit darker. So you can come back to layout and just select the volume object and we can increase the emission strength from over here. So maybe go with something like 0.0 027. 0.003. I think it is a bit too much now, so maybe we can go somewhere around 0.0 028. And now just play around with the scale a bit. And now I feel like we have got ourselves the perfect looking fog and everything, and the compositing is really starting to take shape. Let's just give it one final render. So Press J and render it instead over here. All right, guys, the render is done now, you can press J and compare it with the older one and we can see the fog is really bland and really dark over here. But we fix it up by increasing the emission and adjusting the noise pattern. And we also get the really nice noise effect within our fog. All right. So next what we have to do is we basically need to place around the location of the pillars a little bit better to get that even better layering effect with the fog. And yeah, after that, we can start to add the clouds and a couple more things. So yeah, I think this much is pretty good for this lecture. I will see you in the next one. Thank you watching. 17. Finalizing the Layout: Hello, A, welcome, guys. So let's just continue working on our environment. And in this lecture, we will be adding, like, a couple more pillars here and there just to finalize the layout of the scene. But before that, what I want you to do is you might notice that when you just try to select any of the pillars, you cannot, click on them directly. They won't really be selected easily. And the reason for that is because we have, like, this huge cube like this fog cube which totally encapsulates are seen. So it kind of makes harder for us to select some of the objects because whenever we click on it, this cube gets selected instead of the pillar. So we have to click like two or three times. To avoid this from happening, you just select the cube, select the four cube, go in the object data properties, and under the visibility section, you can just turn off selectable. So when you turn it off, you won't be able to select it in the viewboard. So yeah, that makes it easier for us to select the pillars now. You can see now I can just easily click on them and select them at single click only. If you want to adjust some of the things off the cube, you can just select it from over here in the outliner, and then you can just play around with the material if you want to. But if you want to move it around, you have to enable selectb back again, and then you can just select and move it around. But yeah, for now, I think the position of it is fine. So I'll just disable selectable. And yeah, now we can start working on the pillars. Alright, so first thing that I will do is I will just select this pillar and move it far back. And the reason for that is I want it to be kind of submerged in the fog instead of staying in front of everything. So just increase the scale of it and move it back. And yeah, as you can see, now it feels like it is submerged in fog, so that looks better. This one, as well as you can see, this one looks pretty clean. We don't really see any fog on top of it, so just move it back so that it kind of gets faded away in the fog. This will help us to create a bit of layering in the sea, and I think that looks good. Select these two as well and move them back. Let's increase the scale a bit, move it down, maybe a bit ahead. Yeah, and this one can stay in the front. Like this. This one as well as you can see, we can kind of see this one flying around. Actually, that is not that big of an issue because we will be adding a lot of cloud planes as well, so that will mask it out easily. But yeah, just move it behind so that it kind of gets faded away in the fog. And this one can be a little bit in the front so that we can see it a bit more clearly. Yeah, move it down or something like this. I think over here as well, this one is, like, nicely faded in. So I'll just maybe select it, duplicate it, and just bring it out, like another one, a little bit in the front. That we can get something like this. Honestly, now I think everything looks a little bit much better as all of the pillars are kind of now faded in. Next, what I will do is, if you remember we haven't really used the pillar number two, so just enable it back and I will select it. I think some other objects are also selected. So make sure to only select the pillar two, sorry, the pillar two, select it and move it right over here. Let's increase the scale of For some reason it is flipped around, so just rotate it like this and move it back entirely at the back of the scene. Something like this. Place it somewhere around here. Now just increase the scale of it a bit to make it feel really massive. I think this is fine. What I will do is, let's just select, press the dot key on my number pad to focus on the object, and I will just join all three of them. So we cannot really just join them directly because they have modifiers which will get messed up. So to join them easily, you need to apply all the modifiers first. So just select all of the objects, and then you can press F three and search for Convert to mesh. Basically, the Convert to mesh option will apply all of the modifiers automatically. There is another way to do it. You can just select each and every single one of the object. Go over here and hit Apply like this one by one. But this is a really tedious process. So the best way is to just select it all press F three and search for Convert to mesh. And this will directly apply all of the modifiers, as you can see. So now we can just select them all press Control J. To join them together. And now we don't even really need this empty object because earlier we had multiple objects, so that's why we needed an empty object to parent them together. But now we don't need it, so you can you cannot directly delete it because that will mess up the transformations. So a better way to do it is just select both of them like this, right click and go to parent. And you will see two options over here. So one is clear parent. We don't want to select this because again, it will mess up the transformation. So select clear and keep transformation. Select this and now you can select the parent and just delete it easily. All right, so now we have our pillar with us. And what I will do is I will add array modifier to it and we can adjust the array modifier, something like this. Now just increase the array count entirely to kind of make something of this sort where we have a lot of these pillars far behind in our scene to give it a really sense of massive scale. Yeah, I think this looks pretty good. A I'm just trying to find the best possible position for all of them. Yeah, I think this looks pretty good. And the last thing that I will do is, let's press seven for top view, press Shift, add in a cube, place it over here. Scale it up obviously to match with the size of the pillars. You just scale it up like this to go on top of the pillars. Let's just make it look a little bit better. By the scale for it and we can maybe press control at edge up bright over here. Hold out and select this lube press alt and extrude faces along normals. Add a Bevil modified to it, as well. Make sure to apply the scale. I don't know if if the scene looks better with that added or with it removed. Let's just keep it like this for now and we can remove it later on if you don't like it. We can select the pillar and give it the pillar material only. Okay, let's just go ahead with this and we can render it out and see if you like it or not. Couple more things, I will select this gold material and go here and just decrease the saturation because it is a bit too much. Yeah, that's better, I think. Because we are adding a lot of saturation later on as well in the compositing. So it is best to keep it a little bit low over here. And now I think I'm pretty happy with how the pillars and everything is looking. So let's just press F 11 to view the render and press F 12 to give it a quick one so that we can see. All right, guys. So the render is done now, and I think, yeah, it's looking pretty good. I'm still a bit skeptical about the thing that we have added over here on top of the pillars. I'll just remove it and give it a quick render once again to see which one we like better. So just select it and you can go over here and disable this icon. So this will disable it in renders. So just disable from over here, press F 11, and press J and press F 12 to give it a quick one. All right, guys. So once again, the render is done. Now you can just press J to compare honestly, I think with this added, it looks a bit better, I guess, because it kind of gives the grand look to the environment. So I'm just going to go ahead with this only. So yeah, just enable it back on. And now, if you want, you can add a couple more things here and there, like some of the pillars. If you want to fill out the scene a bit better. But that's totally up to you. Yeah, I'll add this one over here. Maybe we can add one over here as well. Just make sure to move them all at varying depths so that you can create a bit of that layering effect with the fog. Otherwise, it will start to look like really weird if they are all really close to each other. We want to have that fading away of the fog effect that we get. So I'll move it again pretty far. Yeah, I think that's fine. It can be like that. Make sure to add some objects right at the corner to give it like kind of a feel that the scene is going to be extended. And with this, I'm happy with how all of the pillars and everything has turned out. So with this, we can finally finish up with this part, like adding all of the pillars and everything. And the next thing that we can focus on is like adding all of the cloud planes and things like that. So I will delete this one, hit save and press F 11, and let's just give it a quick last render so that we can actually see how it looks. And then we'll finish up with this lecture. What we will be doing from the next lecture onwards is first, we will be adding all the cloud planes that I'm talking about. And then after that, we'll try to create various different variations of this scene. So yeah, now you can press J and kind of compare. And yeah, we have added, like, a couple of pillars here and there. But with this final scene, I think it's starting to look really nice. So let's just hit Save and yeah, this is it for this lecture. Thank you guys for watching. I will see you in the next one. 18. Adding Clouds: Hello, and welcome, guys. So let's continue working on our environment. And in this lecture, we will be adding clouds, fog, and changing of the background to kind of finalize the environment. And then after that, we can start working some variations for our scene. So if you will go over in the reference images folder now, you will find this cloud and this fog image that we can use as textures in our environment. And also, I have added, like, a couple of different cloud backgrounds. These are not HDRIs, but basically just flat images that we can use in different scenarios for our scene. So I'll just show you how obviously, HDRI is like a completely three D image. So if I just switch over to the world shade type right now and if I just try to, like, rotate it around you can see we can kind of rotate it completely because it is a three D image. But we won't be able to use these ones like that, but instead, we can just directly use them like this. So let's just undo this one. So I'll set this back to 40. And now what you can do is you can just press Shift A and go to image and add as a mesh plane because we need a mesh plane. So add that and you can just go here. And in this folder, let's just select maybe let's select this one. So the daytime one, I'll select this, and you can see it is added like this. So we'll basically just scale it up and move it behind the pillars in our scene. And this way, we can use it as a flat background. If you just want to use the HDRI only, it is totally fine. It's up to you how you want to do that. But I will be using this background because I think it looks a lot better, and it gives that stylized or anime kind of vibe that we want. So the first problem is that we cannot really see the background, and that is because it is really far off, so the camera is not really set for that far distance. So select your camera. And if you remember, we changed that thing in the end over here, like we said it to 10,000 meters, the clip and, we need to change it over here as well in our real camera. So press zero. To camera view and just set the end to 10,000. And then you will able to see your background that is added, really far away. So let's scale it up and we get something like this. Obviously, it does not look that good right now because it is very saturated and all. So let's just select it and we can go to object. And I'll just delete everything from over here. Sorry, not this. Just delete the principle BSDF, press Shift A and search for emission node, and now plug the color into the color channel and plug the emission into surface. We get something like this, and now we can kind of control the emission of the image. But the main issue right now is that it does not suit very well with our scene because of the colors. So press shift A and search for a huge saturation node and put it right over here. Now, we want to decrease the saturation a lot to kind of fit with our scene properly. So I think somewhere around you can see 0.6 looks really nice. One was, like, really crazy saturated, so it does not look good. But yeah, somewhere around I think 0.6 would be good. So we can go with 0.6. Maybe if you want, you can decrease the value as well a little bit. And yeah, now you can see we get our very nice looking background, and you might notice that if you just turn it on and off, I think it suits really well with our scene, it goes well with the colors as well. Yeah, I think it looks pretty good. You can control the emission from over here if you want to make the clouds look a little bit glowy. So we can set this to maybe 1.1. But I think that's too much. 1.05 would be fine, I think. You can play around with these values however you want, and maybe I'll set this to 0.55. If you change the hue around, you will change the overall color of the image. We don't want that. We just want that blue color only. So we'll adjust the saturation and value. And with this, we have a pretty nice looking background. Let's press F 12 to give it a quick render and see how it looks. All right, guys, the render is done now, and I think I'm pretty happy with how it has turned out. It's really starting to look nice. All right. So let's just close this now. Next thing is, you might have noticed that I have had a lot of images, so you can just select this one, press Shift plus D and click on here and let's select something else like daytime one. And now plug this into the color, and now we get a totally different vibe and mood for our scene. So just by changing a couple of these backgrounds, we can get a totally different scene. You might have to adjust some of the values like maybe the emission or the value or saturation here and there for different images. So what you can do is you can select this, duplicate this by pressing Shift plus D and plug this one over here and now plug this in over here. And now you can adjust the values according to this one. This way you don't have to do it each and every time. As you can see, we have this as well. Now you can plug this one directly if you want to use this one or this one, whatever. I have one more, I think for the daytime. So it is the second, so daytime two. C plug this one as well. And see how it looks. Plug this indirectly over here. And, this one will give you a different type of vibe. So you can also search through Google to find different cloud backgrounds if you want to. But I have added, like, a lot of them for different types of scenarios. So yeah, let's just move ahead now. I will maybe plug in. The first one that we used, I think that one was fine. So I will be going ahead with this one only, and we can just start to now at the clouds. So press Shift and once again, add a mesh plane, and this time, go back and select this cloud right over here. You will get something like this. Let's scale it up a bit. And I do want to stretch it a little bit just like this as well. So we get something like this, but I don't want to use it like that. So just select your principle BSDF and delete it. We'll use the emission obviously to select the emission and plug this in over here, but we will be encountering one problem, which is that we get this black background as well. So we need to remove that somehow. So for that pressure, and this time, instead of adding a mixed color, add a mixed shader. So we'll be using a mixed shader, plug this in over here, and plug this in over here. For the factor, we will be using directly the image only because the image is a PNG image. So press shift a search for color am, and just plug this in over here and plug this into the factor. Press shifta and search for transparent PSDF and this will be our final thing. So plug the transparent over here like this. Okay, we just need to do the opposite, so the transparent will be going in the top one and the emission will be going in the bottom one. And now you can see we have easily created what we wanted. We can now simply just use the emission to control the power of the gluing, and we don't even get the black borders that we were earlier getting. One more thing that I will do is I will just take this white point in our color ramp and just push it back. So what this will do is it will give us a little bit of more color value. So earlier it is very much transparent. I don't want that. So I'll just push it back somewhere around 0.4 so that we get a bit more of the color details. And now it looks very nice. Obviously, it is still bit saturated for my taste, so press shift and again, add the hue saturation node and just push back on the saturation. We need to turn down the emission as well. I think I'm happy with this. Let's put it right over here. I'll decrease the saturation a bit more. A little bit of the value as well. I think the emission is fine over here. Don't want it to increase too much. This looks pretty good. Obviously, we can switch up these things later on as well. And now what we need to do is we basically need to just duplicate it again and again to kind of layer it with our environment like this. Now, make sure to first select it all on this thing. Just select all of your cloud images, press M and move them to a new collection and rename these two clouds. This way we can easily turn them on and off whenever we want to. Also, I'll select all of these instances, press M and move them to a new delection rename that two pillar instances. Kind of organize everything over here a little bit. This one can just go directly in the pillar instances only. And what do we have? This is the cloud plane, and this is the volume. Yeah. So yeah, these ones can stay like this. Now, open up your cloud collection and just select all of it, press Shift plus D and place it right over here as well. Make sure to increase or decrease the scale a little bit, rotate it around, so press R rotate it a little bit here and there. This way, we'll get a bit of variation as well with the clouds. Like we don't want everything to look the same. And we get something like this, maybe I'll just move it a little bit downwards. Turn off the volume for now because it does get a bit distracting. Now we have the clouds over here. Obviously, we don't have to, like, you know, duplicate them all over environment because that is just a bit too tedious. We'll try to place them around roughly wherever it is, like, visible in our scenes, maybe somewhere around here. Kind of difficult to select them properly. So maybe I can just select it from over here like this date place like this, one of them like this. This way we can just place them around, move them back a little bit to kind of create a bit of layering as well with them. Also, just make sure I forgot earlier, select them all and you can go over here under the object data properties in visibility. Make sure to disable shadow for them. We don't want them to cast any kind of shadows. If you disable shadow, you will notice that you only disable it for one of them, which is like the active selection, the rest of them will still have it. So select them all once again, hold Alt and just enable it back and now disable it. So holding Alt will do it for all of them, as you can see. So it is a nice little shortcut. You can hold At and just disable it for all of them at once. And now, if we just enable back our volume, obviously, the volume will be doing much of the heavy lifting. The clouds are just for kind of to increase the visual appeal, and they will be only really close to the camera. You don't want to put the clouds very far back over here. We just want them very close to the camera only because if it is very far back, only the fog would be right. And with this as well, I think it's starting to look nice. Maybe I'll move them up only a little bit. With this, I think the scene is starting to come along nicely. You can move a couple of them far back as well just a little bit, add them roughly here and there. Maybe we can move over to this one, which is like the material preview. I think it would be a bit faster and a little bit easier to see all of the shaders. All right, so this is how it looks right over here because it is using EV. That's why things are looking not that great, but it's okay. At least everything is properly visible. So yeah, we can just quickly place around a couple of clouds over here, over here. Maybe one over here like this, place one like this over here. Grab one and move it back and maybe we over here. And with this, I think it's looking right. We can move over to the rendered view and let's just quickly see how it looks. Obviously, we just have to give it like a render, so press F 11, and this one was the old one press J, and now we can press F 12 and wait for it to render and see how the scene has updated. Alright, guys. So the render is done now, and if you press Jane out to compare it, I think it looks pretty good. It does hide some of our stuff that we have added, so maybe we can move it a little bit up. But, yeah, I think overall, it looks pretty good. Maybe the bloom is a bit too high because everything is glowing a bit too much now, so we can turn so we can definitely tone down on that. But besides that, yeah, it's coming along nicely. Also, it helps us to fill out this empty space that we kind of have over here. And yeah, I think it looks pretty good. Right now, the edges of the clouds are like a bit too harsh, so we will be adding some fog alpha on top of it just to mesh it a little bit better with our overall seam. But yeah, now I think I'm happy with how this all is looking, and we are very close to, like, finishing it up. So we can move over to maybe the compositing tab, and let's just increase the threshold of this. And you can see as soon as you increase it a little bit, all the bloom has disappeared. Definitely, don't want to increase it that much. So it was earlier around 7.5, sorry, 0.75. So maybe I'll go with 0.8. Yeah, this definitely helps as now the areas are not that bright as they were earlier, and I think this looks a lot better. We can come back over here t's F 11. And yeah, now I think it looks a bit better as it does not like glow as much now. So you can adjust all of these things, and I'm really happy with how the scene is looking. So let's add that one final object. Alright, so now let's press Shift A, go to image and add in a mesh plane and select the fog image, and everything has gone black. And I know the reason for this. This problem might not happen for you, but it is happening because if you remember when we created this volume object, so let's just undo it right now. So we have this volume object, which is like basically all the fog in our scene. And the name of this material is fog as well. So when we press Shifte and add in the mesh plane, the name of this image is fog as well. So when we add it, the material clashes and they basically join those two material. That's why we get the fog image on top of our volume object that we created. So the simple and easy fix for this is, let's just undo it. We can select the volume and rename this from fog to maybe something else. So let's just rename the two volume material. Because this one has the principal volume. It is basically this material that is adding all the fog in our scene. But let's just not name it as fog material. Press It add a mesh plane and now select the fog JPG. A, you can see everything is fine now. So once again, we have to use the same setup to remove the black parts, select this and maybe just select all of the setup, press Control C, select this now, come over here. We can delete the principal SDF and taste. And now plug the shader in to surface and plug the color and the color over here. And now we get something like this. So first, let's just adjust the color ramp back to over here so that it does not really cause any issues. And now it really looks like four. The next is to just bring it right over here, just on top of our clouds. All right, so now this one issue that we face is that the fog is looking a little bit black. So the very simple fix for this is we don't really have to use any kind of color input this time in our emission, so we can hold control and just disconnect this over here and just remove the hue saturation node. We basically want to just use the shape of the fog and we can just control the overall emission like this because we just want this white wispy like structure, we don't want, like, a lot of details in it. So we can set it somewhere around, I think, 0.8. And this will give it like a nice what do we say? Easy way to blend in with the environment. We can just put it right over here and over here as well. I definitely decrease the emission to something like 0.84. Yeah, that's better. Let duplicated and maybe don't really see anything properly in this mode, so I'll just move back to this one. And yeah. Let's just first render it out and see if it even looks good, or we are just doing it all for nothing. Because even this way, I think the clouds look fine, but we can just give it a quick render to see how the fog looks and if we have to, like, work on something for it. All right. So the render is done now, guys. Let's press J to compare between the two. And yeah, I think the fog does add up to our scene. It helps it connect a little bit better with the clouds, but we haven't really, like, placed it around well enough. And what I will do is to make it feel a bit better. We can just select our clouds and just tone down on the saturation for them to something like maybe 0.25. Because right now, I think the clouds are a bit too bluish, so that's why the fog kind of, like, stands out on top of them. I'll just disable this volume thing so that you can look at the rest of the stuff a little bit better. Et's press F 11 and give it one more render. Okay, I forgot to enable back the volume on. Make sure to just close this and enable both of the board and the render display for your volume and hit F 12 once again. All right, guys, so the render is done now, and if we now compare it with the older one, and now I think it feels a lot better and connected with the overall scene. Maybe we can remove one or two of the fog items, but yeah, besides that, I think it looks pretty good because it gives it a little bit of connect with the environment. As you can see, the edges are really harsh over here, but this fog type of thing helps it to kind of blend in with the scene better. So yeah, I think I'm happy with how this is looking. Let's select this one and move it a little bit over here. I'll select this one and we just delete it not this, but fog one. Stilet this one. Saltage to bring everything back. Yeah, I think I'm happy with how the scene is looking. You can, like, fine tune the settings and play around with it a bit more. But I think I'll just wrap it up all now. Let's press F 11 and press F 12 to give it, one final bender, and then we can just start working on a little bit more variations. As I talked about, we will be creating a nighttime scene and a evening time scene as well for this. So let's just finish up with this daytime one. And yeah, now you can see the fog looks pretty good. You can press J and compare it and it basically helps our clouds to nicely connect with the scene. And I'm really happy with how everything is turning out. You can add it more around the behind areas as well in our scene if you want to. But yeah, I think this much is pretty good. We don't have to, like, go ahead and add clouds over here as well. That would look a bit too much and hide, all of the details as well. I think the clouds are fine staying in the front. Let's just close the render now. Hit Save. And yeah, thank you for watching. I will see you in the next one. 19. Scene Variations and Final Renders: Hello, and welcome, guys. So now that we are done with our main environment, let's create, like, a bunch of variations for it. But first, what I will do is you can just select your fog that we had right over here. So just select it. And what you can do is you can also change the color of the emission a little bit. So we have this blue cloud background, and we have some blue clouds over here as well. So we can just select the emission and maybe first increase the hue and saturation a bit. And we will see if we get this type of color and just turn the saturation around to find the blue color that you want. And this is a bit too much, but now you can just select it and tone down the saturation so that we get a little bit of a blue tint in our fog. As you can see, this is completely white, and you can just increase it just a little bit to have that very little blue tint in your fog. And yeah, I think this is pretty good. I'll just hit save, and now you can press Control Shift NS to basically create another variation of it and we can rename it to fantasy environment underscore evening. Alright, so now, as you can see, we are in the separate file, so we can make changes over here. And it is really simple. To create a separate variation, we just have to switch out a couple of colors, the cloud background, and we can change the HDRI, as well. Alright. So first, I will select these fog, all the fog items, press M and move them to a new collection, rename the two form. We can also move in this huge volume cube as well. So all of this is our fog. So yeah, we have created that all in the single collection. And this one ya this one is the Cloud background. First let's just turn it off, and the first thing that we will be doing is changing the GGRI because the HGRI also contributes to the light that is coming in the scene. So we can go into the world. And if you click over here and you can go in the HDRIs folder that I've added in the course files, and maybe we can select the evening one. So when you select the evening one, you can see we get a little bit of a different look and we get some different lighting in our scene. So the next step to do is you can enable back the cloud background, and we need to switch this out once again, so just select it. And now come back to object. So Object shader type. And over here, we have all these image textures. So you can just click on this and instead, you can select the evening one. And now we have switched out the like the cloud background as well, and now we just need to change the color of the clouds. So just select them first. Let's just select our clouds, select any one of them because all of them have the same material. So now as we need to change the color of the clouds, we need to play around with the hue saturation value. So all you need to do is first just decrease the hue to zero so that you get this yellow colored tint that we want in our clouds. And you can play around with the saturation a bit if you want to maybe you can increase it just a bit, something like this. Next step is to select your fog. And once again, just click on the emission color and change this hue value to make it like this orange or yellowish tint. I'll decrease the saturation a bit more to something like this. And the last thing to do is select your like the huge cube that we have like this huge volume cube. Obviously, it is like this white color. We can see in the background as well. So this time we'll just select this emission color over here in our volume material, and again, play around with the hue value. To get something like this. And you can see, we changed a couple of things here and there, and we have a totally different environment from the earlier one. We get a new variation of our environment in this evening time, and yeah, I think it looks pretty good. One last thing that I will show you is you can select your cloud background, and I will just kind of experimenting with things. And I found out right now, we have plugged this in into the emission channel. So this is the image, and then we have the huge saturation value node to control the colors of it. And then finally, we have the emission node to control this part, like how much we want the image to glow. But I kind of found out when we press Shift A and search for the principle BSDF which is the basic node that is added with every material. And instead of using the emissions, so let's delete the emission and plug this BSDF into the surface output and plug this into the color. For some reason, we get way better color results with this one, as you can see, if I once again add back in the emission and plug this in over here. So this is what we were getting the results with the emission node, and this is what we get with the principle DSDF. So yeah, I don't know the exact reason, but yeah, we do get a little bit better colors, and I think they look really good. So we won't be using the emission. So if you want to make your image glow a little bit, obviously, you can open up the emission tab in the principal DSDF as well and increase the emission from there if you want to. And you can also play around with this value right over here, this will also control kind of the emission only. It's similar to that, but I won't be using it that much. I'll just decrease it just a little bit, decrease the saturation as well, just a little bit. And we have something like this. I think I'm pretty happy with our new variation. I think it looks pretty good. So let's just hit Save and you can press F 12 to give it a quick render. Alright, guys. So the render is done now, yeah, I feel like this variation as well, looks really nice. It's totally different to the earlier one. This one has a different type of mood and ambience to it. So you can, notice how just by changing a couple of things like the background, the color of the clouds, we can totally change the look of the environment. And not only this, we can do, lots of other things as well, like let's say, if I select my son, and I change the angle of the lighting. You can see even by changing the angle of the lighting, you can get some really nice and different looks. Obviously, you have to fine tune some things a little bit. But yeah, there are a lot of different possibilities that you can do with this. Let's just hit Control process to save it, then hit Control Shift NS to create a newer variation, and this one will be the last one and rename this two fantasy environment underscore Night. So we will be creating a night variation as well. Alright, so once again, let's just start by switching out the cloud background that we have over here. So we can just select it. And what I will do is, let's just delete these older ones because they are not even related to the night variation. So I'll just delete them all. Let's keep this one only and click on here, and let's just select the night one JBG and we have the background in our scene. Let's switch out the rest of the things, and then we can kind of fine tune them later on. So let's start by selecting clouds and we can once again just increase the hue to make them kind of bluish once again. Let's decrease the saturation to kind of make them a little bit more like kind of white or unsaturated. I think something like this is fine. This, like setup would be kind of, like, closer to the first one only like the daytime variation, but we will be changing out a couple of things to make it look a little bit more like the nighttime. So next is the fog, so I will once again go with a little bit of bluish hue. Something like this. But just decrease the saturation once again because we don't want it too much. All right, so now we have this. So the final thing is to select your main volume, that is the main fog thing, and then just once again, play around with the emission color. Yeah, I think this is pretty good. All right. So now the thing is we have switched out all the things we have added the background as well, but it still looks like a daytime only. We do not really get the nighttime type of look. So the way we can fix this is we can go into our world tab. And this time, instead of switching out the HDRI, what I will do is I will just tone down the overall strength of the HDRI from this node. So we have this background node, and you can just decrease the strength, and you will see as you keep on decreasing it, the scene becomes darker and darker because it now does not really have the HDRI lighting in it. So you can set this to 0.1. And now you will notice that we get really harsh lighting, and that is what I want. So to make it look a little bit more like the nighttime, what we need to do is we need to select the sun and essentially, we will try to create some type of moonlight. So first, we need a little bit more light in our scene so to increase the strength. But now instead of going with this yellowish type of color, we will be going with like a bluish this type of color. I'll play around with the saturation or hue a little bit. But yeah, I think something like this looks pretty good. Obviously, we need to change around a lot of more things to make it look good because I don't think it looks that appealing right now. Let's comp over to the compositing tab and I'll just press F 12 and give it like a quick render so that I can see what all things we have to switch around. All right, guys. So now we have something like this. Overall, the scene is starting to look like a nighttime, but it still feels like that it's not really properly lit up. So let's do that. I'll close this now and we can go back to our layout. And first, let's start by selecting our sun, and I'll increase the strength a bit more. And now other thing that you can do is you can kind of add a bit of emission to your lights as well, making all of the areas glow where it hits. So you can click on this use node icon. And basically, if you go back to the object shader type, we now get this emission node connected with our light. So this is basically connected to our light, and we can increase or decrease the overall emission of the scene. So we can set something like 1.2, and we get something like this, although it is really blown out. But now we can just come back to compositing. Let's press F 11 first and press J, and again, press F 12 to give it a new render, and let's wait for it to see how it looks. All right, guys. So now you press J and you can kind of compare it between the two. So basically, we just need to go back to compositing, and now we need to just adjust this mixed value, and then we will start to get a little bit decent results. Yeah, I think this is pretty good. But I think we do need to decrease the overall strength of the sun. So I'll go with somewhere around 3.8 or 3.7. And now, if we look at our scene, yeah, I think it's starting to look nice. I'll select the volume that is the main fog of our scene, and it looks a little bit dark, so we can increase the emission strength from over here to 0.003 maybe 0.0 031. This will make the overall fog that is behind the scenes a little bit lit up, and then you can select the cloud background. And let's see how we can change this around. Maybe increase the value of bit, make it, as you can see, glow. I'll decrease the saturation as well just a little bit. I think with this, it is starting to look pretty good now. If I press F 11, and now just press F 12 to give it a quick render. Let's see how it looks, and we can just compare it with the older one. Okay, I think it is removed because sometimes when you undo your old render also gets undoed, so it's okay. We can just look at the new one only. Alright, so this is our new render. And although it is really bright, but it still looks like a nighttime scene, and I think now it looks pretty good. Maybe we can still tone down on the sun value just a little bit. Send this to 1.1. And I think 1.1 is pretty good. Yeah, I think these values feel a lot better. So let's just go ahead with that. Let's just hit Save, kind of happy and satisfied with how the scene looks. You can play around with the compositing values. We have already discussed them a couple of times. So yeah, you can play around with them. But I think I'm happy. Let's just hit Save. And one more thing that we will do with this scene is that we will also add like a moon PNG to add a bit more detail. So now just go into your reference images, and over here, you will find this moon dot JPG, so you can press Shift A and let's add a image mesh plane and just select the moon. And we need to create a similar setup that we had with the clouds. Select your clouds and we can just copy it copy and paste it right over here in the moon, hold control, and we can disconnect this, delete the principal BSDF and plug the mix shader in. And instead of this cloud, we will be plugging in the moon. All right, so now we have something like this. Although the saturation is pretty low, so you can increase it because we do want the bluish tint on our moon. We can also increase the emission a little bit so that the moon is glowing like that. Now just move it far back in your scene so that it does not really cast any type of shadows. It increases the scale I'll increase the value a little bit and the emission as well because I do want to make it a little bit glowing in our seam. Select it and move it way back. I increase the scale for it. I think we moved it a little bit too much far back, bring it out in front of your loud background and just bring it close to it. Select it and pin it down and this is pretty good. So let's just hit save, and if I press F 11, I'll just quickly give it a new render and finally we can compare the final renders. Alright guys. So the render is done now. I think the nighttime variation is also looking pretty good. I'm happy with it. Maybe we can do a couple more things here and there. I will select the clouds and increase the saturation for them just a little bit because they are feeling a bit too desaturated and kind of dead over here. And I will also increase the emission for them just to make them appear a little bit glowy because they do fall a bit flat. So yeah, I'm going to increase the emission for them a little bit and also increase their saturation. If you want, you can do the same for the fog as well. Just a little bit. I'll select the main volume and just increase the emission sprend by one point. And yeah, all these settings are totally based up to your preference. You can do them however you like. You might not like some of the things that I'm doing, so yeah, it's totally up to you how you want to play around with these settings. I'll just give it one last quick render to see how it looks. And yeah, I think then we can wrap up with the course. We'll do a bit of compositing in Photoshop. All right, guys. So now the render is done, you can press J, and we can see already the clouds are popping up a lot more in this new one. Over here, they look kind of flat, and now they feel pretty nice. So, yeah, I think increasing the emission on them was a pretty good idea. I think it looks pretty good now. And with this, I'm really happy with the final variation as well. So let's just sit safe. And what we will do now is we can press F 11, and we can just go to image and save our renders that we have created so that we can composite and edit them a bit more in Photoshop if we have to. But even as they are right now, they look pretty good. So maybe I'll create a new folder over here and rename these two renders. Wename the two. Let's just rename this tonight. Select it as JPG, set the quality to 100 and save. Let's save on environment or the blender file, and I will open up the second variation. And once again, just press F 12 and give it a quick render. All right, guys. So the render is done now, let's just go to Image, I save and do the same steps, save it as the evening. Finally, we can do it for the first one that we did. So now, once again, just hit F 12 and then we can wait for it to finish and then save it. Okay, so the render is done now, let's just hit Save and save it as daytime. And now we finally have our three different variations that we have created. I think all of them look pretty good. So now I will just open all three of our renders in Photoshop. All right, guys. So here are our three renders opened up in Photoshop, you can just press Control plus tab to kind of switch between all three of them and see how all three versions fare out. I think they all have their own charm and look really different from each other with the help of the different backgrounds and the lighting setups. So obviously, I don't know, much about Photoshop, but we can do a couple of things here and there to improve the overall vendor. You can go to image hit Autotone and this will help you kind of fix the tone of the environment. Sometimes it works, sometimes it does not. I don't think it really works for this one. What you can do is you can go to image adjustments, and in the level section, you can just play around with the sliders over here, and you will see if you push them in we kind of improve the image a little bit where the contrast of the image is a little bit better now. You can just enable and disable the preview to see how it has improved. If you adjust this one, it will increase the highlights. I usually just push this one in and basically, it will improve the contrast of the image. And we can work with this. Yeah, I think this is definitely upgrade over something like this. This feels washed out. So, we'll be going with this. Another thing you can do is another thing that you can do is obviously you can play around with all of those other settings like the brightness contrast, or maybe giving it some type of color tint using the color balance. As you can see, you can give it different moods by doing that. One other thing that I usually do is I will go into filter noise and also add a bit of this random noise into our scene. It makes it look a little bit more authentic and does not look like very fred renderish because right now it looks a bit too perfect this way. So you can add a very small amount of noise. As you can see if you add it too much, it looks weird. So we can definitely work with something like, which is under five, I think, somewhere around three or four. Let's go with three. And although it is really subtle, but it does add a bit of effect to your renders, if you just zoom it up over here. Earlier, it was something like this, totally clean, and now it's something like this with the added noise. So I think it definitely does a bit. Another thing that you can do is you can go into filter, sharpen and select sharpen more. And basically, this will sharpen out all your edges, but obviously, it looks a bit weird for this one because it is sharpening it a bit too much, so undo it and you can instead select something like the sharpen edges. Which is not really visible this way. But it is really subtle. It will sharpen out the edges a bit, as you can see, and make the details pop out a bit more. So you can definitely use something like that. And yeah, these are some of the settings that I use. I don't do much in Photoshop. We have already done a bunch of compositing in blender as well, and then we are doing a bit in Photoshop. So yeah, you can just play around with these things. Similarly over here as well, I will just play around with the levels. You can see increasing this level slider will improve the image a little bit, making it look better. So this was it earlier, and this is it now. And yeah, these were the couple of setting that I wanted to share with you guys. You can play around with the levels over here as well. Or we do something like the autotone or the auto color. It sometimes helps, but I don't think it is helping over here. So yeah, we'll go with this only. I think our final environment look pretty good. So yeah, with this, I'll just hit Save on these vendors, and we are basically done with the force guys. You can obviously do a lot of more things to experiment with the scene, add some of your own props, add more pillars or variations of pillars. You can use different cloud backgrounds, different types of cloud PNGs or playing around with different types of lighting scenarios. But yeah, I think it is pretty much done from my side. So yeah, thank you guys for watching. I will see you in the next.