Create Jawdropping Animations and Renders in Blender.

1. Create Jawdropping Animations and Renders in Blender.: Welcome to this class. My name is staffer Jasmine, and I'll be your instructor in this class. You're going to learn how to create a jaw dropping animations and renders inside Blender. The first few videos are called workflow, in which you will learn the multiple ways I use blender to my advantage, after years of learning and teaching blender. After you have completed the work for lessons, you will have the ability to pick and choose whatever you want to learn. So if animation number tree looks the most fascinating to you, that you're just jump right into that lesson and start to learn from there. There is no specific order in which you have to follow these lessons. In the first video of all these separate parts, you will see the skill, effort that is required and also what you will learn in upcoming videos. If you enjoyed this concept, then please follow me on Skillshare sent in your renders so I can give some valuable feedback and give this class a refuel. This way, I know that you enjoy the lessons and can update this class in the near future. Plus, I will add all my followers know whenever I've updated a class. So this way you also instantly know whenever there are new lessons online. If you have any questions, then please ask me in the discussion tab. And otherwise, I hope to see you in the upcoming video. 2. Workflow blender versions and addons: Welcome to the workflow video number one. In this video, we will go over blend this versions and add-ons I often use. If there are any other specific blender add-ons that I use, I will of course explain them in later videos. But let's first go over the version. So the blended version that are used the most in this class is Blender 3.2.2. As you can see down here, this might change in the future because I'm going to update this course, right? So if I update the scores, I might have a newer version, but in general, it doesn't really matter which version you are using. Probably you can do exactly the same, but sometimes things might differ. So if you are in Blender version and row five or 4.3, maybe one little key is somewhere else, but in general it will be exactly the same. So let's now talk about add-ons. Add-ons can be very important as they can make your workflow quicker and more streamlined. Plus some add-ons make you do certain stuff which you cannot do without it. But let's just stay at one particular add-on that I really want to explain. This add-on is called the Node Wrangler add-on. So let's look at our anodes. Go to Edit Preferences, and click on Add-ons. Here you can see all the add-ons that you can use. You can even download specific ones and install them. But right now, we're just going to go to this little search bar and look for the Node Wrangler add-on. This Node Wrangler add-on is very, very handy. Let me explain how we use this. So make sure you take this on and safe preferences. Then click it away. And let's go to the shading of workspace. So in the shading workspace, we can play around with these nodes, which of course creates a material, as you might already know. When you want to add a note, you can click on Shift a and then search for a certain node. But with the Node Wrangler add-on, you can also just have a short key at certain nodes. So if I select this principled shader, click or Control 0, you can see that a mix shader is now in-between the principled shader and the material outputs. This of course, is only for people that use this a lot. They create a lot of materials and they just want some short keys. Now that is not us. So let's just look at what is handy for us. There are some very cool websites which also gives you some free materials. In this case, poly Haven has very nice CCC arrow free materials. And in a later video, I will just talk about some websites that you can use and mostly of them you can use commercially. So let's say, I want a material. When you click on a material here, you can see that this is going to be the material that you are gonna get inside Blender. But each material is made out of a lot of different textures, as you can see down here. So here we have this one, we have diffused, we have a normal map. And you might already know how to import these in Blender, right? So if we have blender, you first of all are going to get a image texture. Need to combine this to the base color. Click on open, search for your materials. So let's look here. I have a material here, and now I want this diffuse in here. Now, this is okay, but we need to do this for every single part of this material. So I also should do this for the specular, right? So it's open this, use the specular and then put it in here. And then of course the color space is not as RGB, so I need to change that to non-color. What if the size is not good? Then I need to add a texture coordinates. Mapping nodes. Combined that somehow and then combine it to this. And then I can change the scale. Alright, so I hope you guys understand that this is often the way that you have to do it. And now I change the scale and you can see that the skill chains as well on here, so I can put it to five or even ten. So as you can see, this is a lot of work and I'm not even at half of the nodes that are actually need to create a decent looking material with the Node Wrangler add-on. However, we do not have to do all this by hand. So we can just select the principled shader, click on Control Shift N T, and then we can look for our material. Now you just pick and choose which dexterous you want to use in your material. So let's do the diffuse specular roughness and the normal map. Then click on principle texture setup automatically, all of these textures are being added. Plus, we already have this normal map, which is also set the color space at non-color. It goes into a separate normal map nodes, which would need, otherwise it doesn't work. And of course it then goes into the right spot of this principled shader. Also, automatically we have section here which has the texture coordinate and a mapping nodes in which we can easily change the scale. If we need to. We can also connect and disconnect nodes way easier. So let's say this one is disconnected here, this principled shader, we can easily just hold Alt, right-click on the node that we want to connect. So the principled and then just drag to the next node, right? So you can see that it's easily connected. Instead of trying to find these little sockets. Both of them work. Now, disconnecting is also quite easy. Just hold Control and then right-click to just cut in-between. And there are of course way more uses for this, but these are the basics. And the cool thing is that we can also use it in the compositor because the composter also is all nodes based. But I will later on explain that in a separate video. So I hope you guys learned from this and I'll see you in the next video. 3. Workflow Studio and Transparent background: In this video, I'm just quickly going to explain how I often create my studios. So a studio, it's not necessarily that important, but I'm going to show you how to create a very simple one and also how to just create a transparent background. So if we have, let's say we have an object here, we have our nice monkey. We were to render this monkey, but we don't have any background and we don't really want to have all this empty space there, right? So what you easily can do is just grab a cube. You're going to scale this a bit up. And then we can delete these vertices here. Just delete them. Now, if we go to the Modifiers, add modifier and add a bevel, then we can see that we can start to bevel this very sharp edge here because this is way too sharp and you can certainly see it in your renders. If I go to my render preview, you can easily see a very sharp line there. Now, if we use this bevel, however, we can put the amount higher, but also the segments. And now you can see that it becomes nice and smooth. Right-click Shade Smooth. And here we already have a very decent studios. So if you just want something in the background, then this is often a very easy and simple way to create that. So this is our little studio. So putting something in the background, of course, creates a nice background. So a studio can do it. You can put some mountains in the background, but you can also do this later on. If you want to put Southlake later on in the background, then rendering of a transparent layer might be quite smart. So if you want to render a transparent background, the only thing you have to do is go to your read the engine, this bulk flux inside EV but also cycles. Scroll down to film and click on transparent. Now you can see that we have this Alpha behind here, and if we render this essentially is transparents. This also works for cycles, cycles. Film, transparent, F 12, and there you have your transparent background. So these both are quite handy and easy to use. I will see you guys in the next video. 4. Workflow Lighting: In this video, I would love to explain to you a little bit about my lighting workflow. So how do we light up a scene? How do we make our models look better if certain lighting? Well, let's just get started. When we have or when we start up Blender, we instantly get a model, a light, and of course, a camera off. This is needed to create a render. So if you click on F 12th, you instantly render a image. Now, this is our render. And this render is created with all of this in mind. Plus render, if you go to the render properties, has been rendered in the render engine EV. For more realistic results, I would highly suggest you use cycles, but both of these random engines have their own place and time. Now, if you use cycles and you also have a better GPU than CPU, then please use this. If we now click on F 12 or lighting changed a little bit, it looks more realistic, but it is a bit hard to see, of course, because it's just a singular cube. So let's go to the shading workspace. I go to the shading workspace because often the lighting and kind of material creation go hand in hand because you cannot really see your materials have good lighting. But if you don't have your good materials down, then you also don't really know how to place a light. So often it's a little bit switching in-between them to actually see what your light is doing, I would highly suggest you go to the render preview shading. And now if we move this slider around, you can see that it actually impacts our scene as well. So often I like to go in one screen here, click on zeros so we are in our camera view and then zoom a little bit, inserts a bit bigger. By do I do this? Well, I want to see what is happening to my scene, but from the cameras viewpoint, because it doesn't necessarily needs to look good in every single field that you're looking at it, right? We need to make this image. So this needs to look good. But if I want to change the light now, I need to go out of it again, move it around and then click on 0 again. That is just quite tedious. So I always drag one here to the side and then just change one tip that you might not use often to another 2D viewports. In this view port, I can always see what is happening. And in this viewport, I can move my light around. So that is kind of how I like to still edit my lights in a 3D view port without having to go out of the camera view. So let's talk about the different kinds of lights that we have. This is, for instance, a lighter you can just add, right? So if you click on X, delete this one with Shift a, you can essentially just add a light. And here we can see some different types. But if you just select this point for right now and move it up here. Also, this slide has a specific object data properties for lights itself. So here you can see that you can still change the type if you want to. All of these types, as you can see, have different options. But the main options are kinda the same. So let's start with the point light. We can change the color. We can change the power, of course, the radius of the light as well. Then with the sun, it's a bit different. We can change the color strength, but here we have a different angle spot. We have also all the same. But in a spot, you can change the beam shape right here. And the area lights, which I personally use a lot, has also color power, but has different shapes. If you want to change the shapes. Right now it's a bit hard to see. We need to zoom in. But you can see that we can also change this scale if we want to write. So I just need to scale this up. You can do this in the 3D view port. You can also do this here in these options. There's also an option to use notes with your lights. And in this emission shader, you can change the color and the strength of your life as well. Now, as you can see, quite handy. But there is also one more light that I want to show, and that is the light that the world gifts to our scene. So let's say this point right here is off. We don't have any other lights on, but still, this scene is not all the way black. We still have some lighting in here. This is because if you go here from object to world, you can see that we have a background note in here. And this background note essentially gives light to the whole scene. So even this strength we can put up, down or change the color. But another cool thing is we can put other nodes in here. So if we add an environment texture and then drag it into the background, you can see that now it becomes purple and that's kinda just showcases There's no texture here, so please add something. So let's open a texture. And we're going to open an HDRI texture. And in later videos, I will show you where you can download these. But let's say I'm just going to open the Kiara interior. What this does, it gives us a 360 degrees. Whole texture around here, which adds light to our scene. And the cool thing, if we change maybe the material of this cube a little bit, I'm going to make it a bit darker. And I'm going to change the roughness. You can see that not only does it give really realistic lighting, it also gives us very, very realistic reflections. If I make a dark, you can even see it better. So as you can see, this really creates very realistic results. Let's talk a little bit about the three-point lighting setup. I often use this kind of light set up because it's very versatile and it's also quite easy to use. You can also combine this with the HDRI lighting, so it's not necessarily separated from it. So what do we do here? Well, we have our light here. And the first slide that we're going to create is called the main or the key light. The key light. And this light should be, of course, in a decent position so we can actually see our subject. And it should just be a flattering lighting, right? So moving it around and playing with the strength can achieve that. Then once you're happy with the placement, you're going to duplicate this and move it over to the other side. I'll put the strength right now at 0 and rename this to fill light. So what this slide is supposed to do, it should fill up some of the shadows that we have created with the key lights. So if we put the strength a bit higher, you can see that that starts to fill up some of these very dark shadows. Often this light has a lower intensity, but also this is very dependent on where you place the slides. If it's very far away, then sometimes of course you need more strength. So that is one thing to keep in mind. Then as last, we have another light. This slide is often referred to as rim light. Rim or back lights. And the rim light is supposed to create a nice rim around the subject. It doesn't have to be a rim around it. But let me show you a little bit of what we mean. Here. I want to put the strength of it up and maybe also the radius. But here you can see that we create some kind of rim around our character. And as I said, it doesn't have to be around the whole character. A little bit of hair would also be fine. And it's often used to create a separation between the subject and the background. So now it's really pops out of the image that's safe. And we even could give a different color, do this light, right? So often the rim light is also handy for debt, but you can do that with any light that you want. That doesn't really matter. So one more thing that I want to show you is that sometimes we might overexposed or underexposed our image. So let's say right now we know that this is overexposed if I put this so high, but sometimes it's hard to see if you're actually overexposing something, especially if you're working with really a lot of reflections or a reflective material. This also we can check him lender. So if you go to your random properties, scroll down. Here we have a little section which is called color management. And in a column management, we want to chase filmic to false color. And here we can see a lot happening. So everything is now in weird colors and it looks like we're having a bad trip on some mushrooms. But the thing is with these colors, we can check if you're under or overexposing. So let me grab my key lights and I'm going to put the strength all the way up. What you can see is that we reach rat or even white. And once you reach that threshold, you will lose color data, so you do not want to reach that threshold. Also on the opposite would be if we go all the way to 0, I sadly have to do this with every single light here, light and even the backgrounds to 0, then you can see that we are reaching black. So black is bad. But even if you have a little bit of light in here, so let's say dark purple or even dark blue. In those cases, you are underexposing your image, thus also losing color data. So both these cases are bad, but what do you want n? Well, we actually want to reach this grayish color. And I often like to go a little bit higher, so a little bit higher, so we are getting towards the yellowish orange. And to be honest, if you have your key light in check, alright, then we can know what we're looking for. So if you go now to filmic again, you can see that now we are not over or underexposing, but we still could pump it up a little bit without hurting our color data, right? So if you pump it up, you can just go to back to false color. Who did a bit higher. As long as you don't reach this red, then you're fine. So here yellowish should still be fine. Go back to filmic. And here you can see that we still have some decent lighting. Now for the fill light and the rim light, you could check it, but we know that the key light is the harshest light in our scene, right? So the other ones probably will not overpower our key lights. So often I just check the key light with the false color. And then these other lines I can do just with my eyesight. Alright, so here we have our fill here, just fill up some of the shadows. And then of course we have our RIM, which doesn't do a lot in this scene. But if we change a bit the color here, let's do some nice blue. And here we have some fun lighting. So these are the lights that I use and this kind of setup I often use as well in all of my videos. Go to the next video where you will learn a little bit more about a studio or backgrounds that you can use. I see you guys. There. 5. Workflow Rendering: Let's talk a little bit about rendering. So if rendering, you need to keep in mind a few settings that you might want to set up before you start to render. So as you already know, if you go to Render and click on Render image or render animation. Blender essentially starts to calculate how the light objects in your scene and then we get our image. Higher qualities often take more time to render and lower quantities, less time and you need to find a middle ground in-between them. Because you can make your random like ten hours, but it's ten hours necessarily better than ten minutes? In some cases, yes, In some cases, no. So having a little bit of knowledge about rendering itself will really, really help you. So let's first look at to render engines that we have. We have EV and we have cycles. Both of these have their own use. And of course, you also have to keep in mind that some of you might have a shared VPC. And if you have a very shady PC, then sometimes you need to opt for a little bit of a less quality. Even though it's not super realistic, you can make really nice renders with it. Then we also have cycles. This is my main render engine, which I use a lot. With cycles, you can even choose your device. So we have the CPU, but also a GPU. Only use this if you have a better GPU. But in general, nowadays people do. Also, maybe you cannot even click GPU or do not see this option. But you then have to do is go to Edit Preferences system. And here you can choose your GPU, make sure you take it on. And then of course, you can Save Preferences and go here to click on your GPU. Now, there are a lot of options here. And before we gonna look at dose, by the way, we're not going to look at all of them. I'm just going to show you a little bit of a general view. But before we're going to look at those, I would like to look at my output properties. We are going to look at the output properties because we want to check your resolution. In my videos. I often do 1920 by 1080, but that doesn't necessarily have to be the resolution that you ran their ads. If you're working inside Instagram or maybe TikTok that you might want to use, weigh different resolutions. So please look up on Google which resolution you want to use for your social media or your website, and then start with those resolutions. So if I put this one down or up, you can see that my camera instantly changes as well. We also have a frame rate which 24 frames per second is scanner general what they use in games and some animations. But you could put it up to 34 more of a film like appearance, or even 60, if you want a more, have more like a game experience of frames per seconds. So in movies they often still use 30 frames per seconds. And in games they often wants to have as many frames as possible. But yeah, that will take a long time to render. Of course, 24 or 30 is often the ones that I choose. Now, we also have a frame range, but this has to do more with the animation. So if you want a longer animation, you can put the end up or down, but you can also do it in the timeline itself. Now, the output folder, however, and file format can be quite useful. So whenever we render, it goes into a folder, and right now it goes into the TMP. It's kind of annoying to find this folder. If you want to do some pre renders, I highly suggest you just go here and create a new little folder somewhere where you can find it. Then let's say this is going to be, this is going to be somewhere. Put it in there, excepts. And now whenever I render or an image or a movie, it will end up in this folder. Now, file format is also quite important. Right now we have p and g, that is scan of a general setting, a default setting. But if you want to have higher-quality, you might want to think about a tiff file. Often, I do, however, recommend you stay in this image section of the rendering only when you want to do a little pre-render or after compositing, you might start to think about movie files. But why do we do this? Well, let me explain. If you render an image and you have two random, let's say an animation of 250 frames. If this render crashes at image 240. Well, you already have saved all these images before. So you can just go to 240 and start rendering from there. And then you have all your frames. However, if I start to render a movie file, so let's say a unpack. What happens if it crashes at frame 240? Guess what? The whole file just gets destroyed. So all of this time that you have run, That's all it's 239 frames will just be wasted. So that is why I highly recommend you render an image file and then later on, just throw it together and I'll show you how to do that in the next video. Just to like a tiff, which has quite a lot of color depth. As well. Awesome. So that is what we need to know about these output properties. So let's take a quick look at some of the render settings that we can use. So if we just have our sampling, which is already important, we have a nice thresholds, max samples, minimum samples, and time limits. I highly suggest you just look at the Render settings for right now, because the viewport is essentially what we see when we click on this Viewport Shading rendered. But once we start to render, it uses these options. Right now normally this is set at 4090, but let's say we put it very low. I untick this d noise so it will not denoise after Iran there. What will happen, as you can see, is that we get a lot of noise. And this noise is kind of what you do not want. To get rid of this noise. You can do multiple things. The most basic thing is just putting the samples higher. So if I put this to a 100, you will already see a small difference. It will, of course, also take a little bit longer. Butter is noticeable change. So as you can see, you can play around with these samples. The higher you put them, the longer it takes, but you get better quality. Also at 1, it will kinda give you diminishing returns. So let's say maybe adds a thousand. It might not be true, but maybe at a thousand it looks a very nice clean and we do not have any noise. If I then put it to 10 thousand village really helped me know. If you're going to render an entire animation, I would highly suggest you do a few pre renders this way you save some time. But keep in mind, blender also does have the denoise option. So let's say we go back to frame 210 samples. Our first, turn this off and show you how much noise we have. So this is the amount of noise. Now I turn it on, and this is now our end result. So you can see that the denoise button is actually very, very good. We do not have any noise. However, it looks kinda blurry in some cases. And that is because there was so much noise. But if you just put this to like a 100 and then keep the noise button on the denoise button. Then you can see it we get really, really, really nice results. So now it's your question. Do we really need to go to 4,090 samples to render this for like five minutes or are a 100 samples, we have to denoise button on enough. That is for you to figure out. Now, there are also a lot of other things that you can do here. So you can play around with the light paths and these amount of bounces are key in creating realistic and nice imagery. Normally, I keep this at the default. But if you really wanted to have maybe very nice glass or you have very intricate details or lighting, then I would highly suggest you put some of the bounces up. And these are the basics of rendering. I do not think we need to go way further into this. But if you understand a little bit on how to make your renders look goods, how to change the resolution so you can actually target the social media that you want to target. Um, we also talked about noise reduction, which is the most important and in some ways in which you can make your imagery even better with some of the light paths bounces. So in the next video, I will just explain a little bit about the composter and then you can choose your own animation and just start off. So I see you guys there. 6. Workflow Compositing: In this video, I'm going to explain to you guys how we can use the compositor inside Blender. I do think the composter is highly underutilized. And if you guys are going to use it more, it will highly and greatly impact your work. Now, why do I think it's underutilized? I think a lot of pros are actually using a different program as a compositor, which it's not bad necessarily. But if you are a new blender user, you don't really want to learn even another program. Plus a lot of capacitors actually costs quite a lot of money to use. Plus, I also do not think there are enough tutorials about the compositor. Now, let's just jump straight into it. What can we do with this? There is a multitude of things that we can do. But one of the ways that I like to use it is to compile my recently rendered images together into a movie file. Now, let's first take a look at the compositor. So compositing, use notes. And right now we have two nodes, the random layers and the composite. If we click on F 12, we essentially create a render layer. But if I click this away and go through compositor, you can see that it doesn't really end up anywhere. This is because we need to add another note. And because we have the Node Wrangler add-on, We can just click on Control and Shift, then select on the random layers and a new node will pop up, which is the viewer node. Now we can also see which render we just created. How do we navigate through this compositor? Actually is quite simple. The only thing you have to do is go to View. And here are all the tools which you need to move around. So zooming in or zooming out, clicking the middle mouse button to pan around. But all of these short keys only changed the way that you look at your notes tree. The backdrop, however, has different keystrokes. As you can see, out middle mouse button or click on v to zoom out or Alt V to zoom in. So that is the way that we can navigate through this composite there. As you can see, the compositor is node-based, so we can literally just pop in notes, just like creating materials, and we get a different result depending on the notes that we use. So let's import some of the vendors that we have created before. So we are not going to use to render layers, but let's add an image nodes. Click on Open. And here we're going to just open all of these frames. So I just select the first one, hold Shift, select the last one, and then open image. Because I selected all my frames, I instantly creates an image sequence. Then the image goes into the viewer and the composite node. Now, I don't see anything happening here. That is because I'm at frame number one, frame like 60. Actually my cube is feasible. Also. If you look at frames, this entire render only takes a 120 frames. So the timeline should also end at 120. What can we do here? Well, there are lots of things you can do here. But the first thing that I want to show you is that we can actually add a background. If you want to. Just grab an RGB nodes and choose a color which you might want your background to be. So maybe nice and pink. So to combine the background of this image, we just need one extra nodes. So I'm going to move this a bit further back and maybe even disconnect them. And then click on Shift a to add an alpha over. This alpha over nodes works a little bit like the layers inside Photoshop. It lays a layer on top of another one. So if we have the RGB here, we can drag that into the first image. And this one is going to be in the second image. Now, to connect the viewer again, just click OK Control Shift and just select on this node to this node. The only problem that we have here is this little weird line around here. And that can easily be fixed by clicking comfort, pre-multiply it, or dragging this alpha into the FAQ. So now we have easily add a new backgrounds and we can still change the color if needed. You can already imagine that you can do way more of this. We can even put an animation in a background or just an image in the background instead of just a singular color. Awesome, So that is one of the ways that you can use your compositor. But as you can see, there are lots of nodes which can be used. So let's say I want to change the brightness and contrast a little bit. Just drag it in and play around the fits. And as easy as that, everything gets changed. Once you're finally happier if your image, make sure the last node that you actually have in your node three is connected to the composite because this is going to be rendered out. And then we want to render this out as a movie file, right? Because right now we have an image sequence, but we want a movie file. So go to the output properties, make sure your frame rate is set. And now we want to change the file format to maybe a mpeg. Then if you go to Render and click on Render Animation, you might think like, how do I now need to re-render everything? But no, it's not like re-rendering it. We're actually just putting all of this very quickly into a movie file, Render Animation. And here you can see how fast these frames are being rendered. Right now it's already done and we can easily find our movie file in our folder. And here we have our finished results. So I hope you guys learned how you can work with the compositor. And of course in future videos we will go a bit deeper into it. I see you guys in the next video. 7. Workflow Free 3D Assets: In this video, I would love to show you some of the websites that I often use to get my free 3D assets. Also some free stock images and even a free palette generator. So let's look at the first one. Probably haven, body Haven has free ace your eyes, textures and 3D models. And the cool thing is that they are licensed as a CC 0 license, which means they are first of all free. But you can also use them in your commercial projects. Now, the next one is Paxos. Paxos has free stock images and videos. However, with Paxos, you have to be a bit wary because some images require you to do nothing. But some images also require you to credit the creator or the owner of this image. Then we have Sketchfab. Sketchfab is mostly for 3D models. So here you can look for a license if you want to use them commercially. You can use the CC 0, but you also have something like CC BY. And that means that you can credit the author, but it can still be commercially used. So here you have some very cool models as well, as long as you credit the owner. Then we have a website like coolers, in which you can create your own color palettes. So you can just explore trending ones or create your own. There are many websites like this, but this is just an easy one to use. So I hope you guys can see that from these websites you can get some very cool free assets to actually help you in your 3D journey. This is the last video of the workflow. So I see you guys in the next video where you can choose your own tutorial. I see you guys there. 8. Glassy Gradient: Introduction: In these videos, you're going to learn how to create this animation. So in the first video, we're going to take a quick look at the final scene. So if we look here, you can see that, yeah, this is what this scene looks like. We have a very simple model. It's just a cube, which is kind of twisted with some modifiers. And the only animation at this Q pass is just a rotation. Now, we also have a camera. This camera also rotates. And of course, the materials that you can see here, this is actually a glass material and then the world that looks a little bit more intricate, but I will explain that as well. So that is everything that you need to know to create this animation. So in the next part, we're just going to start and create this whole animation from scratch. So I see you guys there. 9. Glassy Gradient: 3D Modeling: Let's start with the creation of the spiral object. So just select this cube and click on Scale. And then the seven, okay, so we're only scaling this around the z axis. Then we need some extra geometry. So going to tap to click on Control R, this essentially creates extra edge loops. If you scroll up, you can see that we create more edge loops. The number doesn't really matter too much. Just make sure you have enough for it to rotate. In my case, I did 34. Okay. Just so you know, now we are going to the modifiers and the first modified as we're going to add is the simple deform. We wanted to twist around the z axis. And we can of course choose our own angle here, which could be maybe a 180. This already looks way more interesting. However, we do have a bit of a flat shading. If you click on right-click and do Shade Smooth, you can see that everything becomes nice and smooth. But we do get some shading artifacts. As you can see here, it looks a bit weird. This we can resolve easily with just adding extra geometry, add modifier, and let's add a bevel modifier. The bevel modifier might work a little bit weird as we can see here. This is because we scaled up our cube, right? So if I now select the cube, click on Control a and apply the skill. Now we can see that, okay, this baffle makes a bit more sense. Okay, So a applies scale so that our modifier works good again. Now I want to put a few more segments in here, so maybe three or four. And you can always play around with the amount that already looks way better. But I'm going to add even more geometry with a subdivision surface. The levels viewport can be like maybe two or three. Vendors should go higher to maybe five or six. This will make the render time, of course, also longer. But otherwise, we might get a little bit of a blocky result in our render because this is a glass material that is essentially the whole 3D model. A little spiral. Spiral is done. The next step is going to be putting the camera in position. So click on one and then select the camera. Go to View and align the active camera to feel alive and active camera view. Then we can see that our camera can move position, but it is not perfectly in the right spot. So click on this arrow and makes sure that x and the z axis are set at 0. And now we're literally just straight on this model. And with the y, we can come in closer or go further away from this model every 12. Now, how do we need to animate? First of all, I want you to think about how long this animation should take. In my case, I did a 120 frames. Okay, so put the end at whatever frame you think is appropriate. Then we can start to animate this spiral. And we all need to animate the rotation. So at frame one, you can click on AI and then insert keyframe rotation. Then at frame a 120, we can rotate this whole spiral around. So we could do rotate 360 and then I rotation. So now a whole rotation will be made in these 220 frames. If this is a bit too quick for you, you could just go here and then divide this 260 by two. Right-click replace keyframe. So now I just did a 180 degrees because this is a very symmetrical object and has four sides here. It essentially will still loop perfectly if you want to make this a looping animation, as you can see. Now, the next step is going to be animating the camera. Also, this is quite simple. Select the camera and here we want to animate the location, but also the rotation. So it's kind of one step further. We need to animate two things. This, however, is also quite simple. The first thing that I want to do is go to frame one and put this rotation here at maybe, let's do a hundreds around the y-axis. And I want to zoom in a bit more. So I think this is a cool position for our animation to start. So click on AI and then location rotation while having your cameras selected, you saw I got a little error. That is because I have nothing selected. But while you select your camera eye location and rotation, then at frame a 120, I want it to be at the Y and 90, so it's nice and straight, but I want to be zoomed in. So something like this should be fine. I location rotation. So our whole animation right now looks like this. My opinion, that looks very cool and I would highly suggest you now save your file. Then in the next part, we can create our materials and of course, start rendering. I see you guys there. 10. Glassy Gradient: Materials + Rendering: In this video, we're going to finalize this animation. So we already made a model. We already finished the animation. But right now we need to create some decent luca materials. So let's go to shading. The material for the spiral object is actually quite simple to create, so we can just select it. And here we want a kind of a glassy material. We can only see this glassy material inside cycle South highly suggest you go to cycles and put the device so GPU. If you have a better GPU, then let's put the transmission all the way to one. And I will also put my viewport shading at renders just so you can see what's happening. We have a decent transmissive material now, but the roughness should be low. So I'm just going to put it to 0. And here we have a nice glass material. The lighting is not that important because most of the light actually comes from the world. But you could play around with an area light, right? So if you want an area light in here, you can just make one played around with the reflections. But all of this is quite arbitrary and it's not that necessary. So let's just go to the World settings. I'm going to click on 0. So I'm actually in my camera view. And I will drag a new little timeline out of here. Just go here timeline and put it to frame one. The only thing we have to do is go to World instead of objects and scroll a bit out. Here we have a background and a world output. We're going to use a gradient. Texture is great in texture, creates a very cool gradient on here. As you can see. However, the gradient is not really whatever color we want in our reflections, right? So what we're gonna do is we will add a color ramp and a color ramp goes in-between the gradient texture and the background. Here we can put any color that we would like to. I personally like to use callers.co and we can choose any kind of pellet here. So if you go into colors here, then accept our cookies. You can explore trending pellets or even create your own. And here you can just choose one and copy these colors. So if I, for instance, like this palette, I know that I need 12345 colors. So I will go back to Blender and click three times on this little plus. So we have five of these stops. Then click on this arrow to distribute the stops evenly. And now you can see they're evenly distributed. The only thing that you have to do now is just click on here to duplicate the color. Go back to Blender, Select one of the stops, and then select this color down here. Then you go to the Effects tab and just paste whatever you just copied and click on Enter. And now we have this color in here. And we're gonna do that for every single stop. Copy. Select. And then based on if the hex. So now I've duplicated all of these colors. If we look at the background, you can also see them. But we're not finished yet because two reflections just still look quite dull. Even though it's beautiful. It's still, it's not really what I want to achieve. And what essentially is happening in this whole world here. This is kinda shown right? It goes from the white blue to the darker yellow or orange down here. I want this gradient to keep duplicating over and over. To do this, I need to add a texture coordinate. A mapping note. Here we'll just put the generated into the factor, move them a bit back. And as last, we need a math nodes. This factor goes into the first value of the math, and this value goes into the factor of the gradient texture. Right now we have this math Note Set ad, ad, but we want to put it to modulo. Click on that. Put the value back to one. And what we now can do, it still doesn't really look different, but we can start to scale this up. So I'm going to scale it by 101010. Here we can see that it gets duplicated over and over again. Very, very handy. Now, going through a curfew and here you can kind of see what is happening. I would also like to put my gradient texture at easing. And also the color ramp could be at ease as well. To make them a bit more smooth. You can see that one parts, or at least half of this world is not really getting duplicated over and over. You can see that this is just all the way little bit of a bluish light. I just like to put the location also at 101010 or whatever you have here, just duplicate it over or play around with any of these settings. And now we have it all the way through, duplicate it. And here we get this very, very cool effect. And I hope you can see that you can change this to what ever you want. We can do different colors so we can play around with the amount of times that gets duplicated. All these rural settings change a lot, and even the model that you create also changes the way that this animation will look. So it has a very, very much potential. And I would really hope to see just different kinds of models and a different kind of colors in your renders. Now, to render this, I personally liked that the background was not feasible. If you want to do that, just go to the random properties, go into film and then makes sure transparent is ticked on. Now, I would also like to go into the output properties and put the frames at 30 frames per seconds. And now you can just follow the rendering pipeline which you have learned before. So if you start rendering, we can see this amazing color scheme and this animation. And I hope you guys can show me what you have created. I see you guys in the next animation. 11. Cell fracture: Introduction: Welcome to the introduction of this animation. So you're going to learn how to create an animation like this. And it's actually quite simple and easy to do. But you will learn a lot. You will learn new lighting techniques, you will learn new animation techniques, and of course, how to make such a model or any model explodes with the self fracture add-on. So this is our main scene that we have here. And as you can see, we have just a very simple studio, some lighting. And of course, once I click Play, we have our animation starting, which means that now we have this cool explosion of all of these pieces just breaking apart and then flying in random ways. This is all done with some force fields and of course, some rigid bodies. So this is essentially also some kind of simulation. You do need a model for this animation. Of course, the model that I'm using is already up for download. But if you want another model or want to download it from another source, you can go to Poly haven. Probably Haven has some very cool models here. And there's actually also where I got this bus from. But you can also try out another model. I would highly suggest however, that you don't make the polygons too high. So these plants, for instance, they might not work as good as, yeah, a bust or a couch, right? But in this case we choose the marble bust. Now, this is a CC 0 license, which is everything from this website, which essentially means you can use it for any purpose. I think you can even download it and try to resell it, which is weird. But yeah, you can use it in any kind of project, even if you want to sell them commercially. Now, there are also some options here. We can download a different texture resolution, but for k in this case should be fine. We can also download different kinds of files. We can do it in a blender file, but also FBX if you like that better. I will show in the next video how we can import these into Blender. And then of course you can just download it. If you're happy with your choice, go to the next video and we can go on and start to create this animation. I'll see you guys there. 12. Cell fracture: Animation: In this video, we're going to import the model and then start to explore it with a self fracture add-on. So let's get started. The first thing that we need to do is delete this default cube. Then it, depending on how you download your file, we need to import it somehow. So go to file. If it's an OBJ, FBX or any other file that's shown here, then you can just click on it and import it. But if it's in a brand file, you need to append it. And here you can just click on the Blend file. So in this case, it was the marble bust. You can select the object and then we inserted this object inside Blender. I don't want to scale it up a little bit. So Skill five, enter should be fine. Now, what we want to do if this model is we want to make it explode with the self fracture add-on. But before we want to do that, I actually like when the self fractures have a different insights material than outside. And if you want to have that as well, go to your material properties of this marble bust and click on Plus to create a new material. This can be our gold material. Now, let's go to Edit Preferences and look underneath add-ons for the cell fracture add-on. Take this on. And of course you can save preferences as well. If you click on F3, you can search for your cell fracture add-on. You can also find it inside objects. Quick effects, self fracture. So there are a lot of options here, but we don't need to know them all, especially not for this tutorial. The source limit is how many sales will be created. Hundreds, in my case, I thought would look cool. But if you want less or more, you can always play around with this. Then materials should be set at one. This makes sure that it's chooses the second material in your material stack. Now, we only need to create an extra collection, otherwise, all of these cells will just be thrown in a collection that is already here. So if we just rename this to sell, fracture, click on, Okay. And now it will create all of these cells. Plus all of these cells are directly in this new collection. Perfect. So we have our cells here. We have our camera, light and marble bust. We still need this one later on, so we don't need to delete it yet. But let's just focus on the self fractious for right now. Let's select the first model here. And what we want to do is we want to make sure that this model starts to fall down, right? So if we go to our physics properties, we can actually make all of these rigid bodies. And in a rigid body, there are also some options here, so you can change it to your needs. But we want them to be active, so they actually will be controlled by the simulation. The mass could be changed as well. So maybe you can put it at like 0.75. We have dynamic which is fine and shape convex hall works for this method as well. There are some other things that you can change, but this in general is good. However, we do not really want to click on every single piece here and then start to add a rigid body. And if you have made changes, then we need to put this also 2.75. It's just a bit annoying. So what I like to do is make sure I select one with this rigid body selected or applied to it. Then right-click to our collection and make sure we click on Select Objects. Now select all the objects in this collection. And my active element is essentially the last selected yeah, object, which has in our case, this rigid body already applied to it. Why do we do this? Well, if we now go to Objects, rigid body, and then copy from active, then all of these models here, all of these cells will have this rigid body applied to it. So it's all the same, right? All of them have also a mass of 0.75. And if you have changed anything else, everything would be copied. So that's perfect. So if we now play this, you can see that everything falls down at the same time. Perfect. That just means that all of them have the rigid body applied to them and they're working with the simulation. So why does it fall down? That is because if we go into our scene properties, we have a gravity and the gravity is minus 9.8, which is the gravity on Earth. Now, what we want to do here is we actually want to turn off the gravity. And if you ever want to make something realistic, then I would not suggest it, right, because there's always some gravity around. But in this case it's a bit easier for us to grasp what our next steps in this animation I'm going to do. So let's start with adding some force fields. If you click on Shift C, we can see that our 3D cursor jumps nicely into the middle. Then Shift a to add a force field. Let's just add the force field, force. I'm going to move this a bit up so it's around the face area. What I want to do now is go into the physics properties. And now you can see that these are the physics properties of this force. We have some settings here, but the main ones we're going to focus on is this strength. So if we now play this, you can see that very slowly it starts to kind of exploded, looks like, right? This force kinda pushes everything away. You can make this quicker or slower with changing the strength. So let's put the strength at a 100 for right now. Here you can see that it goes a bit quicker. It really kind of explodes. However, if it just explodes like this, it's still kinda looks boring because it's just a singular movement and there's no randomness in here. How do we change this? I would suggest to just add another force fields, Shift D to duplicate this force field and change the second type two, you can choose, you can just play around with these, Let's do for tax in this case. But you can literally just play around with all of them. And here you can see what the 4D text does. So as you can see, there are so many things that you can do. Plus you can even keyframe every single part of these forces, right? So if you want this for texts to become stronger later on, or maybe a bit less strong, then you can always also animate debts. Now, I thought it would be cool if we start to animate the first 30 frames as just a nice steel frame. And then after it starts to explode. So what we have to do, we have to go to frame 29. Make sure strength is at 0. Right-click, insert keyframe. Then the frame 30, put it back to a hundreds right-click insert keyframe. So now this vertex type, in the first 30 frames, it will not have any effect on our scene. But at frame 30, it will start to have a strength of a hundreds. Right? So that is essentially what it does. I will do the same for my other force. So the force is this one. And again, frame 30 seems to be okay. So at frame 30, strength of a hundreds go on back and add a frame 29 strength of 0. So now the first set of bars, we can see that we have just, yeah, nothing happening. So we can admire the bust. But if we render this right now, It's a bit hard to see. Let's go to cycles. Gpu Zuma within. We can see these cracks already. And I actually don't want to see the cracks yet. I want that to be later on in animation. So how do we change this? This is essentially quite easy. What you just need to do is at the first part of the animation, we just want to see only the marble bust. Then around frame 29, we want to see all these cells, right? So we can also animate this. First, let's do 29 frames. Actually. We're going to see the marble bus. So right-click Insert Keyframe while having this little camera on, which means it's gonna be rendered. And then at frame 30, this is gonna be turned off because we want to see the self fractures and not this marble bust anymore. We're going to do exactly the same for the self fractures, but then we're going to switch it around, right? So at frame 30, which they should be all feasible, and at frame 29, they should be all invisible. Sadly, in my version of Blender, we cannot put a keyframe on a entire collection. I need to do this separately. I think however, this will be changed in the future. Okay, So don't worry too much and maybe you can already tried to do it. But I'm not sure why just doesn't work with me. What we need to do at friend 30, all of these are gonna be visible. So I'm just going to click on AI and then just hover over it. So i, and that is essentially it. It's annoying because you need to do a hundreds. But we've just one singular button. It's not that hard. Then at 29, we need to do the opposite. So just click and drag all of these off. I can actually make this even bigger. Then we're going to do exactly the same. Just keep clicking I, so they all become nice and yellow at frame 29. While having this little camera turned off. That means that it's not gonna be rendered. If you want to do a little pre-render, we can grab the camera. Let's move a bit around. Here, a few cameras view. Is there any light in our scene here? So here we can see some cracks. At frame 29, we should not be able to see cracks so you can render. Here, we can see there are no cracks. Then at frame 30, render, which have the cracks, right. So that makes it a bit nicer and smoother. Instead of seeing the cracks at all times. There's just one thing more that I would like to change in this particular case, which has to do with the animation. If we go, Let's go back here to our scene. We have also a rigid body world. And in the rigid body world, we have a speeds. So if you put this, let say at five, we can see that everything here sped up by a lot. Let's go back to solid view. Right? It will be sped up by a lot. And I actually liked to play around with this. So maybe at first like 80 frames, I want the speed to be like 1.1 or 0.1, I should say. Then insert keyframe, maybe like 20 frames later. I want the speed to be 1.5. Key frame. If we make this whole animation take around 160 frames, let's look what that does. So here we don't have anything. And now the slowly start to explode and then it goes quicker, right? So that actually looks quite cool. I do think the 0.1 might be a bit too extreme. So maybe 0.3, and that's put it a bit further back. So maybe if frames 60. And here we can see that it actually looks quite cool. So the animation probably will only take a 120 frames. In the next video, we're going to add a nice studio, so materials. And I'll see you guys there. 13. Cell fracture: Materials + Render: In this video, we're going to create some nice materials, some decent lighting, a studio, and maybe even some camera movements to make this animation even more interesting. Let's get started. The one thing that we need is, of course, a studio and some decent lighting. So we can easily do that with creating a cube, scaling this up, and also around the x-axis. So we can just delete one of these edges. And here let's add a bevel modifier. Put a mountain bit up, and of course the segments as well. Right-click Shade Smooth, and that is just a very basic studio. Awesome. The next thing, we need some lighting, but we also need materials. And actually a lot of times in the beginning they're gonna go hand in hand. You cannot see the materials without lighting, but you can also not see yeah, what the lighting is doing without any materials. So we're just going to change one light here. Let's grab this slide, changes to an area lamp, scale it up here, and then let's move it around. Harish. Go to Shading, go to the camera view, and click on the render a few parts. Make sure that you are in such cycles and use the GPU. So here we have our materials. We actually just want to see the marble bust so we can hide the cell fractions for right now because they're creating these weird artifacts here. So if you just hide all of them for right now, you can see that we actually look at the normal material. So let's select this bust. And what we have now is the gold material, which is gonna be the material inside the cell fractures, right? So let's go back to the material properties and just select the marble bust material, which is the material on the outside of this bus. So what we can see here, this material has already been set as you can see. And I don't really want the base color, subsurface or subsurface color. You have to be careful because if you take the subsurface out, it could be still that this one is on. So also this one should be 0. And now we can play around with the color. I actually really liked black. So black should be fine and nice and dark color. Just so the highlights that we're going to show later on also pop a lot. So this is actually quite cool. I actually liked the reflects on this as well. The next part is going to be the studio in the back. Just click on New. This material can be renamed to studio. And here we can also change the base color to a nice dark color. However, the roughness, I want to put all the way at one because I just want reflections in my character here. And that is one of the ways in which we can create some contrast between the background and of course, our main subject. So this slide actually looks decent. And if you want to change some extra lights, we could always grab a new 3D view port in here. Just duplicate the slides, move it over here. I'm going to use notes with the slides as well, just so I can pull this strength of it down. This one goes a bit higher, maybe make this filled out a bit bigger. So we know this is the key lights. It's going to be our main light in our scene, which is all the time or most of the time it's going to be the strongest slides. So in this case the strength is 1.15. Then this slide here is our fill light, which fills up some of the shadows that the key light created. So to fill lights, a lot of times to feel like it's a bit less strong as you can see, but they could also be a bit bigger to even create more, I'm softer shadows. And then in the back we could even create a nice backlight or rim lights. So REM or back both work because it creates this very cool rim around here. This rim light is also very important in separating the background from the subject. As you can see, this one, I might even put E for lower than the previous one here. So maybe 0.01. And you could also, if you want to play around with some colors, right? So the emissions do not always have to be just white. You can play around with some blues. So if I want the blue here and maybe if the fill light and make a nice maybe rat, right? So you could also create some very cool effects with these colors. Don't be afraid to play around with some of these. So now, if you're happy with this, we can start to look at our next material. That next material will only be seen, however, inside the cell fractures. So the marble bus can be hidden. We can go to the self fractures. And what we want to do here is we want to go through the timeline and just play a bit forward. What happens is once these cells starts to separate, we can see that we have an inside of these cells, right? It's gonna be a different color. So if you select one of these cells, you can go to the second material. And this is the gold material. So in my case, I really enjoyed if we do maybe some kind of a gold color, so a yellowish color, yellow, orange. And then just put the metal all the way to one to create a nice metallic look. I enjoyed that, but you can put whatever you want to. Also, another thing, our self fracture like the explosion that we create has not been saved anywhere. So every time I want to just check somewhere, I need to replay this. That is not what I wanna do. So you can always go to your scene properties inside the rigid body world. And here you can save your cache or bake your cache, I should say. So if you bake your cash essentially saves the position of these cell fractures per frame. And now you can just pick, click and drag from wherever you want to see them. You don't need to remake it every time over and over. So very cool. If you want to change something, however inside the simulation, you need to make sure to delete the big first. Otherwise you don't see the changes. So that is this material which also looks very, very cool. Then as last, I just want to create a nice camera movement. So if we look at a camera, I actually want to just move to the left and the right, but I still want to keep looking at this bus. So let's create a new empty right in the middle. So click on Shift C, just saw a 3D cursor jumps back here in the middle, create a new empty scale this bit up so it's a bit more visible and I might put it around here. Now, if you select the camera, we can go into the object constraint properties at an object constraints. And here we're going to choose tampered track. Now as target, we're going to just choose the newly created empty. You do have to however, change the axis to the right axis. So in this case it's minus sets. But you can just click a little bit through to see which one or where it starts to point at this empty. So now if we move the camera, you can see that it doesn't matter wherever I move it. The camera will always follow this face. So I can go here and a camera view that move the rounds. You can see that it starts to follow it, which can create some very cool effects. As you can see. You can however, also move the empty because the camera is damped to this empty. So for the animation, I'm gonna move my empty a bit lower with down here. And then select the camera around frame one about my camera to be maybe here I location. And then the last frame, which is a 120, I want it to be all the way over here. I location. So now if we move, you can see that we also get this cool camera movement. So that is essentially everything that you need to know to create this animation or just one render if you don't want to run there for hours. So that's totally up to you. Just to make sure you just go through the normal steps, create an output file format, and then Render Animation. That's it. I hope you guys liked it. Please send me your renders and I'll see you guys in the next video. 14. Dispersion Metaballs: Introduction: In this video, you're going to learn how to create this animation. You will learn how to work with metal balls, which is very interesting. And I will also show you a very cool technique to create more randomness in your animations. So, let's first look at the final scene. This is the final scene. And as you can see, my render actually started from frame one. And we'll just keep rotating and cool ways and it's kinda unpredictable. This technique that we're going to use is very, very simple. We're just going to add some noise to our rotation. In the materials section, we will create a material like this. It goes quite well with a very cool HDRI. And that creates the refractive kind of material that we can see in our render. If you want, you can jump right to the next video and start creating the animation. If you want to know a little bit more about the metal balls, then I advise you stay here so I can explain it to you. When adding objects inside Blender. So shift a. We can also add a metal ball. And a metal ball is not necessarily just a ball, as you can see, there are other kinds of shapes as well. So it's up to you what for shape you're looking for That's choose to bow for right now. When we look at this ball, it looks like just a normal sphere, but that's not totally true. If I duplicate this sphere. You can see that as soon as I move the way they kind of start to blend together like clay. But you also can see this a bit like is water or fluid in a 0 G environment, so in space. So this also could be quite handy for some kind of fluid simulations. If you click on top, which is edit, we can see two circles. The inside is the influence circle, and the outside is the selection ring. We can change all of these settings inside the object data properties of the metabolic itself. Here we have a resolution, a render, an influence. Let me make this bigger influence thresholds. And we can update on Edit, we can put it to always, or we can change it to whatever we want. Now, right now, the resolution is what we can see here. So the resolution field board is 0.4. And we can obviously see that it's not that smooth. If you put this lower, it gets more and more smooth. If you put it higher, it gets more blocky and rough. This is the resolution viewport. So only this will be shown in the viewport. If you've rendered, actually does the resolution render. So often we put this, yeah, we can put it quiet low, maybe 0.1. But in the render, you might want to have even more detail. So 0.05 depending on your computer, right? We can also change this to whatever. But in general, we don't really want to see any block Enos. The influence threshold inferences, all metal balls as we can see, if I put this lower or higher, then we have texture space, which is not that necessarily right now, but an active element. We could still change the type, right? We can go to capsule or a cube. And you can change this for metabolic, right? So there's still combined with each other, but every metabolic could be a different kind of type. We also have a stiffness. You can see that the inner share go here, which is the influence circle, gets bigger or smaller. And we also have a radius. But you can also just scale a metal ball up with our normal S short key. If you want, you can even make it negative. All right, so now it cuts away from this metabolic or we can just hide it if you don't want to see it at all. Very, very handy. And those are all the options for the metal balls. 15. Dispersion Metaballs: 3D Modeling + Animation: In this video, we're going to create the metabolic model and animation. Let's get started. We're going to delete this default cube and click on Shift a to add a metal ball. I'm going to choose the metabolic, but you can choose any shape that you like when having this method ball here, we can literally just duplicate it. If Shift D to add another metal ball, it instantly starts to react with each other as some kind of clay. As you can see. We can scale it up or down and we can start to create the model that we have in mind. However, the resolution is still quite low. So I would like to go to the object data properties of this metabolic or of these metal balls. Because if you change something here, off the metal balls that are connected with each other will be affected. So let's change the resolution few ports to 0.1. And now you can see that we have way more detail. The Render should also be 0.1 or maybe even lower, right? So 0.05 might give us an even more crisp results. Let's now scatter multiple of these metal balls on top of this big one to create a cool looking 3D model. I always like to create some decent randomness. So scaling up or scaling it down and also moving your models around in multiple kind of yeah, fuse, right? Because if everything is just done around a particular axis, you can see that it's just all straight here. So that is not about ions. But of course this is all up to you. It is art. So just create whatever you think looks cool. When you're happy with your result, we can start to think about the little bubbles inside. So Shift a and let's add a UV sphere. I'm going to click on Z and then do wireframe. Now I can scale this little sphere down and I'm going to do exactly the same. Just scattered more of these fears around, move them around and scale them up and down to create a randomness in also these little air bubbles. Now I actually want to join all of these spheres together. So not a metal balls but just the spheres. So select them here. Then click on Control J to join them together because this is later on going to be easier when applying materials. Before we're going to animate this are highly suggest. You also save this because if anything goes wrong, we can always jump back. So File, Save As, and save this file. Let's start animating. Before we're going to animate this metal balls, I first want to show you how a normal animation would work and what kind of technique that we're going to use to make it actually more random and also a bit easier. I'm going to turn off all of these metabolic for right now, just to show you how I would animate just a cube. So when you start animates, you of course have your timeline. And we can see here that we start at frame one. Then we can insert a keyframe. So if you click on AI, you can choose if you want to keyframe around the location, rotation or scale. Or of course, you can do some stuff together. So logos, your rotation, logo should rotation scale or whatever. Let's do location. Then often you choose an end frame, so maybe around for 80. I want this animation to be done. Then I want my cube here to move around the x-axis. Then click on here, i, and then location. So from frame one to frame AT, we get this locational shifts, right? It goes from here to here. Very simple. Now, you can actually see in the graph editor. So if we go to graph editor, you can kinda see how this animation works with these curves. So normally, to already make your animation a bit more smooth, blend automatically creates a bell-shaped curve in between these key frames. So you can see here that the x location, which is this whole animation here, has a certain curve to it. We can change this curve as well, so I can move it over here. And now you can see that animation looks totally different, right? So you can actually do quite cool stuff with this. You can even change the interpolation mode when going to key and going to interpolation or just click on T, you can even change the easing or the dynamic or future. So if you choose bounds, for instance, you have to select the first one here, t bounds. They can see that we get a bouncing effect in this curve. So now the animation will look like this. Alright, Very, very cool. So that is how we normally would animate and that is how these curves work. But in this case, we are going to actually use modifiers. So I'm not going to have this second keyframe here. I will just delete it. But we're gonna go here to the side. You saw this arrow, arrow here, right? So if n, You can always kind of collapse them or open them. But here we have a modifier section and we are going to add the noise modifier in this noise. As you can see, we'll create noise around, in this case the X location, right? Because that is what we chose. So that is how we're going to animate this. Now let's just quickly start with animation. I like to go to the animation tab as well. Here we're going to add a empty. So click on Shift C to make sure our 3D cursor is perfectly in the middle. Then click on Shift a to add an empty plain access. We need to scale this bit up. And then I'm going to select all of my spheres and metal balls. And as last is empty, you can see that the last selected object is a bit orange and the other ones are more red. Now click on Control P to set parent object. So now all of these models here, the metal balls and the spheres are parented to this empty. And if I move the MTR rounds, rotate it, move it, or even scale it. You can see that all of these models will follow. This means that we just need to animate empty and everything will follow. Very, very simple. Go to frame one and insert keyframe rotation. We only need to animate the rotation in this case. As you can see here, we're using this dope sheet, but we also want the graph editor, in this case. Now, for the graph editor, we don't have anything. They're just straight. That is because we just insert a normal key-frame without adding an extra keyframe or whatever. But we can start to add modifiers to each one of these eula rotations. You can also see these rotations here. So here you can see that if I manipulate the extra rotation, this rotation or this will happen for the y. It's this one and this one. So let's click on X, click on this little arrow, and go to modifiers. Let's add a noise modifier. And I'm gonna make this a bit bigger just so you guys can see all of these options here. So here is our noise. And you can scroll in or out with your scroll button or even hold control and the middle mouse button. So click it in and then drag your mouse up and down to compress this a little bit, because sometimes it's a bit hard to see what is happening. So you can also do that. Now, we want to play around with the scale, which kinda elongates this. Because if you have a very small scale, you can see as we get a very general kind of animation. But if you make it nice and big, it becomes nice and smooth, as you can see here. Now, for the strength, if we look at one of these high points in this curve. So you can see that this high points will actually reach 21.9. So 22 degrees around the x-axis. If you want it to rotate further, you just have to put the strength up. As you can see, that now this curve will become longer and we get 70 degrees instead of 22. Also here, if this is too long and you cannot really see it anymore, hold Control middle mouse button and then just move your mouse a bit down and you can see that now our fingers a bit cramped down so we can see it a bit better. This might be more of the results that you might like. This is totally up to you, but playing around with the skill, strength and maybe even the offset might be in your best priority to change this noise modifier. And this is how we can get a lot of cool randomness with just a modifier. We don't have to keyframe anything of this. So I would like to do this for every singer eula rotation that we have. So x, y, and z, Let's just add a modifier. Noise. Play if the strength and the skill and maybe even offset. Then look at the results that you've created. So I might want to put a bit more skill in here. Yeah, this already looks better in my case. Then also the z unit rotation at modifier, noise, strength. And skill should again go up. Here we get this cool effect. Also here you might think like, hey, these curves are a bit too much the same like each other rights. You could just put the offset on here and just make sure that the curves don't line up perfectly with each other. So here, this actually looks quite cool. So if you're happy with your model and your animation, then I highly suggest you go to the next video. I'll see you guys there. 16. Dispersion Metaballs: Rendering: In this video, we're going to create the material for this animation. I will be showcasing three different kinds of materials which all look relatively the same. One will be the simple class material. The second material is the simple dispersion material. And the third material is to advance dispersion material. Why do I do this? Well, class materials in general take long time to render. And this is why the first material will take the least time to render. The second one will take a little bit longer, but gives a visually more pleasing material. And a third one will take the longest of them all. But it also has the best visual results. You can choose yourself which one is the best for your PC and maybe the time that you want to run there. I also want you to know that any other material will still look great on this animation. If you'd rather have like a golden material or a rusty iron or a food, whatever. Then please skip this video and just run there with whatever material you would like to create. Before we are going to create any materials, we should create a little studio and get some decent lighting in the scene. So let's go to Shading. Here. I would like to go to my front view, which is one. Then we're going to create a plane. So Shift a and then create a plane. Scale this up, can be quite big. And then, um, we'll move a bit to the bottom. Now, I'm going to go into top, which is edit mode, and then select this edge loop here at the end. Extrude this upwards. Because we've scaled this up, we should go back to object mode and click on Control a while having this plane selected and apply the scale, because sometimes it works a bit weird with certain modifiers. Then I'll make sure I select this edge loop here and then go to the item. Therefore weights all the way up and make sure I add a bevel modifier. Let's put the amount of a tire plus the segments as well. But we need to put the limit method at weight. So here we can just put this up. And then right-click Shade Smooth. I would like to create more segments just so it's nice and smooth. You can also add a subdivision surface if you would like. But keep in mind that the corners will get smooth. So select all of the outer edges here. They click on Shift E and drag all the way to the right to make sure it's nice and sharp. This is a little studio. We should also make sure that our camera is in the right position. So we've clicking one, we are in a front view, then select the camera, go to few, Align View and align active camera to view. Our active camera jumps kind of in the fume, but it's not perfect yet. So the x and the z axis should be at 0. And then with the y, we can zoom in and zoom out if you would like to. So around here should be fine. The next thing is to make sure that our lighting also looks good. So if we go to our Viewport Shading rendered, we can see that it is quite dark. Now, this is because there's just one light in here, which you might not even use this one. So we could delete it at this point and just see what we have. It is just a total gray mess. So let's go to the shader editor and change the object two worlds. Here we can add an environment texture. We can drag this environment texture into the background. Now, we can open on a juror I also here you can choose your own HDRI, but I'm going to use the Kiara interior. Now. This Kiara interior has a lot of colors to them, and I personally made them black and white. You can easily do this with just adding an extra color ramp. I'm putting it in between the KR interior and the background, which makes it black and white. Plus, it also makes everything a bit more soft. Now, if you go to the front view, we can also create our first material, which is the simple glass material. We can select our metal balls, go back to Object, and just click on New to create a new principled shader. This is going to be our simple glass material. We can change this ECT. We just need a transmission all the way to one and the roughness to 0 or maybe 0.01. Awesome. So this is a very, very simple material. And when we start to render, you can see that we have a decent results, but the studio should still be changed. This studio is actually going to be a nice and black material, so just make it quite dark. You don't have to go all the way to black, but dark is fine and put a roughness also quite high. We're still inside E V, So I would like to change the render engine to cycles and make sure we use the GPU. But you can see that our materials still looks quite dark, isn't as bright as I showed in this preview images. So let's select the studio. What we want to do here is we want to go to the object properties of the studio. Go to visibility. And I will turn everything off except the camera visibility. So now we get the results that we like. And we can always add one extra light if you would like some extra reflections. So just click on shift a to create an extra light, which is going to be a point light moved here to the top. And here we can use notes to make sure that you've can play around with the strength. But I would also like to go to the object data properties of the slides. And then we can also play around with the radius, right? So a bigger radius gives us a bigger kind of reflection on here, which I personally like as you can see here. Alright, so those are very cool reflections that you can add to your animation. This already looks way better. The only thing that we have to do here is also make sure that our little bubbles here have the same glass material. So simple glass, and now we have small little bubbles in here as well. So this is our first material. It looks quite decent. But if you want more dispersion in here, then I would highly recommend you create the next material. For the next material, I, first of all, I want to create a little bit more space just so we can see all the notes necessary. Now, I would like to explain that the basic less material that we just created has no dispersion. This helps if the render times, but with the next two materials, we do need dispersion. So what is dispersion? When a light and a new medium, like water, it's path for band. And the larger the index of refraction of the new medium, the more the light will bend. But when we send a white light is composed of all visible wavelengths. Colors will disperse separately. This is called dispersion. This happens because the wavelength of each color is different. Thus, they will disperse at a different angle. Now you have the option to create the simple dispersion material or skip forward in the video and create the advanced dispersion material. When we think about the basic colors, we have, red, green, and blue. So let's create tree glass materials with red, green, and blue. So Shift C, Shift V, shift, Shift V to duplicate them. This one is going to be all the way rat. This one is going to be all the way green. And this one is going to be all the way blue. We do not need the principled shader in this case. Then we are of course going to add these shapes together so the red and the green is going to be added together, and this creates this. Then we're going to create just another add shader and then join these together as well, which gives us a nice and white material. But what we're gonna do here is we will change the index of refraction for each color. Because as I said before, the index of refraction per wavelength is different. The index of refraction for this class material at red, we will keep at 1.45. But the green one, we can change to 1.5. And this blue one we can change to 1.55. So for each one of these materials, we have a IOR difference of 0.05. And here we can see that the dispersion is happening already. Very, very cool. The thing is, we might need some extra light in this background so the world to make this pop even a bit more so maybe the strength of this background should be 1.5, or even to make these colors pop out a little bit better. Well, here we can see that we get this very poor dispersion technique. To showcase this material a little bit better. I would like to hide my metal balls. You do not have to do this, but I just want to showcase it. And I will add a sphere here with this material applied to it. What we can see here is a simple dispersion which we just created. So this creates a school dispersion effect. This already looks better than just our normal simple glass material, as you can see here, which has just no dispersion, right? So this looks way cooler. But there is also an advanced material. This at fence material, we'll take a long time to render. So keep that in mind. If you do not want a very long time to render than just stay with the simple dispersion or even glass, right? So keep that in mind. Now. There's less material is created by CG vertex. The total breakdown and download of this material is also available on his YouTube channel. It is a very, very well done video and YouTube channel in general, South highly suggest you also look at that. To create this new material, we need to create a glass material, but we need to separate the refraction and reflection. So just duplicate this or create a new material. And what we want to do here is we want to create a refraction and a glossy, which is our reflection node, right? So glossy and refraction. Then let's add a mix shader and join these two together. We can also join this to the surface of the material outputs. As less we will add a final note. This fact goes into effect of the mix shader. So now we essentially just have a glass shader. I forgot to explain that. You can also play around with the glossy roughness. If you want a very shiny and non rough objects you put it, of course is 0. Or if you want the opposite, you put it to one. But you can even add an image texture with a crunch node, right? So maybe some scratches in here, some flag that goes into the roughness, and then we have some scratches on here. So all of that is also possible with playing around with this roughness. To modify the refraction, we will use a white noise texture. So white noise, we can set this to two D. And I would like a texture coordinate nodes in here to make sure that the generated is plugged into the factor of the white noise. Now, we will use a color ramp so we can create the colors that are needed. Value goes into effect of the color ramp, and the color goes into the color of the refraction out. Now, the beginning and the end stop should both be black. So just turn this to black. We will add three more stops, and now we will evenly distributes these three stops to red, green, and blue with the value of four. So select the second stop here. This is going to be red and value of four. This one is going to be green at a value of four. This one is going to be blue at a value of four to evenly distribute this, just click on this arrow down here and click on distribute stops evenly. Now let's add a map Range Node. Let's connect the value of the white noise texture to the value of the map range knelt. And the minimum can be set at 1.4 and the maximum at 1.5. This result will go into the IOR of the refraction. And here we already get this very cool effect. You can see that these colors are starting to blend better. Possibly can get this fishbowl effect. To make this a bit more user-friendly, I would like to add to value nodes. One to the top value node will be the IOR of the glass, which can be set at 1.4. If you're using a different kind of medium, then you can just set that IOR for it. The bottom one will be the amount of refraction. So we can start at 0.2 and then change it to our needs. We should add these nodes together if a math nodes, and you can see that the math note is automatically set at ad, so that is good. Both of these will be added here. This value goes in the two max. The IOR of the class, which is the top value, will go into the two minimum. And we also need to connect this one to the front. Now note, here we get this awesome effect. So you can literally just play around with the amount of dispersion that you would like to have, right? There is one more thing that we can add to make this even more realistic. When we look at this sphere here and get these dispersion of these colors, we can see that every color is right now evenly distributed. That is not necessarily the case in real life, because every single color has a different wavelength. And the distribution of these wavelengths is not in a straight linear line, it is more a curve. So if we just move this a bit up here and recreate an RGB curves, we've trow, It's in-between the white noise texture and the map range right underneath the color ramp, we can both make them a bit bigger, just so we can showcase it a bit better. Here with these curves, we can essentially say like, hey, I want more of this blue. So I'm going to create a curve that essentially shows more of the blue, a little bit less of the red. So the red can still go up a bit. We don't want like naan bread, but a bit more blue than red is more realistic. And of course, you can still make this value more. But here we can see that it is a little bit more blue than red. And you can still play around with these curves, but that is essentially more realistic. So just look what you think is interesting. But this is essentially the entire material. So now you can start rendering and hope to see your renders a very soon and make sure to also check out the next animations. Bye-bye. 17. Pink Clouds: Introduction: Welcome to this video. In this video series, I'm going to teach you how to create this amazing render. So what are you going to learn? You will learn how to create this amazing looking clouds. Not only are you able to create any kind of shape of clouds with this technique, but of course also color and density. So you could even create a little bit of a missed. Now, if we want to make this scene, we also want to create or put in some models. These three models that you can see here are from the botanic add-on. You can use this botanic add-on because there is a free trial version. And this free version still has lots of free models for you to use. If you want to use any other kind of model. That of course, is also possible. After we have created the clouds and imported the three models, then we can start to render and composite this image. So how do we do this? Well also that will be quite simple. As you can see, I have two little sections here, the background and the Render Clouds, and those will be combined. And that is everything that you need to create this awesome render. So let's first start to talk about the botanic add-on. If you do not want to use this add-on, that I would highly suggest you just go to the next video and start creating this render. The botanic add-on needs to be downloaded and installed. If we look here in Google and you just type botanic blender, then you can see a link to the blender markets. When you click on the link, you can see that there are multiple options here to download. Now, we're going to use the free version of botanic. If you purchase this, then you can essentially download the zip file. You do, however, need to create an account. Alright, so here, Edit, then you got to go to Filter cards. And here you can continue to check out, which then leads your account, email and password. After you have done this, you will download the add-on, which is a zip file. Then you can go into Blender, click on Edit Preferences. And here we can go to add-ons to install our new add-on. The add-on in my case is called botanic underscore free, 6.60. This could be different for you depending on what your downloads. But right now we select it and click on install add-on. We have installed this add-on, as you can see down here, but we still need to activate it. So if you go to this little search bar in the add-on section, we can search for both there, Nick. Here, you can just take this on and wants a strict on safe preferences and click away. Right now, we can just go here, polygon IQ. And here we can spawn our assets. Right now we have the category coniferous. This is a type of tree. You can see that there are different kinds of threes, because this is the free version. We do not have all of them available for us. So the grayed out versions, you essentially need to pay for them. These, however, are free. There are also different categories. So here, in this case we chose Tropical and then click on Okay to insert this in your scene. So now you know a little bit of help authentic verbs that are way more options that you have here. You can also import grass and already randomly generated. But right now we'll just start with a simple tree and we will see what the future brings. So if you want to continue, please jump onto the next video so you can start to create some clouds. I see you guys there. 18. Pink Clouds: 3D Modeling: So here we are with a brand new blend file. And the first is I want to do is put the camera in position. So let's delete this cube. Select a camera, go to the front view, which is one. Then click on View and align active camera to view. To check up if it's really good, like in position, you can always go to your item here while having this camera selected and check the x and the z axis, there should be at 0 plus only the x-axis should be at 90 degrees. From here, we can start building our clouds. Now, before we're gonna do that, I would love to show you how these clouds work and how we can create any kind of shaped cloud that we want. So what we can do Shift a, and we can just choose a fun yeah, object. So let's do this monkey, which is the Suzanne hats. Then we're going to click on Shift a again. And here we will add a volume empty. Let's go into the modifiers of this volume empty. And here you can see that there are only three kinds of modifiers. We're going to use the mesh volume. And here we can select any object that we have. In this case, Susanna, the monkey hat. Then we can hide our object. And here we have our cloud. Susanna. Awesome. Right? Now, if you go to random properties, you need to make sure that you are in the right render engine. In this case, I would highly suggest you go to cycles and use a GPU because that is just way better, especially when working with volume metrics. Then you can go to the random viewport shading. Here we can see that it's kinda looks like a cloud, but not really, right, so we need some better lighting in here. We can easily add some extra lighting. When we go to shading. When you are in shading, make sure you go to World and add an environment texture here and environment texture and just drag it into the background. Now, we can open this, and here we can open any kind of HGRI. Why huffing is selected. Make sure you go back to the rendered viewport shading and maybe go into the camera view. Right here we have our little clouds. I might want to make this background transparent. And if you also want to do that, you can go to the random properties, film and then transparent. Now we can focus on this cloud. So let's go back to the modifier properties. And here we have these options here. You can play around with the density already here, but I personally like to do that inside the materials. If you create a new material for this volume, you automatically get a principled volume nodes. And here we can change the density also, right? So that's actually quite cool. We can change the color, we can change density, or you could even do temperature, blackbody intensity, and a mission as well. But I will leave those for something else. Those are more for if you have like flames, then we have a certain emission. But now we just have a normal density and we can choose our color. So what do we have here is the monkey head, but you can see that it's quite square and blocky. That is because our mesh here should have a higher amount. So if I do this times four, you can automatically see that we get way more detail in our volumes, right? So that is actually very important. So I could do this times two again, and it will get a higher and higher detail. So this is quite important later on as well. You should keep it quiet high, but keep in mind, putting gets higher and higher will of course, require more off your computing power. So it might make your PC slower and of course make renders longer. So now that we know how to create some clouds, we can actually create the cloud shape that we want because we can use any shape that we would like to. And the cool thing about this is that we can still use the same volume section that we have created before. So this Suzanne hat, if we create now a UV sphere, for instance, I can go to the volume. And then instead of the Susanne had, I can select the sphere. And the sphere becomes, as you can see, the volumetric kind of material. So let's delete the sphere and Susanna. And now we can start to create the clouds. So let's just change this one-on-one to 3D viewports. So in the top one I have my camera view, and here on the bottom, I can just play around with my shapes. So what is a good shape for a Cloud? Well, because I want a big cloud seen, I actually want to use what is called metal balls. And if a metal ball, you just have a sphere, as you can see here, and it has a little circle around it. If we add another metabolic with Shift D, you can see that they can interact with each other. So this is a very handy way to actually create some cool looking clouds. Here. I'm just going to my front view for right now. And just select these clouds, can scale them, upskill them down, move them around. You can see that you can make it quite interesting looking shapes. So this just playing around with these metal balls for right now until you get a decent looking cloud shape. So if you're happy with your shape, we can start to look at the metabolic themselves. So here we have a metal ball. If you go into your object data properties of the metal ball, we also have a certain resolution. If you put this resolution lower, then you can see that it becomes more detailed. It does, however, create some more geometry. You can see the phase is down here, right? So we were at point for this, we're like 3 thousand phases. If I put it lower, you can see that it goes even 200 thousands or even in the millions. So it depends a bit on you're seeing. In my case, it doesn't change that much, but it's some cases it could actually be quite an extreme difference, right? So play with around with the resolution. Then you can convert it to a mesh if you like, the resolution that you have. So 0.4 seems to work okay with me. And then I can select one of the metabolic, go to Object, comfort and uncover to mesh. So now this is a mesh instead of metal balls. However, as you can see, this geometry is kinda weird and it's not really perfect for some displacements which we might want to add, right? So how do we do this? Let's go to the modifiers, click on Add Modifier, and choose decimate. In the decimate modifier, we can essentially choose to triangulate everything. And if you go on top, you don't really see a difference. But if you go to Z and into wireframe mode, they can kinda see what will happen. So we need to put the racial lower. And if I put a ratio at around points, move 0.6. You can see that first of all, the main reason why you use the estimate is sorted. We can put the face count lower. The lower I put this ratio, the less geometry essentially will have. But you also risk of losing certain shapes. So you don't want to put it too low, but we want to put it a bit lower just so we can actually, yeah, I have some decent geometry for some displacement. I'm going to put it at maybe 0.5 and then apply this. And if I now go into top, you can see that all of this geometry has been changed. Awesome. If we now subdivide this, you can see that we have a decent, like it's not perfect, but a decent geometry for the displacement. So let's add a displacement modifier as well. Here. Once you use a displacement modifier, we essentially need to apply a texture to it. So if you click on New and you can find this texture in here. Or if you just click on here, it also jumps to the texture. Then we can essentially play around with the texture. Right now the type is imaged or movie, but we want to change this to clouds. And here we can see that this black and white or gray scale map is now influencing the displacement. And to make this more cloud-like outbreak, to put this size way up. And here you can see that we get more of a randomness in our clouds, which is what I actually want. If you're happy with your displacement here, you can go back to your modifiers and you can also play around with the strength if you would like to. But as you can see, this texture, because rename as this place. This texture can be found here and we can always, still edit this. That is the kind of strength of modifiers, of course. So this is now our base model. And this base model is not a volume yet. So let's go to the Volume object and select this new clouds or MBO as our new volume. We can hide this metal ball from the viewport and the render because we're just going to focus on the volume anyways here and we go back to the rendered viewport shading. You can see that we have a way cooler kind of cloud shape. This cloud shape is however decent, but I would like it to look more like a cloud that it needs to look more fluffy, less full. And of course, the voxel amount needs to be changed as well, but that can all be done quite easily. So the cool thing about this volume empty is that it has modifiers and we have a volume displaced modifier. It works the same as a normal displacement ball of fire. But in this case, it works with the volume metrics. So if you click on view, we can again go to this texture. And this is going to be again, a nice cloud texture. Also here, I would first like to put the size way up so we get some more random displacement in here. Go back to the modifiers. And here you could also play around with the strength. In my opinion, one displacement or about we actually have two displacements is not enough. So I would like to add in another one. And with this displacement, we're just gonna go a little bit lower in the size, right? So maybe this week is going to be 0.5. And you can always put the strength and maybe a bit lower. But here we have more and more randomness. So as you can see, this cloud is coming together piece by piece. There are some things that needs to be changed still, but it is already coming together. The next thing that I would like to do is go back to shading and make sure that the density is way lower, right? This is just way too dense. Maybe. Start with five. Actually looks quite cool. Color also want that to change a bit more of a light pink. Here we already are starting to get a decent seen. Also as you guys already know this background. So the environment method we choose has a huge impact on how the scene actually looks. So I would highly suggest you go to Poly haven.com. And here there are loads of free edge your eyes. You can just download them and put them in your scene. For a kind of a Clouds, I would highly suggest you go at least to outdoors, right? That makes sense. And I feel like scenes where there is a big sun here, like a big focal point of light, works the best. Otherwise, you don't really get any nice shadows in the clouds themselves. And also once you have an ace your eyes. So let's say I have this Roy Park, HGRI, the position of this agent or I also matters. So right now I made everything transparent. But if we look here, we can always add a texture coordinate from generated to the mapping nodes. And here we can rotate this HDRI and this rotation, as you can see, thus a lot through your scene. So you can see that in the back it starts to rotate around where the light or the sun is positioned is quite important. You should also not be afraid to maybe add even an extra light. This light that we have here is just a normal point light, which is fine. But if we change this to a nice sunlight, we of course do need to put the strength down, so let's put it to maybe five. I'm going to use notes. And also the position of this lamp or light is quite important. If you put it in a bag, we get a very nice little glow or rim lights in the back as you can see, right? So with this on or off, you can see that also with extra lights, you can make your, your clouds pop even more out. Lighting is very important. Of course, your materials are important, so your density, the colors that you want your clouds to be at. And of course, the shape of the clouds themselves, which we did with the metabolic themselves. Then we displaced the metal balls. Then we made this a volume inside the volume empty. Here we added two more displacements. So that is why we get all of these cool shapes here. So now that you know how to create a decent looking clouds, we can go to the next video. In the next video, I'm going to teach you guys how we can add some models to the scene using the botanic add-on. And then we can start to render and composite this image. I see you guys there. 19. Pink Clouds: Compositing: So now that we have the clouds ready, we can also insert the three models. If you click on n, You can see that this little section comes up and we want to go to polygon. You spawn assets. You can see that we have multiple categories and I want to choose the tropical kinds. And then just the first one. Click on Okay, and here we just added a tree. It is that simple. If we go here into the 3D view port, we just have a little bit more control. I will scale this down. Here. I will go in my camera view so I can see how high up we can go. This actually seems decent. I want to rotate it a bit as well. And then duplicate your tree. Move it over, make sure you, by the way, rotate this around. Otherwise you just have an immediate duplicate next to it. It just looks very weird, so make sure you rotate it around so it looks like an actual other tree. Here. I'm also going to play around with the scale a little bit. Here we have our two threes. If you're now not happy with your clouds, you can, by the way, still change them. So let's say I want to see more of this tree, but putting it higher, it's not really a solution because then I can't see it anymore. The thing is, you can just start to edit your M ball here and that will automatically change when your volumes. So you can just go to the N bar. You can go into sculpting. And now we can literally just sculpt the way some pieces that we might not want. So let's say, I don't really like this part here. Alright? Or maybe I want some extra here, right? So all of this is possible if you go back to your, let's call it the shading, put your volume on hydro m bar. You can see that automatically it has been changed. Cool, right? As we have some cool shadows here and we can see more of the tree. It is very editable even later on. So even just before rendering, you can still change your clouds. To render this, we need to go to our volume. And here we want to play around with the foxhole amount. So low Fox or amounts, as you can see, creates a very blocky and weird results. So we want to of course, make this higher. Maybe like 600 voxels will do. But it totally depends on how good your policy is and how long you want to run there as well. Now, if you go to the random properties, we have multiple things that we need to take care of. If you did not make the background transparent yet, then now it's the time to do, because we do need a transparent background to help us with the compositor. So let's go to film and click on transparent. Then if you go here to the volumes, we also have a certain step rate. Lower step rates are higher-quality volumes. So you might want to put this at 0.8. But keep in mind also, this does have a huge impact on your render time. So lower is better, but it will make your random times way longer. And as last, we have light paths and enlight paths. You can see that volume is automatically set at 0. Let's put this at four, so it's the same as the diffuse and glossy. Now when light passes through volumes, it will actually also start bouncing. The only thing you have to do is to click on F 12 to start to render. So this is the final render. I'm going to save this and then we can open a new blank file and start to composite in there, image safe S. So here we are in a new blend File. Let's go to the compositor and use notes to start composite image. We first need to delete a random layers and add an image nodes. We can connect this to the composite and open our previously rendered image. Now, if you hold Control and Shift and select this lesson, you can see that we end up with our render, right? So it's essentially just shows us in the backdrop. V. We can zoom out. With Alt V. We can zoom in. Then what does the first thing that we see? We have cool clouds and we have a decent seen, but we don't have any background. So it just looks weird. We can add a very simple and easy background with just adding an RGB node, putting this to maybe to blue, and then using an Alpha over nodes and combining these two images together. Now you can see that we have a backgrounds, but these corners here are quiet, weirdly and ragged, right? These edges, if you click on comfort, pre-multiplied, this goes away and we have a decent looking scene. However, if you want your background to be even more interesting, I would suggest maybe adding some extra clouds. So in my case, I actually did not use an RGBA node. I actually used another image. Note, here, I opened a cloud texture. I got this texture from a website called Pexels. You can download them here for free. And you want to look for a grey, black and white image of clouds. Alright, so what you can do is you can just open it here and then we can use this as the background. However, there are some problems that we have here. First of all, we might want to change the size. It doesn't really matter per se with the render. Because if I would render this, you would still see that it only ran this the part that we want anyways. But because this is so zoomed out, we might lose some detail in the background. But if a transform nodes, we can just put the scale a bit lower. And now we have some more detail in our image, right? So if Alt V, We can zoom in, and here we have some better looking clouds. But it looks quite dark and dull, right? All these nice pink little crowds that we have here. This doesn't matter if the background. So how can we change this? It is actually quite simple. We just need to move this a bit backwards and use a mixed node in-between the transform and the Alpha over. We can put this to multiply, and here we can change the color to just a nice and blue color. So this is one of the ways that we can do this. But the dark blues or just a bit too dark. So adding an extra color ramp in-between the transform and the newly added mixed nodes. Here we can essentially change the darkness of these parts. So if you select this dark handle here and just make it a bit more bright, you can see that now everything what does dark is brighter. So this automatically will also impact the colors as you can see here, right? So we can put this a bit brighter and at essentially will look like this. This already looks better. I personally thought that even this was a bit too doll. Maybe I want a nice gradient from another color. So if you use a color ramp, you might think like, hey, I'm just going to add a color ramp. Change this to nice and blue, and this one here to maybe a purple. The problem here is that these just get mixed, right? There is no gradients and we also do not have a gradient nodes. But if we just add a texture nodes and use the color into the back, then add actually a texture. So we need to go down here, create a new texture. We can use blends, and this blend texture is essentially a nice gradients. So now that you have created this texture, you can click on here in this node and just select this texture to be used. Now, we can change this texture as well. You can do it down here in the colors with the brightness, contrast, saturation. But you can even change the orientation because right now it's horizontal. You can change to vertical. You can even change it from regression, from linear to maybe spherical. Write a lot of things can be done here. Let's actually keep it at linear for right now. And I'm going to put it at vertical ends. But you also can do, you can still move these handles around. If I want a little bit more blue, I just moved this blew up. And here we get this very cool kind of change in color. So that is one way to make the background more appealing. Now, we also do not want this background to be too bright because then there's no focus anymore on our nicely created clouds. So just keep that in mind as well. There are lots of things that you can do extra here, but if you're happy with it, I would highly suggest you just select all of these nodes. Click on Control J to join them together. And now when you click on nodes, here, we can change this label so we could rename it to background. And here we have it nicely into its own little section. Here for this particular section, which is our nice clouds. Here we might want to add some ways too, edit the clouds themselves. So personally I might like to use a D noise. I love to the noise my images because, you know, we all hate noise. The thing is that this node is actually quite slow. So if I change anything here, it still needs to redo the denoise every time. I personally like to add it, then select it and click on em to mute it. It will still be in the scene, so you can just unmute it at anytime, but it doesn't need to calculate it everytime. You will maybe change a color. Just make sure before you start to render that you unmute this again. Now, I want to add a filter nodes. And in this filter note, I just want to soften my image. So if we look at these three is here, you can see that without this filter that they have this kind of sharpness. And with it on, it looks like this. So you kinda want to find a middle ground. You don't need to soften it all the way to one, right? So maybe 0.4 could be fine. Then I want to duplicate this node, which is a filter notes and just use a box sharpen. Now it's sharpens everything again and makes it nice and sharp around the edges, but we don't want to overdo this as well. So maybe 0.15. This already looks quite decent. If you want to change any of the colors, that is also totally possible. You can use hue and saturation. You can use the color balanced node as well to change the colors here a little bit or balanced the mouth. All of that is possible with those kindness with notes. And maybe at the end, you want to use an RGB curves. Here. We can just make a nice little curve here to make everything pop a bit more awesome, right? Also this can be joined together Control J, and this will be our clouds. Unmute the denoise nodes. And here you want to make sure that your last node is connected to the compositor as well. And then you can start to render with F2, which will not take that long. And here is our final rendered image, Derek. Alright. So I hope you guys learned a lot from this and see that actually, once you start to get used to the compositor, it actually makes your image is way better, but also it's not as hard as it might look in the beginning. I hope you guys learned from this and I see you guys in the next video. 20. Planet: Introduction: In this video, you guys will learn how to create this awesome animation. However, you can also just rather a still image because this animation does take a long time to render. And to be honest, it is just a, you know, 360 degrees rotation. So the animation is not debt heart, right? So just a still image render. We'll also do. If we look at our blend scene, you can see that it is actually quite simple. Now, if we click on 0, which is the camera view, and I'm just going to only focus on the Earth, the atmosphere, clouds, and also the sphere in the back can go away. Then we can see that we just have a simple texture, right? Then we will have some clouds on top, which looks like this. And of course we have a nice atmosphere with a volumetric material. Now, as last, we have a light here in the back. And if you look at this, you can see that it doesn't look at all like the random that I just showed you. But when we go to the compositor, you can see a whole different kind of render. And the composite that looks like this. It is quite messy. We should clean it up a bit, but I just want to show you that all of this awesomeness is just possible in a composter inside Blender itself, we do not need any other program in this particular video. So if you guys want to learn this, then I highly suggest you go to the next video to create this awesome looking around there. 21. Planet: 3D Modeling + Materials: In this video, we're going to create the Earth, clouds, and atmosphere. You will create the models which are very, very simple, but we will also dive into the materials. Let's get started. The first thing that we want to do is delete this default cube and we're going to add a UV sphere. This UV sphere is already the Earth model. Very simple. So just rename this model to Earth. Then. Let's add a subdivision surface modifier. We can put the levels viewport to react to. But in the render, I would like to go a bit higher to maybe even four or five. Right-click Shade Smooth to make everything nice and smooth. Let's go to Shading. Click on New. And this is going to be our earth materials, so we can just rename it to earth or earth material. And then next thing that we wanna do is we want to start and add our first image texture. So just drag this in, click on Open. And here we can go to Planet to add the Earth Day map texture. You can get this texture in the files that I provided, or you can go online and go to solar system scope.com. And here you find all the textures that we need. We by the way, do need all of them. Just download all of these five textures. I personally use the eight K, but of course you can also download the two gate if you want to know. If you select this note, you can click on Control T. So the texture coordinates and the mapping node will also be added. To actually showcase this material a bit better, we first need to go into the render engine cycles because that is what we're going to run the width at the end, the device. I would like to set it to the GPU. If we go to the camera view, which is 0, go into the rendered viewport shading. Here you can see that, yeah, the lighting looks a bit different, which is good. But the light that we have doesn't really look like I want it to be. So I would first like to move my camera a bit closer. So go to View, camera to view. Now we can just zoom in to move our camera a bit closer. So somewhere like this, I think will look cool. Yeah. Then make sure you take it off again because otherwise you might move it by accident. And now what I want to do, I'm just going to change this bottom editor very quickly to the 3D few parts. Just so we can move some stuff around, then select the lights. We want to change the slides. So let's go to the object data properties of the slides and change this from points to sun. Right here we can see what it does. It changes to sun, which creates quite a different kind of lighting, right? But it's way too strong. You can see that the direction that we created almost loose white, right? So let's put the strength at ten for right now. Now, we want to put this light in a better position. So in this top one, I'm going to like to go to the camera view. Here in the bottom. I can just move the slide around, right? So I would like to have a nice shadow here, something like this, and a nice highlight here. So this already looks kind of like, I want it to look awesome. Now, we can change this back to the shader editor. So here shader editor. And I like to do this because if we play around with all of these notes, it's a bit easier to see it on such a huge space. Also for the slide, I would like to use notes. And here we can of course play around the emission and strength as well. However, I want you to keep in mind that this light, which is the sun, has just a white color. For a more realistic color, I would like to add a black body, drag this color into the emission, then change this temperature. Because right now the temperature essentially creates the color. We want to put this at 5800, which is more realistic to our Sun. Last thing that I wanted to do is go here into the world and put this color all the way at black. So now we have just this little earth in space. Very, very cool. Let's go back to Object and select this earth to finish our earth material. We can just duplicate it, this node, and then we can open the specular map. Let's drag this factor of the mapping node into this image texture and put the color into the specular. Make sure your color space is set at non-color, right? Because this is a gray scale map. Because this is a gray scale map, we can essentially see it as kind of a mask, right? And what we can do if this mask or what this mask does is the black parts of this map, which is the land, have no roughness, but we can still change the roughness of the sea, right? So that is very handy. I might put this at 0.6 for right now, we might change in the future. Then the last map that we need to create for this particular part of the material is a normal map. Normal map. We can drag this into here as well, is also a non-color data for color space. And this will essentially show some high detail. To combine this normal map, we first need a normal map, nodes. Right? Now we can put the color into here and a normal into the normal of the principled shader. Awesome. So what does this do? Well, essentially creates hide details, as you can see here. And we can play around with the strength to make this more noticeable. I might put it at 1.5. And this is essentially what we end up with. It still looks quite messy, but it will start to look better and better. And of course, most of the color of this render will be done inside the composite there. We just need to add one more image texture map. So I'll just open this Earth Night map texture. And we're going to use the emission of this. So we can just combine a mapping nodes into here and then add a mission shader. This color can go into the color of the emission shader. And we just need to mix these two shapes together with a mix shader node. So just this emission goes to the top one and a principled shader goes in the bottom one. And then we can just combine them both. And here you can see that in these lighter areas, the emission is not that noticeable because the light is essentially already shining on there. And in the dark areas it is very noticeable. So I personally really like that. Let's now add some clouds. The only thing we have to do is select this Earth. Click on Shift D to duplicate it, and scaled a little bit up with your S key. Now, we can rename this to clouds. And if this material I want to delete a material and click on New, then also this material can be renamed to Clouds. So keep in mind, the Earth is not gone. It's just that the clouds are now over it. How do we create these cool clouds? We literally only needs one image texture. So open this Earth clouds texture. Click or Control T to make sure that the texture coordinate and the mapping nodes are also applied. And here we just inserted a nice cloud texture. As you can see, this is a gray scale map, so a black and white map. And you guys already know that this can also be used as a mask. So why do we need to notice? Well, some parts here, I want to have transparent and the outer parts, I want to be nice and wide, just like clouds. So if shift a we can add a transparent shader. Then use a mix shader to mix the principled shader and a transparent shader together. Then we just have to use this texture as the mask, right? So put it into the fact of the mix shader. Make sure the color space is set to non-color. And what you could do is you could keep it at this. Or if you've got more control over the transparency, you can put a color ramp in-between here. Play around with that, right? So it's quite simple and quite intuitive. And that's how you can play around with the size of these clouds. The next thing that I would like to add is also some height detail. So with this texture here, we can also create high detail because it's a gray scale map, right? So if we just use a bump nodes, put the color of the gray scale map into the height of the bump node. And then put the normal of the bump node into the normal of the principled shader. What this bomb load does, as you can see, it creates a bumpy area depending on the whites and blacks of this image. So if we look at our clouds right now, you can see that they are very bumpy. In this case it's a bit too much. So you can just go down and strength here to make sure it's not overwhelming. But this already looks quite cool. So maybe 0.07 sovereign debt gives a decent result. That is essentially how we create these cool clouds around our earth. The next model is going to be our atmosphere. Also. This is just again, a sphere, right? So you can just duplicate the clouds. In this case, I want to hide the clouds and hide the Earth right now. And maybe scaled a little bit up. So this is going to be our atmosphere. So let's just rename this. Also delete the material and create a new material. It can rename this as well. So what do we do if the atmosphere, the atmosphere is going to be a follower metric material. So we do not need this principled shader at all. We actually will use a volume scatter node. And we can put this volume into the volume here. So this does take some render time. If you want to put your render time lower a don t want to render like volumes, then I would highly suggest you just don't do this, right? It doesn't make that much of a difference. If you want to have like a little eye for small details, then I would of course at this. But yeah, that's just all you need to know. It does add some extra render time. Now, for us volume, we do want a nice kind of a blue color, but we don't want this very sharp fall off here, right? So we need to create some notes to make sure that the follow-up is not that sharp. It is actually quite simple. We just need a gradient texture and we can put this grain texture into the density. Then with Control T, we instantly add a texture coordinate and a mapping nodes. However, the gradient texture should not be linear. We actually wanted at spherical, but it's not right in the middle. So let's make sure that in the texture coordinate, we're actually using objects. And now it's nicely into the middle. So we can change the size of this with the scale here. But the thing is, I don't really want to, you know, put this attitude and aptitude and this is too hard, it doesn't fit. So maybe 111, I don't want to keep doing this over and over. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to grab a vector math change to add to scale here. And now I'm going to put the factor in here. If you put this vector just all at one, you can literally play around with this skill and all of them will be scaled up at the same time, right? So it's a bit easier to work with. And that is essentially your material. If you want a little bit more. Control over the sides, you could also add a color ramp in here. With this color ramp, you can also play around with these corners if you want it to be. More often. Even the software fall off. You can use ease. You can pull these together, all of that as possible. But as you can see, it is sometimes a bit hard to see what's happening. So make sure you put your clouds and earth back. And now you can play around with the atmosphere and see how far you want the atmosphere to actually reach. So again, this is the scale of this atmosphere, so the scale of that sphere, but also how you play around with this color ramp and also the skill in here, right? So it is not that hard. I think I have one here. Put this one a bit closer and you can always do a little pre-render, okay? So that is always that there's no shame in doing a small little pre-render to see what is happening here. That is the atmosphere. So very, very simple. As last, we only want a nice bright star or sun in the back. Also, this is just going to be a UV sphere. Now, UV sphere can be quite small. Right-click Shade Smooth. Then we just put it somewhere back here, maybe a bit further back here, new material, there's gonna be a star, so we can rename this to star. Material can also be star. And this is literally just going to be an emission shader. Let's put it right now, or maybe 20. But later on we can see, yeah, if we need to change this strength, because sometimes in the composter you can see like, hey, I actually want more light in here because this has gone to create a whole cool bloom that we could see. And if you've got more or less, we can always go back here into the material. So this is how we create all the materials and of course, all the 3D models. In the next part, I'm going to show you how we can render this and play around with the compositor to create a more pleasing effect. I see you guys there. 22. Planet: Compositing: In this video, we're going to finalize the render. This means we need to render it and then jump into the compositor to make a more pleasing image. So let's first do a little pre-render. If I click on F2, you can see my pre-render jumping up. So if we look right now at this render, I gotta be honest, it looks quite ugly, right? We have a weird background which is just black. This star here doesn't make any sense. It's just a white sphere. The Texas look decent, but yeah, it doesn't look that good, right? And even the atmosphere looks kinda map. How do we change all of these? Well, first of all, we want to make sure that the background is going to be transparent. So let's go to the random properties, scroll down to film and make sure you click on transparent. So now if I would render this, now you can see that this is still transparent. So what next for the compositor is actually quite handy if you separate certain models. So in this instance, if we have this star, we want to put some effects on it. And we only want those effects to happen to the star itself. So we need to separate them. And there are multiple ways to do this. But in this case, we go to our few Layer Properties. Here we have passes data. Here we can actually click on object index. And if we now go to a specific object, so let's go to the star. We can go into the object properties of the star itself. Go to relations. And here we have a bass index. And with this pass index, you have the ability to kinda separate certain models as a mask in the capacitor. Let's say the star is going to be the best index one, the earth is going to be number two. Clouds is three. And I don't think the atmosphere would work, but we could make it for just to see what is going to happen. So now if you render, nothing will necessarily change, but we will later on see the best index in our composite there. So what else do we need to change? Well, you could take a quick look at your clouds. Are they too far away from this earth, right? So then you need to scale the clouds a little bit down. You can also take a look at your atmosphere. The atmosphere in our case, is a volumetric material. So here, of course you can play around in a material, but if you go to your random properties, you will also see a little section which has volumes. And in the volume you have a viewport and step rate in the Render. Both of these are step rates and the lower you put this, the higher-quality your volumes will be. It doesn't have to be high in this case at all because it's quite a simple volume. It is not like clouds or smoke. But putting this lower will get you a higher result. Be careful though it of course will take longer to render. And then as less what I want you to look at is, of course, your lighting. Your lighting is very important and the lighting, you can never change later on. So we can of course change our brightness contrast, but we cannot move our light around once it's already rendered. So if you like the position and the strength of your light, then I would suggest you go and start and render out your first image. Also with rendering out your first image, you need to keep a few things into mind. Of course, we need to be in cycles. I personally use the GPU because my GPU is just way better than CPU. The output, I also put my resolution at what I want it to be. So 1920 by 1080. And here the frame rate, we can always change it if necessary. So I personally like 30 in most cases because it's just kind of what we see on TV or movies TV, a lot of them are 30 frames per seconds. File format is also quite important. So it keeps a lot of colors intact. So I would like to choose the tiff and you can even go to the color depth 16. But yeah, in this case, I'm not gonna do that and we'll just start out with our first render. So click on F2 and just let it render out. This is our finished render. We can minimize this and go to the compositing tab. Here we want to use notes. You probably already know, but this is the random layers and this is the currently rendered image. If we hold Control and Shift and select this node, we have this viewer, so we can actually see it in the background. Now, this random layers has an extra little section here, which is the index obey. These are the indexes that we have created from every single model that we have. We can mask this out. Now. We want to create a sun flare. And we can create this with multiple blur and glare nodes. It is actually quite cool. But we first need to mask out this sun. Because if just use a blur nodes, you can see that if we just blur this out, then everything will be brought out and not only the Sun, right? So that is not what we want to do. We need an ID mask and this will be connected to the index obey. Then what we can see is this ID mask has indexes. And if you remember correctly, index number one was the sun, index to Earth, clouds, and the atmosphere. But as I already thought, the volumetric materials don't really work yet. So the index for is really nothing. So let's keep it at sandwiches index of one. And here we can start to play around to actually create that cool effect. The effect is quite simple. We just need a nice blur node. This helps us blur out this very sharp sun or startup they have right now. You can just put these pixels higher. You can do this in multiple ways. You can just do it with Gaussian. You can even do fast Gaussian or put this at relative and half a percentage. But I think right now the x and the y, just putting the pixels higher, actually works decent. But if you put these pictures higher and blow this out, you can see that this whole image gets darker, right? We do not really have a very bright star anymore. If however, we create a color ramp and put this after, what you can see is if you put this handle to the left, we get a brighter and brighter blur, right? So this is kinda what I want to achieve. Now we can finally start to think about the streaks of this flare. So let's add a layer nodes. And we can put this after the color ramp. And we have this glare node. We have a certain amount of streaks. So there are a lot of options here, but the streaks are essentially not showing up yet. That is because we first need to play around with these options. First of all, the threshold is very important. The glare field will only be applied to pixels brighter than this value. So if all the pixels are darker than this one threshold, you will have no streaks, right? So let's put this to 0. Right now we can see some streaks coming up and the iterations are actually quite important as well. So let's put this at five. Then. The fade is how much they will fade out. So if I put this maybe 2.95 instead of 0.9, you can see that we get some very cool fading effect. And the higher you put this, the longer these streaks go, then the amount of streaks are also quite important, right? So if I put this 216, we get a quiet of a different effect. And the last two things that we have to play around with, or the mix and the color modulation. The mix mixes the original image, which is just this mask with, in this case nothing. So what that does is it kind of fades everything a bit out. So there's mixed could be set at one which now shows this processed image totally, right? Which is, of course these streaks mix at one. You can also play around with the color modulation. This creates a very cool effect. So if you put it to move 0.6, you can see that we get some colors in here. You don't want to overdo this, but 0.6 or 0.7 might add a little bit of extra touch to this image. So this is one way to get a beginning kind of flare. Another way would be adding sun beams. If you select sunbeams, we can see here, we can put it also in the ID mask. We can see that nothing really happens. And that is because the array length is still set at 0, you need to put this ray length up. So let's put this to point to. Now we can see that's the, yeah, in the back that we get a ray length. And this length is being created from this cross points, right? So if we put this cross here where the sun is, then we get a very different effect. So you can just move this around. Let's put this here. And here we can see this very cool Sunbeam effect. Now, we can easily join these two together. So just as a mixed node set to Add, then puts the glare in here and the sunbeams in the bottom one will give us. This effect is already starting to look better than another cool effect. Could be if we grab this glare here. Let me put some beams down, connect the blur to this glare. And this glare will just have to streaks here too. Then let's put the fader bit higher. Let's add another blur note and put it F that is glare. So there's a little bit messy, we'll assume clean it up. But what we can do with this blur node is just puts the X a little bit higher to just smooth it out a bit more. Now if we join all of these together, so just add another add nodes. And I will just join this one here. And then the sunbeams goes after with this add nodes. Now, if we combine them all together, we get this cool effect. The only thing that we have to do now is combine this together with our original image. So how do we do this? Well, it is actually quite simple. We just need another add node here and just add this image with our other image. And here we have everything together. Another thing that I want to talk about is changing colors of a particular part of this image. So let's say the sun is normally not really just white. We could add a color balance node. Let's put it here. And here we can play around with the colors. So the color balanced node does it per section. So what it essentially does is lift is for the shadows, gamma is for the mid tones. And here we have gain, which is for the highlights. So here we can just literally just pick a color. So if I put this right here, we can see that this color is going to start to change. Very cool. Now, I see that my blender is a little bit slow, so I might put this too fast caution. This one as well. The streets too low. This will change the way that this looks. But later on, I'll go back into it again. But it's just a bit slow, so that's why I just put everything a bit lower. Now, you can see that you can change the colors here, right? So I could also put this one to maybe a red or orange. And that is one way to start and play around with these colors. So our image is starting to take form, but we are missing still a huge part of this image and that is the background. We don't have any stars or space in the background. So let's add that with an image nodes, we can add an image to the background. And I downloaded my image from Pexels. So I just looked for stars and searched for a cool image. I think I chose this one. Then inside Blender, you can just open your newly downloaded image. And here we have it. So how do we connect these two together though? We have this image and of course we have the background. We just need an alpha over alpha alpha and it goes in between here. Let me actually get rid of this composite for night now. And the image goes for right now. Let's do it in a bottom. And this background goes into the top. So now we can see that this image is laying on top of it and we have some very cool stars, however, are background, or I should say, My background is way too big, right? And that is not necessarily a problem, but we do lose a lot of detail if I keep it this big. So with a transform nodes, we can change the scale and even angle. So if I rotate this to 90 degrees and then put the scale to maybe 0.5. You can see that right now we have way more detail. I could even make it smaller. So maybe 0.3. 0.3 is a bit too small. 0.4 is fine and we will keep it at that. So as you can see, quite easy. Now, as last, I would like to add a bluish hue. So in-between the Alpha over and add, we can add another color balance, right? And this one just needs to be a bit more blue. So here I will go in the Gamma and Gain a bit more towards the blue. And here we are starting to get a more or a cooler effect. In my opinion. I'm also going to use a hue and saturation. And maybe put the saturation a little bit lower. Here we're getting quite a cool effect in my opinion. So if you're happy with your result, you can put the last node into the composite. Then you can start rendering your entire animation. Or if you just want one image than just one image, that is also totally fine. I hope you guys learned from this and I see you guys in the next video. 23. Retro Run: Introduction: In the upcoming few videos, you're going to learn how to create this animation. And as you can see, we're going to work with an infinite looping animation. There are multiple ways to create looping animations, and for every single one, you need a different technique. So I'm happy to show you the technique that I used for this looping animation. We're also going to use multiple scenes. So if we look here at our final render, you can see that it's quite empty still. Where is the sun? Well, in our second scene here, we actually have the sun and the animation. Both of these animations or scenes are rendered inside E Fi. This makes sure that animation does not take a long time to render at all. Also, we're going to use a very nice program or website, I should say, which is called Mixamo. Mixamo is from Adobe. You can just log in here and grab multiple of these characters for free. You can even change the animation and download them as an FBX file, then we can import that and of course render it as an animation. So if you look here, you can see that this is essentially our animation. So let's jump right into the next video so you guys can learn how to make this animation. 24. Retro Run: Animation: To start this animation, I would highly suggest you first look into Mixamo. Here you can just create your accounts. I just log in with Facebook, I think. And then we can start to browse characters. Here. You can choose any character that you want. But I chose the racer. It looks a little bit like an astronauts, especially if we just look at the back of this model. So if you look for eraser, you can also find it here. But you can choose what kind of character you would like. You can even upload your own characters. Then if you're happy with your character, you can go to animations and we can change to any animation that we think might fit quite well in this animation. I personally chose fast run. Fast run. We want it to stay in place. So it's just runs at the same place. Then I think it runs a bit too quick. So I'll put the overdrive a bit lower. And I want to make sure that at the overdrive, we can see here that there's 26 frames. In my mind, we need to make this loop a ball, and it might be a bit easier if we just find 30 frames. So I put the overdrive at three. Then we can start to download this. So if you click on download, you can download it as an FBX with skin. And here you can choose between 3060 or 24 frames per second. So I'll just do 30 for this case. And we don't need any key-frame reduction. So you can click on Download. Then once you have downloaded the file, you can see that it will just end up as an FBX file. Let's open a new blank file. And here what we want to do is we want to first start with for animation. Normally we don't really do this, but I want to show you how we make this loop bowl. So let's delete this default cube and we're going to imports. So click on File Imports, FBX, because we downloaded our little character as an FBX. Go to your FBX file, and then just double-click on your FBX file. And here we have our character. And you can see that it automatically has 30 frames applied to it. Awesome, right? Now. I also want a plane in here. This plane is going to be the size of our floor, right? Or for our grounds. So I actually want to scale down my character. So you can just select the armature and scale it down. So skill, and I'll do it 0 points, one. So it will be 1 tenth of whatever scale we just had. This will make the character nice and small and makes essentially this area or this floor bigger. Then I want to go to the front view, which is one, and make sure my camera ends up here. So few align, few align. Active camera view, select the camera and just to make sure it's in the right position. So I think it's good actually. But we can barely see it, so we need to move it closer around the y-axis here. So here we can see that the character is actually running thoughts us. So we don't want that. And I'm going to select the armature here, rotated around the Z axis for our 180 degrees, and then move it if g around the y-axis, a little bit closer to the camera. Perfect. So if we look from a camera view, we can see this right now. And we can move our camera in position so we can actually see this floor or less grounds and also the character. So you can move around the y-axis and of course the Z a little bit. And you could even have a little bit of a different rotation in here if you would like that. So software like this would work great. But how do we animate this? It is actually quite simple. Later on, we're just going to erase this floor, right? So this is going to be our wireframe floor. We're going to do, we're going to create an empty. Empty is going to be exactly in this spot. So I would like to select this edge, click on Shift S to put the cursor to select it. Now, if we go back to object mode, we can click on Shift a to also add a empty. We can do the plane access for right now. Now, we're going to select the camera, the armature of this little guy. And then as last empty, click on Control P to set parents to the empty. So two objects. Now, if we move this empty, we can see that the armature, and of course the camera will move with it. So we only need to animate the empty. We're going to animate it from the beginning of this wireframe floor to the end. So let's go to frame one. Click on AI and then do location. Then let's go to frame 60. Go into top. While having this wireframe floor selected, then select this edge and click on Shift S to put the cursor to that selection. Then go back again to the object mode. We have top and select this empty. Then click on Shift S once more to put the selection which is this empty to the cursor. So now the empty ended up in this bot. Click on AI to also insert keyframe at dislocation. So from frame one to frame 60, you can see our animation goes from the beginning of this wireframe floor to the end. I actually would like to put this frame here, this keyframe one. Let's put it to 0 so you can literally just select it here, so it's yellow and then click on G to move the rounds. This will help later on with making this loophole. So from frame 0 to 60 is the whole animation, which means we have 60 frames. Now, this animation looks decent, right? But the thing is, when we look at our graph editor here, you can see that our animation right now, as it normally is, has a big J curve to it. What that does is it speeds up our animation in the beginning, then it is quite linear, so you have the same speed here, and then it slows down. And this is because it makes these animations way more smooth. You can edit these. So if you select all your frames here with a, then click on t. We can make this interpolation linear snow. You can see it's just a straight linear line. Also, our nth frame should just be at frame 60, right? But now you can see that the animation is the whole time, the same speeds. Alright? So let's go back to the timeline and make sure that the end is set at 60. If you go to your camera view, which is 0, you can start playing this. And what we can see here is our little guy does the animation, but it stops at frame 30. That is because we only have 30 frames. And we can change this in two ways. You can first start to think about the fact how fast he's running. Do you like the speed that it is running? If you want him to run a bit slower, you could scale this up. So you can scale it up to frame 60. So now it's way slower. Or you can just duplicate these frames. So select them all with a Shift D and then move this duplication over. And now you can see that because this is also a looping animation, it will just keep running, but then at the same speed. And one thing that you need to make sure that in both cases we want the animation to continue, right? We don't want, Let's say if these two friends were gone, we don't want laggy steel framing There. It is still a bit hard to see if this is actually a loophole or if this actually loops because our background here or our floor, I should say, it kinda skips, right? But if we hide this floor, you just look at this. You don't really see a disconnect in the animation itself. So this is already nice and looped, but the floor is not looped yet. We're gonna do that now. So the only thing we need to do to make this floor seem Looper bull is to just create more arrays. So go to the modifier properties and make sure you create an array modifier. We want to array it around the y-axis, not the x, so that x can go to 0 and the y to one. And then you can just do a count of maybe 15. Now if you look at this, you can see that it's just a perfect loop. And we don't really have any point in which it seems to stop, struggle or skip, right? So this is perfect. And that is how we make this a nice loop. In the next video, I'm gonna show you how to actually make a more interesting looking floor. And then we can also talk a little bit about the other animation which we're going to add as well, which is of course the sun, right? So let's go into that and I see you guys there. 25. Retro Run: Floor + Glare: In this video, we will upgrade the wireframe floor and also creates a decent materials so we can start and random this scene. The first thing that we notice is the wireframe floor. Right now, it is just a normal plane. So let's add the wireframe modifier. And what you can see is this wireframe modifier essentially creates a wireframe on every edge. So if we create an extra subdivision rev right-click, you can see that these newly created edges will also have this wireframe applied to it. Now, we want to create a decent amount just so it will look good later on. However, we still need to go to the wireframe modifier to make sure the thickness is a bit smaller, right? So maybe 0.001, it's quite thin, but later on this will make more sense, especially if the materials, let's actually create them. Now. Let's go to the shading and click on New while having the wireframe select it. Then the leader principled shader. And this is going to be our emission material. So just as an emission node jointed vessel material output and we can even rename this material to a mission. Now, we can change the color, as you can see here, and the strength. If you go to the random viewport shading, we can see that right now I have a stroke of one, it is pink, that all make sense. But it doesn't really have that nice glow that you could see in the preview before, right? So how do we create that cool glow? Well, you go to the random properties, stay inside the EV and then just click or take on Blum. Blum. We have a lot of options here, but we still don't really see anything change in our scene itself. That is because together with these options, we also need to play around with the color and the strength of our why this case wireframe floor, but it's just the emission, right? So if I put a strike through five, you can see a huge difference already. I can even put it higher to ten, right? So you can see that it increases strength wise a lot. But you can also play around in these options. So there is a certain threshold and the knee also has to do with this thresholds. We can change the radius, Michigan see here, which is the radius of the bloom itself. So you can make it smaller or bigger. And even play around with the intensity of it, right? Even the color you can change as well. But then Mike is, I think the white actually looks cool. So these are the options that you should play around with it. You can always change them in the future. But how do we make this floor look more interesting? Well, one thing is, of course, the material which we just created, but it's still a very, very flat. So if we change this flat look to a more maybe bumpy area with some hills on the sides, then it will already look way better. To create this, I would highly suggest, however, you turn off your wireframe modifier just by clicking on the real-time display modifier in viewport, right? So if you take this on, the wireframe will essentially not show. Then go to sculpting. And here we have adjusted normal material. What we can do a sculpting, as you can see here, we have loads of brushes. And in this two area, the active tool, we can also change the brushes if we need to. And we can kinda see what our brush does. So if I click and drag, we get this line. Now it is quite low poly, but that is also what we want. We want this flat low poly shading because that will essentially complement our wireframe, right? So we just want to play around with maybe a different brush. So I would personally liked the sharp brush in this case. And then just click and drag. However, the sharp brush works in a subtract mode. You can click on Add just so it always adds. But you can also hold control, so it switches directions, okay? So either of these will work. You can click on ads or just hold Control to switch your direction. I really like this brush because it creates higher peaks. And there is one more thing that you have to take or keep in mind is that this is essentially one plane and this plane will get arrayed over and over. This is handy because it saves us a lot of time. But if you go to this corner, you can see that it kind of gets cut off and that is what you want to avoid. So maybe avoid the coordinates a little bit and just work on all the other. If you still want to have a little bit of height in the corners, I would highly suggest you enable the y-axis symmetry. So now if I drag here, it will also happen on the other sides. Which makes it look less disruptive. However, you can also see that once I do this, we might get a gap in-between here. This is also easily fixable if you just go to your Modifier Tab and go into the area modifier, you can click on or tick on Merge. Then you have to play around with this distance. Okay, so just put it, this is a bit higher, So there will actually connect, and that is how we can do that. So that is one more way to make this look a bit more interesting without any disruptions and that you actually can see it too much. Just create some hills in here. So now it's time to check up if we actually like this, go back to shading. Go to the front view or a camera view which is 0, and then just stick on the wireframe again. And this is the area that will be created. Very cool. However, this is not just the end because I don't want to be able to look through here. So what I did is just duplicate this wireframe floor, rename this one to just maybe floor or black floor or whatever, and then delete the wireframe. Now, I'm going to also just duplicate this emission nodes and then just create a principled shader instead. So principled BST F, drag it in here. This, I think I'll just make a nice dark or even black material and put the roughness quite high or even the specular low if you don't want any reflections. And here we get this very cool effect, right? So if we now animate it, you can see that we've run around in such a very cool area with hills. And later on we of course, will also create a huge son here, which is also animated. This last, I personally also made sure that the background, so the world is also totally black, right? It makes it look more like space. And this guy here, I actually also changed his material. I took out the roughness, specular, and then even the base color and just made him black so it looks more like a shadow. I even made sure that the specularity is all the way to 0. I think this will only makes sense if you have the sun behind here. And before you start rendering, you need to make sure that the world does not get rendered with this character. We actually want this to be transparent, right? So go here into your random properties, go to the film and make sure that transparent is on. So once we start to render, this is nice and transparent and we can put the sun behind here. So those are a few things that you want to keep in mind. But that is essentially everything that we need to know to create this scene. So we can rename the scene to whatever guy running. Or maybe you know, a bit of a better name. And then just make sure you of course, also save this. So maybe less than three in this case. And then in the next video, we can start to create the sun. And then we can run, They're both of these animations, which because it's EV, it goes quiet quick, as you can see here, this was one frame and it took me not even 1 second. I have a good PC, but in general, this will work for you as well. 26. Retro Run: Sun Animation: In this video, we're going to create the background of this animation. And then we can both rendered them and compile them together in a composite. So let's create the sun. We are actually going to create a whole new scene. So if you look at our scenes here, we already rename this to guy running. And we can click here to create a new scene. As you can see, you can create a whole new scene. You can copy certain settings or even fully copy everything that is shown here. But we're just going to create a new scene. Once you create a new scene, we might want to go back to the layout section ends, maybe add even a camera. So shift a camera. You can see that the camera gets added from whichever position you are at. So if you are in the front view already, which is one, then click on Add camera. Now this actually rightly precision. So let's move this around the y-axis just so it's a bit backwards. Then go into 0, which is the camera few. And let's add a circle. This circle can be scaled a bit down and rotate it 90 degrees around the x-axis. Now, this circle, first of all, needs to be filled because we want to have a nice field moon with a decent looking material. Just go to Edit mode, extrude, scaled down around here. Actually it again, right-click so it snaps back into the middle, then click on M two, merge at center. Click on Control R to just create more edge loops, as we can see here, which will later on work better when we add a Boolean modifier. And then we just want to add some extra subdivisions. So maybe we'll put the levels, few ports and the render at two. Now, what do we need to do? Well, we want to create this school sun effect. But how do we do this? Well, it is actually a little bit easier to see once we have a decent material in here. So let's go to Shading, click on New and just delete this to create an emission shader. We can connect this to the material outputs. And what we want to do here is I want to Greg get a sort of a gradient. So we need a gradient texture. We can connect this to the emission. And then let's go back to this view. What we can see once we enter the rendered viewport shading is that we get a nice gradients in here. This gradient, however, goes from side-to-side and I want it to rotate. So if Controlled T, we get a texture coordinate and a mapping note in here. Let's rotate this around the z axis for 90 degrees. You can see however, that it is rotated correctly as we can see how it rotates. But we cannot see it anymore. If we however, put the x location a bit up, you can see that that now starts to appear, right? But now we have our gradient. Now we have a gradient, but it doesn't have the correct colors that I like. So let's add a color ramp and just drag it in-between the gradient texture and a mission nodes. Now, we can just change these to change the gradient. So we're going to even put this to ease if I want it to be a bit more smooth. B-spline, I can do as well. There are lots of options that you can do here. Now, we can also change the stops and the colors of the stops. So I could, for instance, make this one nice and red, right? I can make this one nice and yellow or orange. Maybe I want to switch them around. It's all up to you. What you want to create, as long as you are happy with, I just see. And of course, if the gradient doesn't really match up with what you want, you might need to play around with the location still a little bit, as you can see here. So this is kind of what we have right now. And again, the colors you can choose. And of course, if we go to our render properties, we can again turn on the bloom and play around with the strength of the emission to create more bloom, the radius, of course as well, and maybe even some of the intensity. So all of these options are the same essentially as what we did in our last video. But how do we create that cool effect that you saw in the preview? Well, we need to use cubes to essentially cut pieces out of this sun. So let's just go back for a second into layout and create a cube. Let's scale this cube down, just make sure the whole Sun fits in there and maybe even a bit more. So, be generous with your skill. Then scale this down. And we want this to be super thin. So you could do it with skill set and just try to drag it down. Or you can go here and just put the scale of this z axis even lower. So I can put this to 0.001. So it's super, super thin. This is very handy later on. Now, this is also going to be a part of our animation. So at frame 0, I want this to be the location and the scale. So I locations scale. Then we can start to think about how many frames we want this animation to take. I was thinking about 60 frames. This is because 60 frames. Yeah, it's just a nice number. But our beginning seen our guy running is also 60 frames. So there were both loop at the same time, right? But you could also do 30 frames. Then the sun loops two times and the guy running loops onetime in that time, right? So that is also possible, but let's just keep it at 64 right now. So the end frame is going to be 60. Then we want to look for a position of frame 60, right? So the animation is essentially going to be, I'm going to move it down. But I'm also going to scale it up right somewhere around here. Maybe. Then click i and do location scale again. From frame 0 to 60, we get this animation. Very cool. Now, what does this look like with our materials? We first need to add a modifier. So select your son. We can actually rename this to sun. Then add a Boolean modifier. And as object, we're going to select this cube. We can hide the cube for right now. What you can see is that this cube gets cut out of the sun. So that is the Boolean modifier, that is what that does. So if we now go to the rendered viewport shading and play this, you can see that we get this cool animation. Awesome, right? We want this to happen over and over and over again. So we only have to select the cube, duplicate it, go into the timeline, and make sure you select both keyframes and just click on G to shift these animations around maybe 20 frames depending on what you want to achieve. So now we have two of these. Cool, right? We can do this over and over again. So I can duplicate this again, move 20 frames, duplicate again, move 20 frames. So now we've reached from frame 0 to frame 60, these animations. But the one thing that you might be able to see is that it doesn't move at all, right? This is because our first cube here, the animation of that ends at frame 60. So this should actually be our beginning frame. Right? So what we actually want to do here, we want to go 60 frames further. Then we can essentially select all of these cubes, duplicate all of them, then go into the timeline. Make sure all of these animations are, these keyframes are selected. Click on G and move it all the way until this first keyframe ends up at frame 60. So now if we change this to 60 or 61, you can see that this will be a perfect loop. Awesome, right? Now that it loops perfectly, we need to make sure that all of these are actually Booleans, because as we see in the sun, we have only selected one of these cubes. I don't want to add like ten of these Booleans. We can actually operands, as it says here, operand type two collection, right? So if you just create a new collection, we will rename this new collection two boolean. And then put all of these cubes from, in my case, cube 02 cube seven, drag them into the Boolean collection, select the sun and make sure we have selected underneath the collection, of course the Boolean collection. Now, all of these cubes essentially will be Booleans in the sun because they are all inside that collection. We, however, do also want to hide them from the fuel board and the render because we just want to see the cutout. We do not necessarily need to see the cubes themselves. Now if you play this, it might be a bit slow because of course, it needs to calculate all of these Booleans. But if you run this, you can see that it just works how it's intended to be. The only thing I would highly suggest though, is that you go to the render properties and make sure also here we can put film to transparent. So now if you render, everything else is transparent and we can literally just drop this in the background of the scene guy running. So now we need to animate or render both of these. And we can do this quite simply, as I explained in one of the first videos on how to actually do this. But because this is a little bit of a more advanced animation and we're actually throwing multiple animations together. I would love to show you guys how I did this. So in the next video, we will start to render and then compile them together, and then throw them all in the compositor to finish our nice animation. I see you guys there. 27. Retro Run: Rendering + Compositing: So before we can composite everything, we need to Random them. So of course, before you're going to render something, make sure you just click on F2 to actually check if your render looks cool, right? So in this case, my frame, a 109 that I have here. Yeah, looks decent. It's a bit hard to see because we of course have this transparency back here. Um, but in general, it doesn't look that bad. So I'm just going to be okay with it. Then once you are okay with your render, you can go to your output properties. Choose a frame rates. Maybe we'll do 30 frames per seconds. Makes sure however, if you have this frame rate that you also do the same frame rate in your outer seen, a resolution should be fine. And then we need to choose a file formats. This case P&G might be good, maybe deficit bit better. And then of course, you can also choose a color depth if you want to have some more color depth in here. And that is essentially it. Choose a nice folder or create a new folder, I should say. So I'm just going to create a new render folder. And in this render folder, I will put the sun render, which is this accepted, and then start to render the animation. Because this is e v, it will actually go quite quick. So now you can see that for every 1 second, I already have a render and I'll see you guys when this is done. So my render is done, but we of course need to render the scene as well. So go into the guy running scene, make sure the frame rate is good. And also makes sure you again, like what you see. So little pre-render always works. Wonders. I like what I see, so I can start to run it all animation. We only need to put the file format again, a diff. I'll keep the color depth of eight for right now. But of course, I will create a new folder which is going to be running guy. And then accepts Render Animation. This animation also almost no time. So I'll see you guys when it's done. Now that this is done, I would like to just quit this, maybe even save it, right? And then create or open a new blank file. In this new blend file, we do not have to worry about the camera cube or light at all. We can just skip all of this and go to compositing. And when using notes, we get two nodes. We can the composite node and the random layers. We can delete the random layers and add an image nodes. This image note is quite handy because we can import the images that we already have rendered. So let's go get the sun render. I'll select the first image, scroll down, hold shift and select the last image. This way we have selected the whole image sequence. So open image and automatically you will see we have an image sequence here. We have 60 frames and we start from frame one. If we connect this image to the image of the composite, you don't really see anything, right? That is because this is essentially for rendering. If we're going to run the right now, we will see what the end result of the composite is. We can essentially save that, but we still cannot see whatever we have. If you click on Control Shift and unselect this node, you can now see the backdrop, right? And this is because Control Shift and selecting this node added a new node, which is called the viewer nodes. So now we essentially view the backdrop. This backdrop works differently than the notes work. If a zoom in or out, the backlog doesn't zoom in or out. We actually zoom in and out from the notes. If you want to zoom out of the backdrop, I would highly suggest you look at the view options down here. Backdrop, move, backdrop, zoom in, backdrop, zoom out. And of course, fit backdrop to available space. So with v, we can essentially zoom a little bit out if needed. Very handy. And now we can start to add multiple nodes to composite these images together. So let's start to think about the background. This son is our backgrounds, but we still have a transparent layer here in the back, right? We might want to also have some color in there. So I'm just going to grab an RGB nodes, which just has a singular color. If I hold Control and Shift and then click this note. You can see that now this node is connected to the viewer. So you can easily switch in-between nodes or even in-between sockets of a certain node. If you keep holding Control, Shift and clicking on a certain node, right? So it's very handy to just showcase your notes. This color. Maybe we want to have a bit of a dark blue. But how do we combine these two together? Because now they're still separated. Well, we have a very nice note which is an Alpha over, let's put an alpha over here. In the top image. We'll put our background, which is this blue, and then we put the sun in the bottom one. Now, if we click on Control Shift on this one, you can see that there are both combined. Awesome, right? And you can still change any color that you want if needed. Now, very handy, but this is not everything in our scene. We of course have another animation. So let's duplicate this image sequence and just open it and go to their running guy. And of course, select all these frames as well. Open image. Now, we can just duplicate this alpha over and put this image than in the bottom. And here we can see what's happening. Awesome, right? However, the sun might be a bit too low in this case. So do we have a note to change this? Yes, we do. We can add a transform nodes. This transform node goes in-between this image sequence and the Alpha over what you can do here, you can change the pixels are balanced the x or the y-axis. So we can essentially move our image right? So now the y-axis can go a little bit higher. And we can even play around with the scale. So maybe 0.8, right? So it's literally just up to you what you want. But yeah, as you can see, we can play around with this. And this is what a so-called about having separate scenes. You can literally just play around with the background. You can even add certain nodes to just one particular part of your render, right? So if I want also a glare in here, I can do that literally just for only the sun. So just put it also in-between there. Let's make sure we get some space in here, just so everything is a bit more organized. Here. Let's do ghosts and just play around with this threshold. Alright, so I put it to maybe 0.2 and we have some glare on here. Now it's a ghosts, but maybe for glows a bit better. And that makes it pop a bit more, but it's up to you what you want to create here. I'm just showing you that you can just throw extra notes in here if you would like to. So this is all combined. A very cool. The only thing that I might want is even some more focus on this middle. I don't really need to see anything here. This is just empty space anyways, and maybe a nice vignette would work. What is a vignette though? If vignette is a gradual darkening of an image around the edges of the frame. So normally when you go into Photoshop or Premier Pro, you often have a vignette option. We do not have that in Blender. But if we just start to think very simply about what a vignette is, we can easily create one. So if shift a, we can create a mask. Let's use an ellipse mask. And if you click or Control Shift on there you can see we get a nice circular little pattern. We need to make it a bit bigger. So the width and the height I do will do add 0.8 or 0.6. And here we have a nice big circle. We can use this as a mask, right? But this circle is quite sharp and abrupt, right? So let's add a blur node in-between here. And we can put it to just first Gaussian and put this X and a Y way up to maybe 200 or even 300s. Just so we get a nice smooth blurring here. Then justice a nice mixed node. We can mix this ellipse mask with the blur and this alpha over of all these images. So just join them together. Here. We don't really see anything yet. If however, we put this to Multiply, you can see that the dark areas of this blur nodes, we will essentially get darker. So it still has the same kind of course. It doesn't just throw a black on top of there, but a darkens the areas, which gives a very cool effect and even draws us more into this running guy instead of the outside, right? So if vignette is often quite cool to drag even more attention to the middle. So those are very cool ways to make this a much more interesting. And I would also highly suggest you always look into some brightness contrast and maybe even some RGB curves, right? So brightness and contrast, if we want some more contrast in here that always make stuff pop a bit more. You can even blur it. It's totally dependent of course, of what you want to create, a virtual want to showcase. But I hope you can see how powerful the composite can be. Now, if you're happy with your results out, highly suggest you start rendering this and of course send it to me, right? So just go to the output properties. Make sure the frame rate again is just set at the same as which we rendered with before. Also. Now we need to put the nth frame again at wherever we want to end it. So frames 60, right? They're both 60 frames. The whole loop takes 60 frames, so 60 should be the end. Awesome. So now we just want to search for a decent folder. So maybe I'll just put it in this folder except and then change the file format. So here again, you can choose any file format. Let's just do an impact for right now. And one thing before you start to render makes sure you put your last nodes inside the compositor, okay, the composite nodes, because the viewer and the composite are different. This is just to look at your image, but this is essentially what will be rendered out. So now you can start rendering, render animation, and now everything will not even be rendered again. It will just be compiled together. So this is even quicker than just normal rendering, even when you, when you ran it like HD images. Okay, so don't worry about the compositor taking too long or having to re-render everything. It is totally different. I hope you guys learned from this. If there are any questions, please ask them below, and otherwise, I'll see you guys in the next video. 28. Falling Dominoes: Introduction: In these upcoming videos, you're going to learn how to create this animation. Or if you want, you can make it just a still frame. Both are fine. So what are the separate parts that you need to learn in order to create this animation? Well, it is quite simple. First of course, you are going to learn how to create these dominoes. And the domino animation is created with rigid bodies. So you will also learn a little bit about the rigid body simulation and how to finish this animation. Then we're also going to create an animate this water. You will also learn how to use the free version of the botanic add-on to create some extra plants and grass. And of course, a nice camera position where we can actually make sure that the dominoes in this case look huge. So it's actually quite cool that placing your camera in a certain position will really change the way that the viewer looks at an image and cannot perceive what it is. Because if I just put my camera up here, say I'm going to grab my camera here and then just look from top, the instantly start to look smaller. So those are a few things that you're going to learn. And right now, if you do not have the botanic Add-on installed yet, then keep watching, otherwise jumped to the next video. So how do we install the botanic add-on? First of all, we need to go to this website. This website is called blender market. And in the blender market, you can look for both Titanic. And we need this tree and grass library botanic free add-on. Now, you can see that the full add-on cost 130 bucks, but you can use a little trial version. So does this cost $0 to purchase? But you have to keep in mind that you need to make an account here. Then once you have downloaded the file, you need to go to Blender because the botanic add-on is not an add-on that just comes regularly with Blender. We need to install it. This is very simple. Just go to Edit Preferences, Add-ons. And here we have an install button. Click on this and search for your add-on. The add-on should be in a zip file. So here you can see that I have the botanic free zip file. So just double-click on it or click on it and install add-on. And then we will have to search for it in this little search bar here botanic. Just make sure you take it on and then safe preferences. The way that we use the botanic add-on can be in a multitude of ways. And I will also show you how we have to create the grass. But it essentially is here. So if you drag out this little arrow or click on n, then we get these options. And here we have probably gone IQ. And here we have the botanic add-on. You can spawn assets. And here we have, for instance, the category Carboniferous. And we have this tree. You can change through different categories. So here we can go to maybe flowers and have some flowers. Blast, you can click on this image and we have a multitude of other flowers. However, because this is the free trial version, only the ones that are actually colored in are available to you. So these all are not. If you actually like this add-on, then of course you can buy it. But right now we don't need it for this particular tutorial. And then if you have made your choice, you just click on Okay, and instantly we have a nice little tree here. That's it. So in the next video, we're going to start with this class. I see you guys there. 29. Falling Dominoes: 3D Modeling the domino stones: In this video, we're going to create a domino stones. It is actually quite simple and very editable. If we make number five, then we can easily create all the way. 0-56 is a little bit different. That's why we're just going to focus on five and all of the numbers underneath. And then of course, you can place them to whatever your liking is. So we're gonna go to the top view, which is number seven. Then we can delete this default cube and add a plane. We're going to create some cuts and display in some loop cuts to just focus on one little part which we can mirror over. So go to top, click on Control R to create a loop cut here. And here. Then we can essentially already delete all of these vertices, x, and then delete vertices, and we just have this little parts left. Now, I want to do exactly the same. So contra arm and Control R to create a vertex here in the middle. So now I want to create a circle here. So just click on Shift a and add a circle. This circle has too many vertices. So go to add circle this little section here and change the vertices to eight. Scale this down to your liking. So maybe around here, and then this is fine. Then with Control R, I'm going to create two more edge loops here. We kinda have a vertex here plus some extra geometry. Then we're going to duplicate this one over and move it exactly in the middle. So you can kinda match these vertices up with these lines, with the edges. So just met them a bit up. And this should be fine. I do think the circles are a bit too big. So if you want to scale them down, you have to select them both. Make sure your pivot point is changed to individual origins. Otherwise you get this effect. But if you change it to individual origins, then you can see that the skill around there, of course, individual origin. So something out this should be fine. Make sure however that you gonna go back to the medium point, otherwise you might be confused in the future. We can delete some more vertices now, so it's gonna look a little bit bare-bone. But if we're going to delete all of these here, X vertices, then delete this one here in the middle. And this is essentially what we end up with. Now, we're going to select these four vertices, click on F to fill them up. And then also these form, then these are gonna be just three. If you now just select these two vertices. So this edge here is selected. And then click of f, it will start to fill all of these vertices automatically. Then as last one, we do need to fill this one up. Right? Awesome. So this might look weird, but if we're going to go to the modifiers and add a mirror modifier. You can see that we can mirror it around the x and the y. And now we instantly have a nice part of a dominant stone which has five of these circles. But this is very flat. So let's add a solidify modifier to make it more solid. In some cases, the solidify modifier might not work as intended. That might be because your normals, the face orientation is flipped or you have maybe have like a set, say this one is flipped. Let me show goes this. Then we get a very weird results with our modifier. So if you want to fix this, we need to make sure that all the normals are set in the right position. So if you now go to top, click on a, and then do Mesh normals and then recalculate outside. So that is essentially how that works. Let's put this thickness 2.3. So we have a nice thick kind of dominoes stone, and it still looks quite rough. If we add a self-sufficient, however, you see that everything's becomes too smooth. So before we add a subdivision surface, we need to add a bevel modifier. And this bevel modifier here we can change the amount that it baffles. So you can see here that every edge got beveled in a certain way because we can put the amount lower or we can put more segments in there. However, these edges here in these circles are also beveled. We don't want them to have any bevel because it will never get nice and smooth. So let's make sure that the angle in the bevel modifier is set to an angle of 50 or maybe even higher. And now you can see that those bevels are gone. Now we can add a subdivision surface and right-click to shade smooth out probably puts another extra subdivision in here. And we can see that everything looks decent. Bots, these sides here are still very sharp. Also that we can easily change. I would highly suggest however, we apply our mirror modifier. Now, if we go to these corners here, we can bevel them. So conferral, be, drag it out and nothing really happens. That is okay. Just click and we get another section that comes up here. If you don't see this, just make sure you click on this little bevel option. We want to make sure that we are actually affecting our vertices. And now we can see a huge change. Make sure that the width is not too big, right? So we want the width a bit smaller around here. Maybe. This should be fine. Now, this already looks decent. If you want your edges here to be a little bit more sharp, what you have to do is create an extra edge loop in all of these edges. So just right-click and sub-divide them. Then select those vertices and scale them a little bit up. Awesome. So this is our domino number, five. Let's move this up by g and then Y one, and duplicate it and then do g minus two around the y-axis. What this does, it gives us an entire piece of domino. Right? Now it's a 55 domino stone. But what we can do is we can easily fill up these holes here to create these other numbers. So if I fill up this hole here, we can see that we have a four. If I fill up, let's say this hole and this, this whole, then we have it three. So it's as easy as that to create extra numbers and all the way from zero to essentially five. How you fill them up is also easy. You just select the whole edge loop here, which is with holding Alt and then selecting, then actually with E and then click on M two, merge at center here, same E, M at center. Here we have a number three. So I'm going to leave it at number 5.3 for right now, the thickness look decent. We have some nice bevels and yeah, it looks nice and smooth. I'm happy with our results. So now you have to create the materials. And I'm not really going to explain how I created the materials. That is not because I have some grand secrets. I just wanted to see what you guys come up with. Now, if you truly do not know what to do, grab maybe immaterial from Pali haven or just called the shading and create a very simple material. So just click on the modal, click on New here. You can rename it as well as you want. So maybe we do a nice corporate color. It's metallic, goes all the way up and we can play around with the roughness. This is copper. And we can select this one here. We can create maybe a glass material. Here. We can do transmission all the way up and then play around with the roughness as well. So it can be as easy as that. But please spend some time in this because I would actually really liked to see what you guys come up with. I'll see you guys in the next video. We're going to build up our scene a little bit more. So I see you guys there. 30. Falling Dominoes: Ocean Generator: In the last video, we created, of course, the dominant stone. So right now, I think it's time to create a nice ocean. And we can put our camera and domino imposition. So we actually start to get the feel of the scene. So let's get started. Let's go to Layout. And here we can zoom a little bit out and click on shift a to create a plane. Now, this plane is going to be our water. So we can rename this to water or ocean or whatever you want. Then go to add modifiers and add an ocean modifier. So this modifiers kind of an ocean generator. And there are a lot of options that we can utilize to actually change this option. We can also animate this. So if you play around with the time, you can see that it looks like a nicely animated ocean. Perfect. Now, what do we want to change here? We could repeat it for a multitude of times, but I think 1.1 should be fine. So just one little plane. Then we have resolution. In the resolution we for sure. And it's play around with because we want very tiny, small little wrinkles. We do not really want this huge waves. So putting your resolution higher will definitely help. You have two ways of putting your resolution higher. And as you can see, you have a resolution viewport, which is this top one, but we also have a resolution render. So if we put this one like the render to 32 brand and does not really slows down from this. But if you put this resolution field or to high blender might slow down a little bit. So be careful with that. I'm going to put it to 32 just so you guys see what's going to happen. But you can see that we get a very small little detail. I want to get rid of these huge waves. This can be done also in multiple ways. First of all, the depth. This is the depth of the floor or the ground underneath the water. So if we put this to, let's say two, you can see that some of these very high peaks are actually being lowered down. Then of course we should go to waves because that is essentially what we need to edit. The skill is very important because that needs to go down. So maybe 0.03 or even lower could do wonders. If we zoom in, you can barely see anything. And we don't really know if this is the kind of waves or if these are the kind of waves that we want. How do we check this? I highly suggest you go into the lighting and actually see how the reflections are going to look. So let's go to the random properties changed or run the engine from ev2 cycles, then go to Shading and go here into the world instead of objects. Here we're going to add an age, your eye, or an environment texture. And this can be connected into the background, so just open. And in my case I used the Kiara one done, then you can open image. And here, if we go to the render view port shading, we can see this HDRI in the background. So this ocean also needs a material. Let's go back from world to objects and click on New while having this option selected. Also this material can be renamed to ocean ends. I'm going to put this base color just to black and put the roughness all the way to zero. So we have a very reflective material. Now we're going to look for these nice waves. And if you essentially look from a little bit more down, so we can see these mountains in the reflections. You can see your waves. And as you can see, these waves are not very extreme, they are very subtle. There are not huge waves and this is what we want. Awesome. So our water is done. The only thing that we need to do is put our domino stones in place. Now, we can grab our domino stones. Let's grab both of them and join them together with Control J. Then rotate around the x-axis for 90 degrees. Go to the front view, which is one. And I'll just go to the layout right now so we can kind of see what is happening. Then click on G to move that around the z axis and just move it a little bit above the ocean. But you don't have to do it very accurately because later on we're going to also create a little bit of a land rights, but this is for the next video. So let's now click on zero to go to our camera view. And go here into view, camera to view so we can move our camera. Now, I'm going to move my camera somewhere around here. Actually, I'll go to the other sides. Here. I want to look kinda up to the dominant stones because that makes them look huge, right? If I just look from down here that just look very small, that's not what we want. We want them to look very impressive and big. I think something like this might work. We always can change it in the future. But what we have to do is select one of these domino stones, add a modifier, and this modifier is going to be the array modifier. So we of course want to take a look at this. So let's turn off the camera view so I can move around and actually see what this array modifier is doing. Let's scroll down to the modifier. And right now we are carrying around the x-axis, but we wanted to array around the y-axis. So x to zero, y to one. Well, now a problem arises. The domino stone actually does not array around the y-axis. It erase around its own y-axis, which for us is now the z axis. So what we could do is just select the dominoes stone, click on Control a, and apply the rotation. So now it actually goes around the y-axis. Let's do a width of 3.5 or maybe even four, and then just do a higher count. So this looks decent. I wanted to go around the other way. So what you could do is just two minus four in this case, the last thing that we need to do is to animate this water. So let's look at the water. It is quite hard to see if it actually animating it because the scale of our water is so small. So keep in mind how much you have it right now, -0.03. And we're just kinda put it up to maybe one so we can actually see what is happening. Now. I'm going to put my resolution field boards also a bit smaller, so maybe 12th, just so Blender doesn't really slow down too much. Now, how do we animate this? Let's grab our timeline. Put the end at quite a generous and frame because we do not really know yet how long our animation is going to take. Then at frame one, we're going to right-click on this time and insert keyframe. Then let's go to the last frame here. Let's put the time. Let's try five. Right-click, insert keyframe, and just play this to see how slow or how fast our waves are going. This is actually quite nice and slow. The problem is, once you add keyframes are animations inside Blender. It automatically creates curves out of these. So if we change this timeline to the graph editor, you can see a curve here. This curve resembles what I'm talking about. It goes slow here. The water speeds up here. Right now it's a constant speed and then it slows down again. We want it to be more linear. So select this first keyframe here, click on T and then do linear. And now we have a nice linear speed at all times. So if we play this, we can see the movement. And I actually like how nice and slow that's going. Of course we do not know how it's gonna look like if it got smaller. So 0.03 because there's literally nothing to see. But if you do 0.3, we might be able to see a little bit, yes. And it still looks quite nice and slow and decent. So I'm actually happy with what we can see and this is y. I'm just going to accept the fact that probably at 0.03 is also going to look great. Awesome. So that is the animation for this water or this ocean. 31. Falling Dominoes: Vegetation: In this video, we're going to create a land where these domino stones will actually stand upon. And we will also create some grass and maybe some plants in front. So how do we do this? Well, it's very simple. Let's click on seven to go to the top view. And let's add a plane wave shift, a mesh plane. We're going to scale this up and move it to the middle. Then scale this around the y-axis. Just so all of these domino stones are covered. Then we're going to scale this a little bit further up, somewhere around here and go into edit mode. Now, we're going to create a loop cuts. So if countries are, you can see that this little edge loop here appears. If you scroll up, then you can create more or less, right? So we want to hear, then just right-click so it snaps into the middle and we can scale this up. So scale around the x-axis. So there are maybe a bit bigger than these domino stones. Then we're going to select these two edges here and move them a bit down here. Now also this water can go a little bit down because I want this length little piece to be a bit higher than the water, of course. Now, this is a little bit to flat, right? So if it creates two extra edge loops and just move a bit around the z axis, we have more of a smooth fall off. If you right-click and click on Shade Smooth. Now it's also nice and smooth. So this is quite decent. The cool thing about this, if you click on zero, we noticed we can only see this part of the grass. So later on we might not even need this outer part so we could literally already deleted, right? So I just selected this x vertices and that's it. Now, we need some graphs upon here. And we're gonna do that with the polychronic botanic free add-on. In the first video, like the introduction, I already explained how to install this. So if you have not done that yet, please go back there. Then what we can do is we can scroll down and use this scatter option. If you click on Plus or having the object that you want the grass to be scattered upon selected, then you can select a certain category. We're going to choose grass. Grass is fine and we can click on Okay. Now, incidentally, this object has a new modifier, which is a particle system. We can also go to the particle system and change all these settings ourselves. So the first thing that I want you to change is go to the viewport display and just put this amount a bit lower. We do not need to see every single grass trained on here. So if we put this to like ten, we only see ten per cent. But if you start to render, then you will see all the hundred per cent. Of course, this is just to make sure that your blended doesn't slow down too much. I do not necessarily need anything to spawn here on top because I want this donor stones to just be on some dirt instead of grass. How do we do this? Well, we can select this face. Go to the Object Data Properties, create a new vertex group. And this is going to be density grass. We can assign this phase to this vertex group. So now if we go back to the particle properties, we can scroll down to the vertex groups and puts this density grass into the density. Right now you can see that only grass will be spawned up on this density. So we need to flip this around and this will now be avoided. Awesome. So we only have grass very wanted to see grass. If you click on zero. Of course we've changed some stuff around so we might need to move our camera a little bit. But essentially what we have here, a very decent looking scene. So let's go back to View, camera to view and put a camera into a better position. I'm going to move my water a little bit higher. Something around this actually looks quite cool. Now, what I personally like is to create more layers in your renders. So some plants in the foreground will actually help a lot with your image. So we have plants in the foreground. We have our main animation, which are the domino stones, and then the background. We will have, of course, our HDRI, which are some very cool mountains and of course sky. So now you have created three layers which already makes your image look way, way, way better. To create these plants, we again need to go to the polygon IC add-on spawn assets. And here we just want to look for maybe a shrub. Then we can choose for the symbols nigra. And if you just click on Okay, we have this added to our scene. I personally like to grab another scene out of here. Zoom a bit. In this scene here, I can just move my plants around wherever I want to. So I'm going to select this plant, click on G shifts to just move it a bit around. Maybe here. One can go here. Cool, right, so we create some extra layers to this scene. At the next video, we are going to animate this domino stones. So I see you guys there. 32. Falling Dominoes: Rigid Body Simulation: In this video, we're going to animate the domino stones. And the domino stones are actually a simulation, a rigid body simulation, which of course you can do inside Blender. And a rigid body simulation is used to simulate the motion of solid objects. So I'll very quickly just explained to you how this works. If we select our cube, you can see that we can go to our physics properties and make this cube a rigid body. If we start to play this, we have space or just in a timeline, you can see that our rigid body interacts with the world. There is a certain gravity and it will fall down. This rigid body also has a mass which makes it heavier or less heavy. And of course it has a certain coalition. We can make certain models collide with each other. And that is what we're gonna do with domino stones, bars before you can make objects like active type rigid bodies collide with each other. We also need a floor for these to stand up on. So if shift a, we can create a plane. I'm going to move this plane down and scale it up. This plane also needs to be a rigid body, but this is going to be a passive type. This means that it will still be in your simulation, but this will not fall down or be pushed away with any other collision. So if we play this, you can see that the cube will just stay up on here. However, if I move my cube, Let's save it up. I'm going to rotate it. Now you can see that it still does collide with each other. So if the domino stones, we literally are going to just create a stone here. We're going to create multiple of these. One of them is gonna be turned a little bit. And then we play. And as you can see, we have a perfect animation arrived here. So let's do that in our scene. So right now we're going to finalize this domino stones. Because after we have done the whole simulation, it's just annoying to change stuff, right? So first of all, I think I'm going to move them a bit backwards. I might add a count of two more. And this should be fine. So I'm going to hide everything else. So if you select the donor stone and click on Shift H, you essentially hide everything else in your scene and we can focus upon these. Now, let's create a new collection. So right-click here, new collection, domino simulation. Then we're going to drag our domino stones into there and rename this to domino. Before we're going to create a rigid body simulation on this domino stones, we need to separate them, right? Because otherwise it doesn't really give a rigid body to each separate individual donor stone. So let's apply all these modifiers. Then what you want to do is you want to separate this piece by piece. So if you go to top, click on a and then P, you can separate by loose parts. Now however, all of these are loose parts. So you want to join these two pieces together, right? So if I select these two here, Control J, these two pieces Control J. Now however, all of these donor stones still have their origin all the way here in the beginning, which is what we do not really want. So we want to select all of the domino stones, go to Object, set origin and origin the center of mass surface. So now all of these domino stones have their origin perfectly in the middle, which now also makes you able to rotate them easily. So if you don't want them all to stand with a five on top and a three and a bottom, you can literally just grab a few, rotate them. Maybe these as well, hundred and 80 degrees and maybe around the z axis to get some of these rotations going. Now, if you want to animate this, you just need to create a rigid body on one of these models. So go to the first domino stone. Go to physics properties and click on rigid body. I want this stone to be huge, right? So the mass is probably also quite big, so maybe 1,000 kilos. Then we want to start animating this. But if we play this, you can see that it of course falls down. I personally like to create a new plane for this display that we just created is going to be the floor. But I do not want to see it in my renders. So just take this little camera off. Now. This is a rigid body. It is a passive rigid body. And now it will interact with my active rigid bodies. So if I play this, you can see that nothing happens because our rigid body here are dominant stone is just on top of it right now. You can kinda see it moving. It just falls down on top and that's it. That is exactly what we want. So we're going to select all of these. And then as last, the one dominant stone with the rigid body applied to it go to Object. Rigid body and a copy from active. So now all of these have the exact same rigid body settings as this first one. And the only thing we have to do is we have to rotate this first one a little bit, so it actually starts falling. And then we have our rigid body animation. Now, if this animation goes a bit too quick for you, we can slow this animation down. So go to the scene properties to the rigid body world. And here we want to play around with the speed. If it put it to 0.5, it will go slower, right? So maybe this is too slow, but you can kinda see what the difference is. I actually think it looks quite decent. And we also know that our animation is now going to take maybe like 190 frames. This everything that we need to know to animate these domino stones. In the next video, we're going to go over finishing the scene and starting to render. I see you guys there. 33. Falling Dominoes: Lighting + Rendering: In this video, we're going to finalize this animation. So first of all, my screen might look a little bit different now because I guess or I didn't save it or blend the crushed. But yeah, I had to redo the domino stones and these plants here again. So yeah, some stuff might look different, but everything else is exactly the same. So the first thing that we need to do is make sure that this entire rigid body world is actually saved, right? So if you go to the Rigid Body Worlds, scroll down, you have a cache. And here we can simulate a certain amount of frames. So mine is 200, then they are all down and I can bake this. This bacon does not take too long, but now we don't have to recalculate the simulation every time. So I can click like here, here, here, it doesn't really slow down anything. So often I take a little bit of time in the end to finalize the lighting, maybe some of the models that might not be on par yet. And of course, the animations and the Render Settings. So how do we do this? Well, we can see a lot when we click on this rendered preview, but sometimes that does not give us enough detail. So what you could do is just go to your render settings. Mine is set at cycles GPU and then I'll put the render samples, maybe the firewall for 1,024. Now I'm just going to render this so f 12th, and we will wait until it's done. So now let's render is done. We can take a better look at it. A few things to jump into my mind. And I understand also totally that some things that I might not enjoy or that I want to change might look totally different on your image. So I'm just going to go a little bit through my thinking pattern. And if you want to join, you can join. Otherwise you can just render out your animation. You don't have to wait for me. So what do I see? First of all, I see the water here. I'm not that happy with the water. I would like there to be a little bit more wrinkles, so I want to change that. The second thing, which to be honest is the biggest thing is the lighting. There's a lot of shadow here where the grass is. I would like it to be more light and there's too much light where the domino stones are because in my opinion, shadows are just as important as like bright areas. So I also want to incorporate those into my renders. And in general, that is actually it. So let's change these two things. I'm going to click this away and start with my water. As we can see, this water has quite a big area, right? And we know that if you want a higher quality water, we probably need to put our resolution higher. But why should we put our resolution so much higher if you're not even seeing half of this like water. So what we could do is scale it down by quite a lot and move the bit into place. The only thing you want to make sure of is that this butter is always in view when we are in a camera for you. Alright, so that is the only thing you have to keep into account. We can always put the resolution in the viewport a little bit lower and the render a little bit higher, if you would like to write, that is no problem. Also, if you want the skills or the scale of the waves to be a bit larger, you can put this number a bit up. And it is dead simple. For the lighting. I would like to go to Shading. Click on this arrow to go to the camera view and change this section here to treaty few boards. I'm going to drag this out. And here in this viewport, I'm going to play around with the lights in this viewport or just want to see our beautiful image. So just click on rendered viewport. And here we have whatever we want to see. I'm going to hide every single light except the main light that we have. And in this case that is our HDRI. So this slide here can go off for right now. Then we can go here from objects, two worlds. And in this world scene, we can play around with this light so we can put the strength up or down. And if you click on Control T while having this image selected, you can see that we get a texture coordinate and mapping nodes. This only works if you have the Node Wrangler add-on activated. We can play around with the rotation. So the rotation of this can be easily changed as you can see. Does it also changes our lighting? This slide on itself already looks decent, but I think an extra light would actually do wonders. So this lie that we've hidden, we can unhide it selected. And we're going to change this to maybe a sunlight. Sunlight in general are very strong. This strong light, however, we can use to see where our light is ending up. So if I move it here, we can kind of see what the light is doing. And I want some cool shadows just to rotate it. Maybe to something like this. So we have a nice light area or bright area, and we even have some shadows from domino stones being cast onto other domino stones. Also quite cool. Now the strength is way too high. And you guys probably already remember how we can check the strength. But in general, we put this a bit lower to maybe ten. Go to Object, use notes. And here we can always play around with the strength. But what I'd like to do is go into the random properties, scroll down to color management and check my film few transform from filmic to false color. Now, we want to reach grayish, maybe even orangey color. But we don't really want to go too much into the rats. Let's go back to filmic. And of course now you can still kinda judge to, I want to go a bit higher, that's totally fine. But keep in mind if you go too high, as I explained in one of the earliest workflow videos, that you might lose some color data. So once you're happy with your decision, you can start to render. Please share your renders. I would love to see them. And if you want any feedback or have any questions, just ask down below. See you guys in the next video.