Create Photorealistic Planets in Blender

1. Course Trailer: Ever tried creating planets in blender and ended up with results looking like this? Planets might seem like the most basic thing you can do in three D. Just add a sphere, slappy texture on it and you're good to go. But the reality is far from that. Pretty far in fact, that when I started digging into the topic, I found out how little information is there about actually how to create good looking planets. The majority of videos out there teach variation of the same technique by relying heavily on compositing that there is something wrong about that. But I think that in order to create a realistic looking planet, you need to try and make it as physically accurate as possible. That's exactly what this course is trying to do. This course, you will learn how to create a photorealistic earth in blender, 100% pure blender magic. These are the results you will get straight out of rendering with no compositing. This mini course can be divided into three big sections. You will start by learning how to set up your scene. Forget the common misconception of using simple spheres and point lights when it comes to creating planets. Instead, I'll g you through the proper scene, set up lighting techniques to unleash your full power when it comes to creating planets. Then we will move on to texturing our planet. Texture work is often where planetary renders fall short, that's why a subistantial portion of this course will dive deep into the world of shading. You will learn how to create flawless shaders for your planet's surface clouds and most importantly, the atmosphere. You know how complicated is that if you ever attempted to create a realistic planet in Blender, we will dive deep into the world of nodes and procedural workflows and you will learn techniques that will take your texturing level to new heights. Lastly, we will finish by rendering and doing some really small compositing. Rendering planets isn't like rendering any other scene. This course will give you the things that you need to keep in mind when it comes to setting up your scene for rendering. And by the end of the course, you will be well versed when it comes to optimizing your planet's renders. We will also do a little bit of compositing just to take your renders to the next level. Make your planets shine at a quiet level. I try my best to explain everything in detail, but I'm expecting you at least to know your way around blender. At least how to connect pipes. Lastly, this course will give you the exact way on how you can create really stunning planets in blender. If all of that sounds exciting for you, we can't wait to welcome you inside the course. See you inside and happy blend. 2. Scene Settings: Alone. Welcome, in this first video where we are going to prepare our blender for all the work that we will be doing throughout this course. So this is a fresh blender scene. I'm going to pick general, and surprisingly, I'm not actually going to delete any of these elements. Or actually I might delete the light, because we are going to add later a sunlight, not this spotlight, or actually point light. So hit X and then delete. The first thing I'm going to do is to adjust the UI of Blender to optimize it as much as possible for all the work that we will be doing. I'm going to hide this bar right here because they don't need it. So let's just go here. You will have header and you will have this option show tool settings. I'm going to hide it. So I will basically have more area to work in. The other thing, there is a really important add on that we need to activate that we will need later for all the node work that we will do, which is the node angular add on, which probably already have it activated. But just in case, make sure to go to Edit Preferences, add ons, and from here you need to look for Node Wrangler. This one right here. Yeah, this is all we need for now. Right now, let's start preparing our scene. Planets are always spheres as far as I know. Should we delete this cube and go shift a and add a sphere, or should we work with this cube? The thing is about spheres in blender is that they do have really terrible topology. Especially if you look from the top, if I hit tab to jump to the edit mode, you will notice that you have this huge pole right here which is super ugly. For example, when we will subdivide this, if I go here and let's add modifier, generate subdivision surface, let's crank the level to two and shade smooth. You will notice that still on the top you will have some weird, basically something that looks like a star. And this is basically a sign of bed topology. That's why actually creating planets out of spheres. And this is basically what most vides you will find out there do, is not the best solution. There is a better way to do this. I'm going to select the sphere and x to delete it. Let's try to think of a way of how to turn this cube into a sphere. The main reason for that is that when we will turn this cube into a sphere, we will have an even quad topology, which is exactly what we want. Here's what we'll be doing while I am in the edit mode. Hit Tab, I'm going to hit the right most button, and you will have an option called subdivide, which will actually subdivide this cube once. And you can do it twice. But instead of like basically hitting subdivide and all of that, you can hit shift R to repeat the last operation you did, which in our case it was the subdivide. On a hit shift R, I will be able to subdivide this cube even more. I will settle on something like this. Basically five level or six level of subdivision. Right now, we do have the same exact cube. The only difference is it is like subdivided like a lot. Right. Now, if we can figure out a way to turn this into a sphere will be good to do this while you are in the edit mode. You will have an option right here. It should be yeah, Sphere. This option right here. If I select a sphere or the shortcut is shift olds, you will be able to basically convert this into a sphere. Notice what will happen. I will be able to transform it into a sphere. So make sure that the level right here is one and boom, right now we turn this cube, which is called cube, into a sphere. The really nice thing about this sphere is that it is all basically quads. It does have really nice topology and all of that, which is exactly what we want. So let's rename this, for example, land, because this will be our planet land. And boom, this is our sphere. I'm going to hit end to open the sidebar. And from here I want the size to be exactly 2 meters by 2 meters by 2 meters. This will ruin our scale. So make sure you select your sphere. Hit Control to apply the settings. And make sure you apply the scale so that it will be back to one. We need that later for all the text recorded stuff. And hit and to close the sidebar. Okay, Right now we've got the surface of our planet done. Let's right now add a camera and a light for the camera. We already have one, which I don't know where it is. It is right here. I want this camera to be pointing exactly to where this planet. So how can we do this? Basically, I need, first of all, to reset the position of this camera into the center. You can easily do that by selecting your camera. Make sure you jump to the object properties. For the location, I'm going to turn it to zero. And for the rotation also, I'm going to turn it to zero. So right now it is pointing just like so if I hit one from the number pad, I'm going to jump to the front view. And as you can see from the front view, I need to have the x axis right here and the z axis pointing top. If I want the camera to be pointing exactly from the front view to this planet, I need to rotate it to something like, so that it will be pointing exactly to this. How can we do that? Make sure you select it and in the rotation on the x axis, make sure it is 90. Right now it is pointing like this. And you can always change the location so that it will be something like, so this is exactly what we want. Something that you will always find me doing is basically to go here and add another window from here. I'm going to hit zero from the number pad to jump to the camera view. So this is what my right now sees. And we can hide all of these unnecessary stuff like the tool bar by hitting. Let's hide all of these overlays. You can also jump to your camera settings by clicking here. And in the Viewport display you will have this option called passe partout, which is actually a French word. What you need to do is basically to bring this up to one so that basically everything outside what the camera will see will be black. I find this way less distracting. Let's right now just adjust our view. So make sure you select your camera. You can hit J and then y to move it on the y axis. And let's get it slightly closer, something looking like. So I think will be good. We just basically made sure that everything is in the center. The next part will be just adding a simple light and adjusting the overall lighting of the scene. If I just jump to the rendered view from here, space should be black. That's why I'm going first of all to jump to the environment. And in the color or actually in the strength, I'm going to bring this down to zero. There is no light from the environment. Other thing, I'm going right now to go shift A and let's add a light. What is the light that exists in the space? It is not a point light, it is a sunlight. So I'm going to add a sunlight. And what you need to know about the sunlight is that the position of the light doesn't matter because it is just a direction. It is like you have a huge source of light and all matters is how it is rotated. And as you can see, if I move this light, nothing actually will change. The only thing that will change if I start rotating it, I'm just going to hit alt G to reset it back to the original position. And you can hit JZ to just, I know as I said, the position doesn't matter, but just for the sake of us, so that, okay, we can see that there is a sunlight and it is pointing down. And as you can see, the slide is hitting this sphere from the top. And there is some sort of like degradation. It is not smooth enough. So that's why I'm going to select the sphere and hit shade Smooth. Right now it is perfectly smooth and from the settings of the sunlight you can always jump here and you can bring the strength to something like 25. This you might say like, okay, this is too strong. And actually with all the textures that we will add and the atmospheric elements we will add later, 25 actually will look pretty sick, so don't worry if it is a little bit too bright for now, We'll fix that later. Also, if you want, you can play a little bit with this angle which will basically control the extinction of the light or the extinction of the shadow. I don't know what they call it or how soft the shadow is, so yeah, you can definitely play with this number. The last thing that we need to work on right now is actually our render settings. We're not going to adjust all of them right now, but there are a couple of important ones that we need to basically change right now. So let's jump to our render settings. First thing that you will see is the right now we're using V. V is not the right render engine that we will use. We're going to use cycles. We're going to leave the feature set for now as supported in the device. If you have a GPU card, then you probably need to use it or you should use it. Make sure to jump to GPU. Compute this will make everything slightly faster for the Viewport sample and render sample. I'm going to leave them right now, the way they are directly. I'm going to jump into light paths in space. There's no light paths. I'm going to bring this to 00, also to zero. And also for the transmission, should be zero. There are still a couple of settings that we will get back to them later, especially in the volumes, but as of this moment, this is all we need to actually start working, creating our planet for now. The last thing I'm just going to get back to, which is in the sun settings, in the angle, I'm going to reset it to its default value. Reset to default value. I dig this result way more, if we need to later on increase the angle, we can always do that. But as of this moment, I'm just going to leave it to the default value. Right now, we do have a ready blender scene to actually start adding our textures and all of that to it. I will see you in the next video where we are going to add the texture to the surface of the Earth. Yeah, I will see you in the next video, also make sure to save your fire. 3. Create the Land Material: Malone? Welcome. In this new video, where we are basically going to create the look of the land, or the material for the ground. Since we are going to create the Earth, we need real life textures. And the really nice thing that Nasa offers a lot of these textures for free for us to use in the resources folder that comes with this scores. Besides the Blender projects, where you will find all the different projects during the scores, you will also have the four K textures and you will have also the eight textures. These are the same textures just in different resolution. Four K is more for the wide shots and you can use the eight K if you're going to create a close up shot of the Earth. Generally, since there is only five textures in each folder, it is not a big deal whether you will use the four K or the eight K. Yes, eight K are heavier for computer to compute, but at the end of the day, there are just five textures based on that you can design. For a close up, you use the eight K, and for more of a wide shot, you will use the four K. In our case, since I'm going to create a wide shot, I'm going to stick to the four K for now, unless I notice that I need a higher resolution. At that case, I can swap the textures to eight K. This will be really, Now back in Blender, make sure you select your land object, which is the sphere. And I'm going to jump from here, from the time line which is the default editor. I need to jump to the shader editor, basically where we create materials. Right here. There are a couple of things that I like to do, basically. First of all, I'm going to hit end to hide this side bar to have more space. And also, if I activate this magnet right here, the nodes will be able to stick to the grid, which I find more satisfying. Let's start shading right now. I'm going to call this Material land and I'm going to jump to the rendered view from here. And this is the result we get. It is really boring. The first texture that we will need is a map of the color of the Earth in the resources folder. If I go into the four K textures, you will have Earth color four K, which is a map of the color of the Earth. So I can easily just drag it and bring it into blender like this. And I will put it here and I will take the color and plug it to base color. And boom, as you can see, it is right now on the surface, but it is weirdly mapped. Like notice that it doesn't look right. In order to fix that, I need to tell Blender how to map this texture on the surface of a sphere. That's why we're going to use a texture coordinate node. Which luckily, because we're using the node angular add on, all you need to do is to make sure that you're selecting your texture, which is the Earth color. And hit control and this will add a mapping set up to it. This mapping set up will help you to map the texture on the surface of the sphere. So you can basically change the scale, change the rotation, for example. You can change all of these in our case. First of all, I'm going to, right now, as you can see, I'm using UV. I want to change it to object, and once I do this, okay, it looks kind of better, but not quite right yet. That's why in the texture node you will have here something called flat and there is an option for sphere. So if I pick sphere, boom, normally, okay. It's still looking kind of weird. Why is that happening? Oh, okay. I did a small mistake, not the object. I need to change it to generate it. Yeah, make sure it is generated by doing this. As you can see right now, this texture is perfectly mapped on the surface of the sphere. I can always hit zero to jump back to the camera view. This is what my camera is seeing right now, and it is basically just staring at an empty ocean. Except with a small island, really tiny island right here. I guess this is how, either way this is really boring. I need to rotate this texture. In order to rotate this planet, all you have to do is to select your sphere. And from the object properties right here or in the viewport, I just prefer using real values. I can start rotating this until I get a look that I'm happy with. Let's say something like so will be good. Yeah, let's leave it at this. You can see Africa right here, Asia right here. But this still looks fake, because in real life, for example, the oceans should reflect more light. Let's say the areas where the land is, it should be slightly rougher and it should have some bumps and that's where the Earth land ocean comes in. It is basically a black and white texture which will help when it comes to the roughness. I'm going to take this Earth land ocean and bring it into blender. I'm going to use the same mapping set up. That's why I'm going to bring these nodes here and connect the mapping node to this. And also make sure you select from flat, make sure to change it to sphere. It will be mapped the right way onto the surface of the sphere and we're going to plug the Earth Land ocean into the roughness. Let's take color and plug it to the roughness. As you can see something is happening. But surprisingly, it's not the right thing that should happen. Here's why. Another handy shortcut that you can use with the node Angular add on is the control shift. And click on a node to see exactly what it does. As you can see, this is how our Earth land ocean looked like. Black will mean a value of zero and white will mean a value of one. Let's think about it, we plug this to the roughness. So what is the roughness value for ocean? Should it be one or should it be zero? The surface of the ocean is not rough. It needs to be a value of zero. As you can see in the texture, it is white, which means a value of one. So we need to invert this map to tell blender that, hey, we want these areas to be one because they are rough, because they are the land. And we want these areas that are white to be black because that represents zero and they're not rough roughness of zero. Let's invert this texture. Go shift a hit for search. Let's look for invert, invert color. Let's put it right here for a second. And let's get back to looking at our principal SDF control shift and click on it, and we're back to our usual view. Let's plug this here and boom, something that happened. And this right now looks right. If I just hit control shift on the invert node right now, it is perfectly the way we want it. The rough areas are white, which are the land, and the black areas are zero, which are the ocean, because it is not rough. And let's click on the principal SDF to get back to our usual view. You can also hit zero from the number pad to get back to the camera view. Now to the last texture that we will add, which is basically some, a bump to this map. Because as you can see, everything is flat even though the surface of the Earth does have some hide variations. Let's say that's where this topography map comes in. Make sure to bring it into blender and let's put it here. And make sure to connect it to this node. And here's another handy shortcut. If you hit Alt with the right most button and drag over two nodes that you want to connect, you'll be able to connect them. Alt, right most button, and drag over these two nodes. You will have this red box to help you. I'll be able to connect them. This shortcut is really helpful when you have really far nodes from each other. And also make sure to change the mapping from here, from flat here so that it will look right. Control shift and click on Color and boom, This is a topography map, but how can we use it? We're going to use this map as a displacement, which will basically create some bumps on the surface of the Earth. And when it comes to displacement, we need to plug it to the displacement output, or actually to the displacement input right here. But there is a problem. This is a yellow socket, and this is a vector. So we need to transform this data from the colored data into a vector. And we can do this using a displacement node. Go shift a S for search, and let's look for displacement. Let's add it right here. And I'm going to take the color and plug it into the height. Take the displacement and plug it to displacement. Nothing is happening because we're still looking at the topography map. So we need to get back to our usual view by control shift and clicking on the principal BSDF. As you can see something is definitely happening. But for whatever reason, these bumps are not real. It still looks flat because by default, blender will not displace the geometry. By default will fake that. We need to tell blender that, hey, blender, we want you to actually do some real displacement to change the geometry. To do that, you need to jump to the material settings, make sure you are in the land material. If you scroll down under settings, you will have here an option called bump only displacement. Bump only means that blender will do some sort of fakery to fake the look of actual displacement. This is not what we want, we want to change from bump only to displacement. Bump. And as you can see, something is happening right now and we're changing the, underneath the geometry of the sphere. But the effect right now is really, really strong. So we need to deal with that. And this will be really simple because we can play with the settings of this displacement node right here. The first thing which is the mid level, which point the displacement is calculated? Is it from the bottom or is it from the top? In our case, it is computed in the mid level, which is the middle. We want to change it to zero, so it is computed from the ground level up. All we need to do right now is to just play a little bit with the scale. So let's try 0.1 Let's see, this is still way, way too strong, so let's try 0.05 This is more or less still pretty strong, So let's try 0.01 This is starting to look kind of better, but I don't know is it really strong or not. It is still pretty strong, So let's try 0.001 Yeah, this is more like it. I think this is better because in general, yes, mountains are huge and all of that. But when you start looking from the space, they start to lose their glory. They are more or less flat. But either way, for now, I'm going to leave it the way it is we might get back in the future to change these values and tweak them a little bit to get a better look. But as for now, we're good to go. And by doing this, we finished our land material. As you can see, it is pretty simple. Maybe you can organize it just so that you can use it in the future. So these are our textures. And we did this really simple displacement set up to add more depth to this Earth. And we can always hit zero to jump back to the camera view to see exactly the result we got. You can also hit the home screen to fit the render in this small window. This is basically it for this video on how to create the material for the land. And we'll see you in the next video, where we are going to actually add some clouds to this, which will make it look even more realistic. I will see you everyone in the next video. Also, as usual, make sure to save your file. 4. Create the Clouds Material: Alone. Welcome, in this new video where we are going to add some clouds to our planet. In the last video, we created the material for the ground. And right now, it is about time to add some clouds. This is my usual scene, and basically clouds will be above the surface of the Earth. The easiest way to do this will be to achieve D, to duplicate the sphere, which is the land. And I'm going to rename this to something Clouds, super creative name. Both of the clouds and the land are two spheres and they are basically on top of each other and they are overlapping. We don't want that, we want the sphere of the clouds to be slightly bigger than the sphere of the land. So make sure you're selecting your clouds and jump to the object properties. And you will have here an option for the scale, which will basically allow you to make it either bigger or smaller. In our case, we want it to be slightly bigger than the land. That's why the value that I found that kind of work is 1.001 which is slightly bigger. And this is the key word, slightly bigger. Right now nothing happened because the clouds still have the material of the land to fix this. Just make sure you click on this to basically delete that material from the clouds. And we will have a white sphere, perfect. Right now we have the cloud sphere and we're ready to start doing some shading. Let's create a new material for the clouds by clicking on you. And let's rename this to Clouds in the resources folder that comes with this course. Under the four K or the eight K textures, you will find the clouds, Earth clouds. And this is the map we'll use to add some clouds to our scene. So I'm going to drag it into Blender. Let's put it here right now. Let's figure out a way of how to make the system works. If I hit Control Shift and click on the Clouds to see exactly how it looks like, Control Shift and click on it. This is how our clouds is looking. And the first problem that you will notice is that it is mapped in a wrong way on the surface of the sphere. That's why I'm going to hit control to add a mapping node to it. The usual workflow, I'm going to change it from here from UV to generated. And make sure to change it from flat to sphere. And right now we will have perfect mapping of the clouds on the surface of a sphere. Step number two will be somehow to figure out a way to tell blender that, hey, blender leave the white areas the way they are and for the black areas, make sure they are transparent. Because if we imagine that these black areas are transparent, the Earth or the surface of the Earth will be visible in the black areas. And that's exactly what we want. We want to leave the white and get rid of the blacks. And what is the thing that controls transparency, Let's say? What is the thing that will leave white and we get rid of black? It is alpha. So if you notice in this principle, BSDF, if I just scroll down, you will have here an option for alpha. If I drag it way, way down, basically this will be super transparent. And it is not super transparent for a reason because I'm still looking at the Earth Clouds. So control shift and click on your principal BSDF. As you can see, it is transparent but not the way I imagined it. Okay, there is a slight problem is that when I change the Alpha, nothing is happening because I should be able to see the surface of the ground. What is causing this problem. My first hunch will be that in the render settings. Yeah, transparent. We set it up to zero. We need this to be something like 12. Yeah, so now it makes sense. Now it works the way we intended. Make sure that this number is not zero, it is 12. Earlier when I was setting up all of these different settings, I just glance over it and change it to zero. So the most important thing is that this alpha will control which areas are transparent and which areas are opaque. So if I take the color out of the Earth clouds and bring it into the alpha, we got some clouds. If I fly around the Earth, yeah, this is looking pretty sick. What we're doing is basically to use this Earth clouds as a mask to tell blender which areas are transparent and which areas are not. And in reality, what controls the color of the clouds is not this map, It is the base color. So if I change, for example, this to blue, as you can see, we're changing the color of the clouds to blue. I'm going to set this basically to white because that's what I want. And right now we have some clouds going to make them even better. We might add some slight subsurface scattering to them. So in the subsurface scattering radius, make sure to set all of these to one. And let's add something like 0.001 Make sure you do this in really, really tiny values. And at the same time, clouds tend to have some volume to them or they're not just a flat to the sphere around the Earth, they have some height to them. That's exactly what we will try to fake right now. What is the thing that will allow us to add some bumpiness or some displacement to clouds? It is basically the displacement socket and this is exactly what we will do right now. Let's go shift A, and let's look for a displacement. Let's put it here. And I'm going to use the same Earth clouds to do the displacement workflow. So I'm going to take the color and plug it to height. And take the displacement and plug it to displacement. And something is happening. First thing I always like to verify is to jump to the material properties. And from surface bump only make sure it is set to displacement And bump and something is going, we're adding a lot of bumpiness or a lot of displacement to our clouds. This is not exactly what we want, so let's play a little bit with the settings of the displacement. First thing, the mid level should be set to zero. We want it to be calculated from the bottom up. From the zero point up. We don't want it to be calculated from the middle. Step Number two will be to change the scale, because right now this is way too strong. So let's change the scale from something like one to something more suitable, like 0.1 And this is still pretty strong, so let's try 0.001 Let's zoom in a little bit, okay, This is looking pretty decent. The effect is pretty subtle, and that's exactly what we want. The only thing is that you may notice is that it is pretty low res. This is because of two reasons. First of all, there is not enough geometry in the sphere clouds. If I just hit Tab for a second, as you can see there is not much geometry here. Number two is that we're using a four K texture, so it is not the highest resolution image possible. But for now I'm going to stick to the four texture. The only thing I'm going to do is to add a subdivision modifier to this by going to add modifier and subdivision surface. And you can crank this number, for example, 23. And this is one to two. This is how you can add some clothes to your shot. The last thing I'm going to do is to hit zero, to jump back to my camera view. And this is what my camera is seeing. And surprisingly, I don't like this angle that much. That's why I'm going to select the land jump to the object properties. And I'm going to rotate it slightly on the Z axis until I get a better view, something that looks like. So at the end of the day, we settled on America, just like in movies. Yeah, either way everyone, I'm going to leave it at this for now. And maybe we can change some values here and there in the future. But as how to add some clouds, this is the workflow for it. Make sure you save your file. And I will see you in the next video, where we will add some atmosphere to the scene, which will actually make this look like an actual Earth. So yeah, I will see you everyone in the next video. 5. Create the Atmosphere Material: Hello, welcome. In this new video where we are going to add the atmosphere to our planet, this is where we stopped last time. Basically having the surface of the planet with some clouds floating above it. Right now, we need to add the most important element, which is the atmosphere. By far, the atmosphere is the hardest part of this course because there are different ways to fake it. And probably will find the lo tutorials on Youtube that will show you different methods on how you can create atmosphere. The hardest thing about atmospheres is how to get the extinction. Most of the tutorials on Youtube will basically either show you that it is basically just like a solid sphere around the planet or try to fake it later on in the composite. In my opinion, this is some sort of cheating. I know probably all the shading work we do is some sort of fakery at the end of the day. But I would love to get the atmosphere right inside of blenders and basically get it as physically accurate as possible. And I don't want to later bother around trying to get that look. And that's exactly what we will attempt to do in this video to try and create a physically accurate atmosphere directly in Blender. No trickery, no compositing, no anything. Everything will be rendered using cycles. So let's jump to doing that. First things first, I have my land selected right here. And I'm going to do shift D to duplicate it. Since basically the atmosphere will also be above the clouds. We need to make the sphere slightly bigger. If you remember, the land have a scale of one, the clouds 1001. I want this land 001, which I'm going to rename to atmosphere, to be, let's say 1.002 It is slightly bigger than the land and the clouds. I'm going to delete the material, and I'm going to create a new material, and I'm going to call it atmosphere. And since atmosphere is not just a surface, it is a volume. We're going to delete this principle, SDF, because the atmosphere tend to scatter the light in a certain way. And what is the thing that scatters light and blender? It is a shade or cold volume. Scatter this one right here. This is the main hero of this set up that we will build. So I'm going to take the volume and plug it to volume, and from here I'm going to change the color to a bluish, earthy color, something like. So here's the exact hex code if you want to get the same exact value. And I'm going to bring the density to something, let's say like 50 or let's say 250. And as you can see, something is definitely happening. We're starting to add some layer of volume scattering, let's say, to our planet. But there are two issues. First of all, you will notice that it is not the high resolution. There is some sort of like squares appearing right here. The main reason for this is that we need to bump our subdivision level. We don't have even a subdivision surface. So to fix that problem, go to add modifier subdivision surface and we'll be good to go. You can even crank this to two and we're good to go. We fix that first problem. The other thing is this effect right now is really strong. And here's the most important thing that you need to understand. We want this volume scattering operation to be so gradient. What do I mean by that? Basically, if I just zoom in here and I need to show all of my overlay so that you will be able to see what I mean, what I want is, is that the atmosphere will be here, for example, a value of one and it will gradually fade to zero. The hardest part to get inside of blender is how to get this gradient. Basically, the only way to do something like this is by using some math. That's exactly what we will be doing. We will be using brat math to get this exact look so that the atmosphere will be here strong and it will gradually fade beautifully into zero. Let's learn how we can do that. Let me get back by hitting zero to my camera view. Let's try working on that. First thing I'm going to do is basically to add a texture coordinate just to exactly see what it does. I need the object to control shift multiple times until I jump to object. What this will do is basically to give me, let's say, a representation of the coordinate of every single point of that. And that's what all of these colors basically represent. As you can see, for example, the more I go to the left, the redder it gets because red is in this direction. And that's why this color get red. What I want you to understand is that this is a visual representation of the different coordinates of all the different points on the surface of the sphere. From this, I'm going to try to build a mathematical operation that will allow me to get the look I want, the smooth fading to this, I'm going to add another node which is called a vector math. I know the moment we start mentioning math, a lot of people get scared, but this will be simple. I'm going to add a vector math in the operation. I want the length. Where is length? Yeah, it is. This one right here. Control shift. And click on it to see exactly how it looks. Let's just hide the clouds for a second. The length operation will give you the distance of a certain point on the surface from the center. Let me say that again. The length operation will calculate the distance of a certain point from the center to the point. For example, just to see, these points that are on the surface of the sphere will be a value of one because they are basically the furthest from the center. And the values that are inside the sphere will be 0.005 or 0.003 et cetera. And since zero represents black and one represents white, if you start to imagine this in three D by doing this operation, and if I plug it into the volume, I will start to get some sort of a three de gradient. What does that mean? I will start to get a gradient that is basically in the middle or in the center of the sphere, It will be black and it will gradually go to white. And that's exactly what I want. This is what length operation is doing. Let me get back to the normal view and let me disconnect the volume to this. I'm going to add a math node, which is usual math node. As you can see, we transform this from a vector data, which have three values, to a scalar, which has only one value. I'm going to plug this here, and I'm going to change it to subtract, and I'm going to subtract one from it. By doing this, I inverted that operation. Why do I do that? Because what I want is, is that I want a gradient that goes from white to black. After this operation, I get a gradient that goes from black to white. What I want is the inverse of that. I want a gradient in the center, it is white and it will gradually fade into black. So this subtract is responsible for inverting that. So this is the first step. As you can see, everything is black right now. So we need to start bumping the intensity of this effect. To do this, here's what I will do. I'm going to plug this into the density, and let's plug this into the volume, and let's disconnect this. And nothing is happening for now. Here's what we will do. I'm going to add a multiply node. And the main reason adding a math node, not multiply a math, and we select multiply. The main reason I'm adding this is basically to be able to multiply the intensity of what is coming out of here. I need to boost that signal. So I'm going to multiply it by, let's say, something like 20, not 220 already. You know what? Okay, we multiplied it. Oh, something is happening. Something is wrong right now, let's try 20. Okay, Something weird is happening. We're not seeing the effect right here, for whatever reason. And my hunch is telling me that I need to do some displacement to it. Okay, let's just bring this here for a second and let's do some problem solving. The main reason we're not seeing any sort of volume scattering or any sort of atmosphere here is that basically all the atmosphere is right now, basically in the center. And when it gets to the surface of the Earth, it is almost a value of zero. So what I want to do is to make this atmosphere slightly bigger. Your first instinct will be to, hey, you can scale this, but this is not the right way to do this. I'm going to do this using displacement. And here's what I mean. So I'm going to go shift A and look for displacement, which we used plenty of times during this course. And make sure you jump to your material properties and scroll down and change this from bump only displacement and bump. I'm going to plug this into displacement, and for the mid level I'm going to turn it to zero. And let's bring this to something like 0.00 or let's say 02 and boom. Something is happening right now, we're starting to see this atmosphere. And as I said, the main reason we had that problem is because all the gradient or all the atmosphere was stuck inside the sphere of the Earth. We wanted to go outward. So right now we have something looking like this. If I just zoom in to the edge, as you can see, we're getting that same look that you see in most videos out there, which is this ugly harsh line in the atmosphere. Right now, our job is to somehow build the system that will allow us to get the smooth fall off. I'm going to add another node right here, and I'm going to change the operation to divide. And I'm going to divide it by the same value as here. I'm going to go shift a, and let's look for value. And I'm going to plug this here. And plug this here. Basically, whatever value I will plug right here, it will go to the divide at the displacement at the same time. Instead of writing the same value here and here, I'm going to change this to 0.02 and you will get something looking like. So what we are trying to do right now is to build a system for the gradient falloff. Divide is the first operation. Second operation. After that I'm going to do a multiply and I need to lower this value, let's say to something like 20 because it is too intense. And if I just zoom in to the edge to see exactly how it looks, it is still a harsh line as you can see. To get the ingredient fall off, I'm going to duplicate this math node another time in the operation, I'm going to change it to power. I lost everything, so make sure to change it from base to exponent. As you can see right now, we're starting to get the gradient fall off right here. If I just zoom out, this is the result we got. If I had zero to jump to the camera view, this is what it looks right now. Effect is still way, way too subtle. So I need to boost the signal to do this, multiply this, or actually duplicate this multiply node. And let's bring this value to something like 250 or let's say 50, because this is too strong. Yeah, this is starting to look pretty sick. For whatever reason. We still can see some grid on the surface of the atmosphere. The best solution for that is to actually bring this to 00.3 and you will start getting rid of it. Let's try 0.04, this is better. Let's try 05. Yeah, this is way, way better. Right now we nail the volume scattering part of our atmosphere now to the last part of the atmosphere, because we need a volume scatter. And at the same time, the atmosphere does have a property of absorption to it. That's why I'm going to also add a volume absorption node. Let's put it here and let's just organize this now tree slightly for this volume absorption. I'm going to take the same value out of the multiply node and plug it to density. And let's change the color to something like brown inch. And I need to mix both of these. Let's go shift A and let's look for add shader. Let's plug it here. Take this and plug it to shader. Right now we have a really simple set up for how we can emulate the atmosphere or the light scattering in the atmosphere of the Earth using this really simple set up. I know this might sound like it is really complicated, but actually want to just do a little bit of research and try to visualize, let's say all of these different operation. This is really basic. Either way, let's just fly around the Earth and let's also make sure to activate our clouds and yeah, this is starting to actually look like an actual planet. The last part that I'm going to do is to jump to my render settings. And under volume, under volumes, as you can see, you have step right render. Basically, this is responsible on how smooth your volumes will be. The lower the number, the better quality you will get. For the sake of this course, I'm going to actually lower it as much as possible to 0.01 I guess. And same thing for here, 0.01 And this will give you a way better look to your atmosphere. Yes, it will slow your renders drastically. But I think that the result that you will get out of this is really nice. Honestly, As you can see, we are emulating, or we're simulating, how light basically acts in the atmosphere and all of that in a really, really nice way. And that's why basically this is a key, to get this shader working, the way it is intended is to lower these values. This is the usual trade off. If you want like really outstanding quality, you will push your computer to the maximum and you will have more or less slower renders. Yeah, this is planet right now. If I hit zero to jump to the camera view, this is what we got. You can play with all of these different values until you start getting a result you're happy with. Yeah, I'm going to leave you with this. Don't be worried to experiment. Make sure to save your file also. And I will see you in the next video where we will actually set up a couple of shots to render, and later on we'll move on how to composite this shot. Yeah, I will see you everyone in the next video. 6. Rendering: Alone. Welcome. In this new video where we are going to set up one of our shots that we will render okay, So this is where we stopped last time. And the first thing I'm going to do is to jump to my camera settings. Let's select the camera. And right here in the camera settings, the first thing I'm going to change is the focal length. By default, Blender comes with 50, but I'm actually going to change it to a wider ****. That's why I'm going to change this to 24 millimeter ****. Of course, the moment you will change to a wider ****, basically everything smaller. That's why I'm going to select my camera J. To move the camera, hit y, to only move it on the y axis and let's get it closer to our planet. Right now, you need to think a little bit about how you want your planet to look like or how you want your animation to be. Of course, if you're going to render only one steel frame, you can probably just play a little bit with the lighting, for example, and you will start getting interesting things. Or if you want more of a close up, you can always, for example, take the camera, for example, hit seven to jump to the top view. And you can do something, as you can see right now, you will get a close up shot. And you'll always see similar compositions in movies and all of that. But either way, I'm actually not going for this angle for now. What I want is a master shot, which is something looking like this. The animation that I have in mind is basically if I select the sun and hit our ax to rotate it on the X axis, the animation I have in mind is something that will start like this, and slowly the sun will just rotate. Now of course, we're doing things the wrong way, because technically we should not be moving the Sun, we should be rotating the Earth or changing the position of the camera. But in our case, we can cheat that by rotating the sun. Let's do a little bit of animation. First things first, I'm going to jump to my output settings. And I want this animation to be only 3 seconds, 24 frames per second. So if I want 3 seconds, 24 multiplied by three, so I will have 72 frames to render. And after that, I'm going to jump from the shade or editor. I'm going to jump to the Timeline. Yep, the timeline. And you can zoom a little bit here to better see exactly what we will be doing. I'm going to select the Sun and jump to the object properties. And I'm going to animate the rotation on the x axis, that's why I'm going to rotation x. Hit the right mouse button, insert single key frame. Let's go also to the end, and let's also insert key frames. Basically, right now we do have identical keyframes, nothing is happening. I'm going to jump back to the first frame and I'm going to rotate it to something like so. And you can always replace single key frame. What will happen now is that so will slowly rotate to reveal our planet. Yeah, this is looking pretty good. But one thing that you need to keep in mind that this will not maintain the same velocity. It will start slow, and then it will go faster, faster, faster. And at the end, it will slow down. We want this movement to be linear to keep the same velocity. That's why I make sure you select both of your keyframes to jump to the key frame interpolation, and make sure to change it to linear so that it will keep the same velocity along our animation. And that's exactly what we're looking for. This is the animation that we will get. The purpose of this video to show you what is possible, but at the same time, for example, you can create some animation for the camera, for example. So that the camera with time will get closer, for example, to the planet. You can probably also do a little bit of rotation to make a more dynamic shot. But in my case, I'm going to leave the camera the way it is. So let's right now play a little bit with some render settings. I'm going to jump to the render settings. Of course, cycles support GPU, compute the most important thing which is the max samples or the noise threshold. In our case, I'm going to actually work with the noise threshold. What does that mean? That once blender reaches this threshold, it will basically decide that, okay, I'm done with this frame, let's move to the next. It is basically a different model on how to render an image. In the past we used to mainly use samples and once blender reaches the sample count, okay, it will move to the next frame. But with noise threshold it is way more accurate because once you reach a certain threshold of noise, you can move on to the next frame. So it is way more efficient and it will give you better results, in my case, actually going to use 0.1 And I found that this value works really well with what I have in mind. Make sure to keep noise checked because you want to noise our render. And the last thing which is really important, make sure to jump down and under film, you will have here something called transparent. Make sure to check transparent. So basically you will have only the Earth rendered. And later on if you want to swap the background or any of that, that will be really easy to do and we will be doing that later. Stay background behind it. The last thing that you need to do right now is to jump to compositing. Make sure to check, use nodes to use nodes for rendering. And let's set up where we want to save our render. To do this, go shift a and let's look for a node called file output. Let's put it here. And let's plug the image. And plug it to image, make this bigger. And let's select this file output and jump into node properties. From here, we're going to basically specify which file format we want and what is the naming of the file and where we want to save it. First of all, I'm not going to render the scenSPNG, I'm going to render it as open XR. Make sure it is RGBA because we want the alpha channel and make sure it is float health. This is actually more than enough. Probably a lot of movies will basically go find with float health. Float fall is way too overkilled for the Dec. Make sure to change it to DAA loss or DAB loss. In my case, I'm going to change it to DAB loss, which technically will have the same quality as lossless, but it is way smaller files. I bet you will probably never be able to tell the difference between the lossless and the DWB loss. And for the naming, let's call it, for example, Earth Shot 01 Underscore, the blender will basically put the name of the frame after the underscore on the last thing, we need to tell Blender where to render this shot. To do this, you can always click here. So let's jump to my Blender projects. And I will have here a folder called Earth Shot 01. So let's put it here. I'm going to delete both of these just in case. Delete selected files. Okay, and hit Accept. And because I selected those two files, I'm going to delete this name right here. Perfecto. So I'm going to save it to create realistic Earth assets, Blender projects Earth Shot 01. Just tell Blender where you want your render to go. And the last thing, make sure to go file and save your project. And once you finish that, make sure to go to render and render animation. Right now, you need to wait for your Blender to render the scene. And I will see you in the next video where we will be doing some compositing. Yeah, see you there. 7. Compositing: Be welcome in this last video where we are going to do our compositing work once we finished rendering. Right now, it is about time to start combining all the different elements, Add a star background to our render, and basically make it possible for people to watch it in the form of a video. For this, there are two different options. Either you can continue working in your usual blender scene, but I will highly recommend that you start a fresh blender file because it is fresh and it will be faster. And that we will not ruin the three D stuff that we did or the render layer that we set up in the compositing tab. That's why I will recommend that you start fresh blender scene. This is my fresh blender scene. I'm going to pick general right away. Right away. I'm going to jump to compositing. All of the work that we will be doing right now will be in the compositing tab number two. Make sure you check use nodes and let's activate this magnet so our nodes will stick to the grid because that's satisfying. And another thing which is that if you jump to your render output, make sure that the scene end or the number of the frames is 72 because that's the length of our scene. Make sure to change that to 72, the same length as your image sequence. And I'm just going to hit this to basically make the timeline in the middle. Right now, let's start compositing. First thing, I'm going to delete both of these tunes, select them and delete. And I'm going to go and let's look for image to import an image. And the first thing I'm going to import is the image of the stars background, which you will actually find in the resources folder. And your compositing textures you will find here this Night Sky. I'm going to import it into Blender. Click on Open, and let's choose Night Sky Control Shift and click on it to see it, and this is what it is looking like. I'm going to hide the sidebar by hitting the first thing that you will notice that it is so huge. If you want to make your image smaller, make sure to hit V, this will make it smaller. Or if you want to make it bigger, you hit OltV. This is a weird way to scale your preview image, but we just get a deal with how Blender works at the end of the day to jump to the last frame so that I will be able to see the Earth in its final state, control spacebar. And make sure that your cursor is somewhere in the compositor. Hit control spacebar to maximize this editor. Right now we can focus. Make sure you select your viewer note to be able to move this preview image slightly up. This is what we will see right now. After doing this, let's import the image sequence of the Earth. Let's go shift A, and let's look for image. Click Open Earth Shot, and in the folder of your Earth Shot Render, make sure to hit A to select all the different images, and click open Image. Right now, this is our Earth shot. We want this Earth to be over the night sky. That's why there is a node in the compositor called Alpha over which will allow us to do this shift A. And let's look for alpha over. Let's put it here. This node by default will put what is in the second socket. Above the first socket, the sky went to the first socket. So let's plug the Earth shot into the second socket. And boom, this is exactly what we want. This is more or less the final composition that we will settle on. But let's start doing some adjustments. And there are two things that we will be doing. First of all, ad just a little bit degrading of the shot. Add more blues, make it a little bit more faded. That's number one. Number two, we'll add a really tiny animation to it by changing the scale of the different elements. And number three, we're going to add some extra spice to the shot. Like a little bit of blur, a little bit of glare, and a little bit of let's say **** distortion. And **** and chromatic aberration. The first thing I'm going to do is to add curves. So let's go shift and let's look for curve RGB curves. And let's put it here, the look I have in mind is a slightly faded look when it comes in, the blacks. Which means that I'm going to take this point and bring it a little bit up. But generally, this curve is really, really sensitive. So even though I move this point like really tiny amount, the effect is really drastic. That's why I would rather basically getting back to its original position and I'm going to hit shift and change the value from here in really, really small increments. I just want the hint of faded look. Not like fully faded, let's say. And yeah, I'm digging this result. This is the before and this is the after. Yeah, this is looking pretty good. I want to add some blues or some scans in the top areas or in the highlights. That's why I'm going to red and I'm going to lower it to something like saho now this is the before and this is the after. This is the before, this is the after. And as you can see, we're adding a hint of an in the highlights. And let's add a little bit of blue to the highlights. Also, something that will look just like, so I think this is good. And let's reduce the magenta a little bit by reducing the green. This is the before and this is the, this is the before and this is the after. And I'm really, really digging this result right now. Let's add some transform node to create a really simple animation. And here's a really handy shortcut. If you select all of these nodes and hit H, you will be able to minimize them, which will give you more screen real estate, let's say. To do your work, I'm going to select all of these nodes, move them a little bit down. The first thing I'm going to do is to make the Earth slightly smaller. So let's go shift a S to look for something. Let's look for transform. I'm going to put it here in terms of scale. I'm going to change it to something like 0.8 I'm also going to the night sky. And I'm also going to add another transform node. And I'm going to put it here and I'm going to create a really, really simple animation. Here's what we will be doing. I'm going to hit control space bar to get back to my usual view. Let's select the viewer and move it slightly down so that we will be able to see everything. I'm going to jump to the first frame. Okay, I'm going to create a keyframe for the angle of the night sky. Scale of the night sky. Insert also keyframe also a keyframe for the angle of the Earth. Insert keyframe and a scale for the angle of the Earth insert key frame. After that, I'm going to jump to the last frame which is 72. I'm going to bring the scale of this space back around to something like one point. Let's say one to slightly bigger. Make sure to insert key frame and I'm going to change the angle to something like three angles and insert keyframe. And same thing I'm going to do for the Earth. I'm going to rotate it three degrees and insert Keyframe, And I'm going to change the scale from 0.8 to something like 0.9 slightly bigger. And Insert Keyframe, So this is our animation. I'm going to select this and select all of these nodes t and choose a linear. And same thing for this transform. Make sure to select all of this, is it. And choose linear. So we will have something looking like this and it will go to this. Yeah, this is exactly what we want. Some of you right now might wonder, why did I choose to do this animation on each node separately? The main reason I'm doing it this way is that this will ruin my render. Here's what I mean. I'm going to select both of these two nodes and I'm going to hit empty, mute them. Right now we don't have any sort of animation. And just to show you what will happen if we choose to do it, let's say the conventional way by adding a transform node at the end of my notary in my viewer. I'm going to put it here and I'm going to make this image slightly bigger so that we can see it. I'm going to go and make the Earth smaller, just like we did. So let's go transform. And I'm going to put it here and I'm going, let's say to make the scale something like 0.5 we made right now the Earth smaller, right? Now, if I jump right here and add another transform node and I'm going to cancel the scale operation, we scale by 0.5 Right here, I'm going to scale by 1.5 This will basically, or actually probably it even more, something like like two or no, wait two, yeah, this will cause a little bit of degradation in my earth shot scale because first we're scaling it down and then we're scaling the whole thing up. And that will cause a little bit of degradation and we will lose a little bit of resolution. That's why I think it will be better if we create or add a transform note to each layer on its own. To each node on its own. I'm going to select both of these transform X to delete it. X to delete it. Make sure to bring this here. And I'm going to select both of the transform node and hit M to mute them, and I still don't see anything. So control shift and click on this to be able to see the final result. And the last thing we are going to do is some final spice. The first thing I'm going to do is add some glare. So let's look for glare. I'm going to change it to fog low. Change this to him in terms of resolution the quality of the fog. Low. For the threshold, I'm going to lower it to 0.2 Let's say 0.1 Yeah, this is better. I'm going to leave it at this. Let's add also a blur. No, to slightly blur our render in terms of size, I'm going to just make it one. Let's add a **** distortion. This is the usual stuff that we do in every editorial. Basically, this will be distortion 0.01 for the dispersion, which is the chromatic aberration. Let's 00.5 a really tiny amount will do the job, and that's basically it. The last thing that we are going to do is to go shift. And let's look for file output, connect this to this in terms of the final render, I want it to be by hitting Jump to node properties. From here we can pick the final format that we want. We're going to render this as a PNG sequence. So make sure it is RGB, we don't have any alpha, and let's call it, for example, Final Earth Shot Z. One score like so let's choose the location. Let's say it is in our Earth shot. I'm going to create a new folder and let's call it Final Earth Shot Accept. And once you do this, all we have to do is to go to render and render animation. This should be really quick because we're just rendering sequence of images. Once you render is finished, let's close this and the first thing I'm going to do is to hit control space bar to get back to my usual view. And I'm going to jump from here from general video editing, video editing. What we want to do right now is to transform our render into an actual MP four video that we can publish on the Internet and all of that. Once you do that, make sure to go to add image sequence. Let's jump to Earth shot. Final Earth shot. These are all the final images that we got out of compositing. Hit eight to select them all, and hit Add images strip. And let's make sure it is beginning of my time line at frame number one, just like so. Once you do that, we're going to render this shot even one more time. Let's go here in your output panel. Let's jump to render in the file format. Make sure it is set to MPG video, which is the usual MP four video for the encoding. Let's make sure it is H 264, medium quality. Change it to high quality encoding speed. Let's keep it at good. Yeah, these are all the settings I'm going to change for now. And where I want to save it, I'm going to also save it. In the final Earth shot, I'm going to Final Earth shot and I'm going to save it as Final Earth shot one. Right now it will be an MP four, accept and go to render and render animation. This should be really fast, like blazing fast, because we're just rendering a simple image sequence right now. If I jump to my assets, Blender projects, Earth shot one, final Earth shot, I will. First of all, these are the different images that we had out of compositing. And this is my final video. Boom, this is looking really nice. Anyway, let's set everyone for this course. I hope you like it. I hope you learned a little bit about how to create planets and all of that. Feel free to check the rest of my courses here on the platform, and I will see you in future courses.