Create pixel art in blender.

1. Introduction: I am David from Treaty School, and in this class, you are going to learn how to create the school pitlatd effect in Blender. When looking for a new treaty adventure, I actually found these amazing rands by Michael Shillinberg. I liked the style so much that I even created a class out of this. And that is this class, of course. Learning and taking inspiration from other treaty artists will help you a lot with becoming a better Treaty artist. I've even gotten more work and more clients using different kind of styles and learning from Audit Tree D artists. So I hope you'll do the same. This class is divided in small videos explaining everything you need to know to create the cool looking planets. If you ever get stuck, I have some extra resources in the description down below, and you can always ask me. I hope you guys are as excited as I am, and I can't wait to see all the different kinds of planets you guys are going to create. 2. 1.1 Model the planet: Welcome, guys. Here we are inside blender, and at the bottom right, you can see in which version I am. Let's start here and we're going to create our planet, right? So the planet consists of two models. We have our mountains, let's say our land, and we have the oceans, right? So we're going to delete the default cube here and going to add a UPsphere. This UPsphere I want to have some displacement in here. But let's first add a subdivision surface and put this at two because now we have more geometry for this displacement modifier to work with. I would also like to click on W and do shade smooth on this model, so it's nice and smooth instead of having those little flat faces. Now, add modifier and use a displacement modifier. Click on New, and now we have created a new texture, and if you go to the texture properties, you can select a type. From image or movie, we're going to choose clouds. So now we can see that they finally have some displacement. This displacement, you can change in multiple ways. First of all, you can change it here in strength, I can make it less or more strong. That is in the modifiers, or you could go here into the texture properties, play around with the size. And right now you already want to think like, Oh, how big do I want my mountains to be, right? So let's say I want them to be like 0.6. It is a little bit hard to see though, because we don't really have any reference to look at or have our oceans, right? So if we rename this sphere to just planet mountains, then duplicate the sphere, and this one is going to be the planet oceans. Now, into the planet oceans, go back to the modifiers and delete the displacement, because the oceans are just going to be nice and round. You can go back to the mountains right now and play around with this texture. So we set a size of 0.6. Good work. But I would like to have a little bit more impact on what is really happening here. So I'll go to colors, and here you can play with brightness, contrast, and even stuation. So if you put the contrast down, you will see that also the mountains will go down in height. And around here actually looks cool in my opinion, but you could keep changing and finding whatever you think looks cool. So just play a little bit around with these options. So now we have our planet mountains and we have our planet oceans. Very cool. In the next video, I will show you how to create the materials for the mountains. 3. 1.2 Materials mountains: So let's get our planet Mountains material going. Select your planet mountain and then click on New and create a mountain material. You can delete the principal shader because we're going to use an emission shader. So emission. And what an emission shader does, it actually just emits light. And this comes later on very handy with this bloom option here. So if you go to rendered or a material section inside the EV render engine, you can see that now we have, it's just a very flat shading, right? So that's co totally work, but I would like to have a little bit more, more interesting looking material. So what we can do is we can combine two of these. So let's make. Let's just do one random color in here. And use a mixed shader to combine these. You will see that this mix shader just combines some half half. So right now, it's in between this white and a pink, right? You can also move it up, and now it will only use this node or move to the left, and now it will use this node. So 0.5 is in the middle. The thing is this also works with gray scale maps, which is very cool. So let's say I am using a noise texture. So I'm going to use a noise texture. Noise normally just looks like this. So let me get a diffuse shade in here. Okay. So noise normally just looks like this as you can see, right? So we still have to play a little bit around these options, but you can see what the noise does. It gives us black and white values. This is a gray scale map. We can use this in this f right? So I have to go from the noise texture into the fac. We don't need to difuse shade anymore, and this mixed shade goes into the surface. And now you can see that instead of it being black and white, now it's used as kind of a mask. So the white or black will be using this node and the other color will be using this node, as you can see right now. So we can do very coool stuff if this because if you use a gradient texture gradient, put the gradient into the g. Then you can see that we get a nice gradient in between here. And this is the one technique that I really used. You can see from a preview that you can see from a preview, it's kind of hard to see, but in the bottom of this planet, it is more bright than on the top. It might be a bit hard to see, but it for sure is happening there. So I want to have the same here. And yeah, this kind of shading is already working. We might want to change it. So let's just do kind of the same colors that what I had before. Around here. The problem here is is that it needs to be rotated a little bit, and I cannot do that right here. So if we get a texture coordinate and a mapping node in between here, let's just use it generated into the vector of the mapping node and the vector of the mapping node inside the gradient texture. Here we can start to rotate everything if you would like, right? So we can rotate it, and now our gradient texture is more in the position that I like. What you can also do for even more control is you can use a color ramp. So now a gradient texture can be controlled with this color ramp. You can see here that it can make it very sharp right here or can keep it quite loosey goosey. But you can see that I can yeah change these colors around a little bit. I can even swap these if I want. So pm. Now this side is the more brighter blue, right? So those are a lot of options that you have. So as you can see, this is kind of the basic material that we have here, but there's something else happening. You can see that we have these very bright points here in these mountains. On top, they are pink, and in the bottom, they are white. What are these and how can we create them? Well, I thought is just a very cool, kind of, yeah, back light effect, right? And we can create this actually quite easily. So we can get another emission node in here. Let me get everything to white. And get another mix shade in here and we're going to mix this. So as you can see, right now, the mixing doesn't make any sense because it just mixes this color with this color, right? But what we can do is we can use a fernal node. Now, a Fernal node does something different. So what is feral? Fernl has to do with specular objects, right where we have reflections. If you look at this image, I want you to focus on the water. When we look close towards the object, which is the water, you can see that we can look straight through it. But when you look further away, you can see a clear reflection from the mountains and the sky above. So once we get more of a grazing angle, then the object gets more and more reflective. At a 90 degrees angle, it actually is all the way reflective. It's just a mirror. 100% of the light will reflect back to the camera or your eyes, of course. And because it has to do with the angle, you can see that it is not totally reflective in this image. That is because there are some waves, maybe because of some of the wind that blows over. So rough objects will have a less noticeable for a el. We can also use a color wrap in between here and get these areas more sharp or less sharp, whatever you want, and you can play around this IO R, right? Very cool. So that is the bottom and the top. You can see that we have these brighter areas, right? So how do we get the pink in there? Well, it's exactly the same as we did here. We used all of these. So the whole gradient texture setup, put it down here, and then mix this emission with the pink emission node. So here's the pinker one, with this grading texture. So here you can see that we have the white on the bottom and the pink on the top. If we just use this texture, you can see what is happening. It is just the same as we had before, right? But because we're now using this fernel node, then only these corners are affected. So this is our planet mountains material. You can see that actually, the material doesn't really pop yet. It looks like mine, right, which I showed you before, but there's something missing. But what is this? That is essentially the blooming section here. So if you go to the render properties, make sure you are inside the render engine EV and put on bloom. For bloom Bloom is already working, but let me put this emission very high just so you guys can see what is happening. So if I turn on or off bloom, you can see what it does, right? It creates a very cool effect around the emissive parts. And because we're only working with emission, we need to put some strengths higher than other ones. But we can also play around with the with these options here. So the threshold could be quite important, but also the intensity of the bloom and the radius of the blooming, right? So if you have a smaller bloom, you can see what is happening here. If I look back at my scene, I saw that I had this at four and this at 0.094, which is quite extreme, right? But if I look back at my strength and emissions, this one was at 3.6, and the other one seems to be quite lower. So this one is at two, then we had this one at five and this one at four. And as you can see, it doesn't really look the same at all, and that is because every scene is a little bit different. So maybe, in this case, we'll put the intensity a little bit lower, and we want to play with these emission notes, okay? And I can show you right here, like, Oh, I do this and this, but it will be different than yours. So you really have to play around and make it look the way that you want it. So as you can see this material, yeah, looks quite big. It also is big, but it's quite simple still, right? And we're not going to use way more difficult materials, but I hope you guys learned from this and I'll see you guys in the next one. 4. 1.3 Materials ocean: So let's create our ocean material. As you can see here, the ocean is just blue. It's quite simple, but there are some cool reflections happening, and those are actually animated. So let's go into Blender, and we're going to start with this material. Select your ocean, make sure we go to rendered, and then we can click on new to create a new material. Let's rename this material to planet Ocean. Now, I'm going to delete the principal shader and just going to do the same as we did with the planet mountains. So add an emission, duplicate this and use a mixed shader to mix them. As well as the mountain material, I like to have a gradient texture in here. So use a gradient texture. Color goes into the fc and we like to, of course, put a color ramp in between here so we have some more ways to play around with this material, and then a texture coordinate and mapping node. Now I'm going to hide the planet mountains just so I can focus on the planet oceans. It is all the way white. We don't see any gray and, and that is because both the emission notes are white. So let's go here, make sure this is nice and blue, and this one is going to be a little bit of a lighter blue. I actually like it like this, but you could, of course, play around with everything that we did before. So that is up to you, but now let's create those cool little reflections. So I'm going to add another emission note, and I'm going to duplicate this mix shader and put it in between here. Now, it's just going to mix this whole material with this emission node here. But we don't want that. We are actually going to use a mus grave texture, and this height will go into the fac of this mixed shader. Now you can see that we have some differences between this big material here and this emission node. We want these white parts to be those little reflections. So I'm going to put the scale way up, maybe to around like 20, and also the detail can go way higher, maybe like 15. Let's add a color ramp. And play around with these two slides so we can create some small little splotches. So these are essentially going to be the reflections. So you can make them as big or small as you want. You can essentially make them bigger or smaller with the color ramp, or you can play around with the scale, you can see here, right? We are also going to animate this with the scale. So let's grab our timeline in here, Tline. I want to change my begin frame to zero and end frame to 120. Now, at frame zero, I want it to be at a scale of 20, right click insert keyframe. Because I want this whole animation to be looped, I want to go here at frame 120 and also have the scale at 20 and insert keyframe. Then at 60, which is in the middle, I want to change the scale. So I'm going to go to 25, right click Insert key frame. So let's play our animation and see what is happening. If we play this, you can see that we get some cool little animation happening here, and at the end, it goes back to its original position so that makes it loopablelet's say. Awesome. So that is essentially what we need to do here, and that is the planet ocean material. See you guys in the next part. 5. 1.4 Astroids: So let's now create this ring of asteroids, as you can see here. So it's going to be quite simple, actually. We're just going to create a ring. The first thing that we're going to do is create a circle, scale this up, and then going into edit mode, extrude it and scaled up even further. What we're essentially going to do is we're going to create some rocks, and then we're going to spawn it on this circle, let's say. So let's create our first rock. What I want to do is I want to just duplicate the planet mountains, duplicate it. Move it over here and scale it down. So of course, this material is not going to be the same, but the shape is already a little bit rock like. We do want to change a few of these modifiers, though, because I don't want it to look exactly like our planet, right? So I am going to change everything a little bit. So maybe the strength goes a bit up or we just create a new texture. So two, then we go here into the texture properties to the texture 001 and play around 50 these clouds, so yeah, I'm going to make it quite big. The strength is going down. Here, and this is going to be one of our asteroids. So it's going to be very simple. I'm going to put them inside a collection. So new collection asteroids. Why do I do this? Well, if we have these asteroids in a collection, we can essentially put a collection as a particle system, okay? And I will show you very soon how we do that. So rename this to asteroid. Let's do big, and we can duplicate this multiple times, okay we can put one here, which is a bit smaller and put the strength a bit down or play around with another texture that's all the way up to you. Then another one. It's going to be even smaller, and then play around with that again, rotated, maybe a little bit. But that is essentially, we have a big one, we have a medium one, and we have a small one, okay? So also rename these. So we have a big. This one is medium, so mid. And Small. Now, go back to your ring, go here into the particle properties, click on plus, and here we can create some particles. So we can also do this in multiple ways, but I like to click on hair and then put the hair length at one, go to the render. Instead of render as path, we're going to render our collection, and of course, select the asteroid collection. Right now, everything is very small. That is because our skill is set to 005. Let's just put it at one, and now because our hair length is at one and our skill is at one, they are exactly the same size as shown here. Now, the count is, of course, totally wrong. So let's put the number way lower and let's just start with 100. And what you can do is you can go to use count, and we can make sure that every asteroid has a count set to them, essentially. So for every one big asteroid, maybe we take three small medium ones and five small ones. That makes the image look a little bit more balanced because we have some big asteroids, more medium, and even more small ones, right? So that makes more sense. We can, of course, change a lot here, okay? So we can play around with the skill randomness. So if you want more randoss than we already have here, we can do that. So maybe a bit of skill randss wouldn't even be bad. Then if we click on advanced, we can also play around with the rotation. So we can click on random. You can see that this doesn't really do anything, but if you randomize phase and play around with the phase as well, then you can get some random, rotation in here, which makes it look way better. That is good. So now we get some random rotations. Let's actually go to the emission and look at source. And I want to play around with this jittering amount. So you can see that now, it depends solely on your scene, but you want them to be a little bit more spread apart, okay? So this already looks way better. Keep in mind, nothing is set in stone. You can put a number higher. So if you want more of these rocks, if you want less of the rocks, you can play around with the scale randerss if you want even more randinss in here, it is all up to you. But this is how we create this ring of asteroids, okay? And for the materials is actually, I'm not going to create a new video on that because the materials are very, very simple. Just select one of these. Let's start with the big one. Click on four to duplicate this, but we're going to change the name. So let's do asteroid, big. Then I'm going to delete everything here. And just get an emission shaded in here. Mission. And for this color, I'm going to create a blue dark color, something like this. Then for the medium one, I'm going to select again, t big, duplicate it, rename it to medium. Then this color is going to be maybe a bit of a lighter blue. And all of this is totally up to you, but it's going to be the same for the small one, select the small one, select asteroid medium, duplicate it, then do trod small as name, and maybe this is going to be yellow or whatever. You guys should really just play around with this, see what looks cool to you and then go on with the next video. So I'll see you guys there. 6. 1.5 comet: Let's create the comet that flies around our planet. So it's going to be quite simple, actually. The first thing that we need is we need a curve. So this curve is going to be let's do it a bit bigger than our asteroid ring, and this curve is essentially going to be the curve where our commet flies around. So let's create the comt. Make sure when you add something, you don't add it to the asteroid section because this is, of course, going to be added to this ring, right? So the asteroids should be only for the asteroids. Now, what we're going to do is I'm going to create a UPspere Click on Shift H to hide everything else except this UPsphere and let's addit this UPsphere. So I am going to rotate this 90 degrees around the x axis and delete one side, okay I'm going to go to the side few here, go to wireframe mode, and then delete one part. Then I'm going to this and move it all the way backwards here. Then scale it down. Around here, and we need to create some extra edge loops. So contra R and just scroll up and then around here should be good and then accept it. Perfect. So this is our comet. Now what we want to do is we want to unhide this bier circle. And you can see that our comet is way too big. So I'm going to scale this way down. And then click a contra A to apply the scale. Now, what we can do is we can go here into our modifier properties, select curve, and then select this curve. It doesn't really deform the way that we want it, so I need to change this axis. In my case, the Y axis seems to work, but in your case, it could be different. So just play around with these. Now if we unhide everything with old age, you can see that we have our comm and we can start to give some material to this. Also, for the comet creation, I don't think we need to create a new video because, yeah, we already done almost, right? So what we're going to do is we're going to create a new material. It's going to rename it to Commet then let's delete this and create an emission note. What we're going to do here essentially is do exactly what we did before, but the gradient is actually going to work a little bit different, okay? So let's add a gradient texture. And if we put the gradient into here, emission into the surface, let's look at our render, you can see that our gradient creeps up here, right? So we can create a color ramp, put it in between here and play with this color ramp. That works great. But you can see that right now this gradient doesn't really follow this curve. So to change this, we need to add a texture coordinate and a mapping node. Factor goes into the factor, and then we will use the generated into this factor. And now we can play around with this y rotation. So just put it at 90, and you can see that now it goes from black all the way towards white. Perfect. So that is not really what we want because we want these cool colors, right? So we're going to create some white in front. Then we're going to have some yellow and then some red, right? So let's put this at ease to have a very nice smooth transition. We're going to put this to a nice white color, maybe almost yellow white here. Then we can click on the plus to create a new little stop. Make this yellow, and you can play a round of how far you want it. Create a new stop. This one is going to be red, red. And then this one can be, I guess, pink. For some reason, if I play around of the location, you can see that kind of the colors are flipped, right? So I'm going to put inside of rotation 90. I'm going to do it to -90. Now you can see that, it is flipped again, good. So here's pink and then then yellow, and then white. I'm going to play a little bit around of this location, so I can actually have the white in here and just a little bit of playing around with these colors. Awesome. But if we render this, I do not just want to see everything as a solid. I would like this little tail of the commet to be transparent. I'm going to use a transparent shader with a mix node. I'm going to mix it with this emission here. But where do I need to say that it is going to be transparent? Well, what we're going to do is we're going to use a color ramp, and we're going to use the exact same gradient texture. This one goes into the color, and then color goes into the. Here, and here we can see that we can play around with this value. And where essentially is transparent. There it is black in this case. Why is that? That is because we need to tell EV that we should work with transparency, okay? So go into the material that you want the transparency to be in, and in this case, we want this commit to be transparent. So go here into the material properties, then blend mode underneath settings. Blend mode should be Alpha blend. And now it's nice and blended as you can see, and you can play around here with how far you want this, transparency to be. So that is quite simple as you can see. That is how we're going to do it. And yeah, now it's just up to you to see how much emission you want in here and all that good stuff. So I hope you guys learned from this little part, and in the next part, we're going to create the background. 7. 1.6 background: The next three D model that we need to create is the background. So create a plane, rotate it, and move it a bit backwards. I'm going to go into my Cafe, so zero and make sure the plane is just as big as whatever we can see like inside the cama few. Now, contra A to apply the skill on this and we're going to create a new material. This material we can name to background. Just as in our ao materials, we will use a gradient texture. So we're going to delete this add emission note Color Ramp, gradient texture mapping node, and a texture coordinate. So let's put the UV into the vector, vector into the vector of the craton texture, color goes into the color of the color ramp, and then the color goes into the color of the emission node. This emission note can go into the surface, and now we can start to play around with these colors. So first of all, I'll go into my random field parchining just to see what is happening here. And the first thing that I want to do is I want to rotate my texture. So let's look around the Z axis in this case. So that's 90 degrees around the Z axis. And then I need to play around my x location. This all depends on if you have applied your rotation as well or not. Otherwise, these values might differ a bit. But around here seems to be fine for me. And now I want to play around with these colors. So I am going to use a nice purple, I guess. And this color is going to have the same color, but maybe a little bit brighter. So we have a little bit of a difference between them. But Yeah, that seems to be okay. So you might think, cool, that's it. But what I actually like to do here, I like to animate this background as well. So this is also the first step into our animation. We already have set our end at 120. If yours is more or less, put it at 120 because this is how long our animation is going to take. Now, what do I want to animate here? I want to animate little stars. And we need some extra notes for this. So I'm going to use a noise texture. We're going to mix this noise texture with the emission. But this is going to go into the fac, okay? And we need a different kind of color for the stars itself. So I'm going to duplicate this emission node and put it in here. So these are going to be my stars. And you can see that, right now, it doesn't really look like stars at all. So what do we do here? Well, first, put a skill up, and here we can see that we get some small noise in here. So maybe 67, something like that. Detail can go down to zero, and then that seems to be okay. But you might think now like, mm, doesn't really look like stars. And yeah, this doesn't look good. Well, I'm going to add a color ramp. Here. And now, if I play around with these two values, you can see that I can create small sploges and right now, they might look like, yeah, kind of weird things. But once it's pixilated, it actually looks like small little stars, okay? So, we want to play around with the strength, of course. Strength of everything needs to go a little bit down. So maybe 0.15 or 0.2 for the emission of the background itself. And then the emission of the stars, we need to, of course, change the color so we can go a little bit, maybe purples or reddish or even yellow, whatever you want. And this strength also goes a little bit down, but we want to animate this. So you might think, how do we actually animate this? Well, we animate it in a quite a simple way, okay? So let's first put it at 0.5, and I'm going to right click and insert keyframe. So from now on, this is animated. We have inserted a keyframe for our light. But what do I want to achieve if this animation? What I want to do here is I want the strength to go a little bit down a little bit higher, a little bit down, just so it looks more interesting. Now, if we just grab this one, pull it a bit up and go here into our graph editor, we can select this, go down into our background, lower and default value strength, which is this, the strength. We can go here. Click this little arrow here, which you can see, little arrow, or you can also click on N, and then we go add a modifier. So now we add a modifier to this whole a graph to this keyframe that we just put in, right? So add a modifier, and this is going to be noise. So what you can see if you play this is that it doesn't really feel like anything is happening, but if you look down in the strength, you can see that it goes up and down and up and down. This is just not strong enough in this case. So what we could do is we could change some of these values inside the modifier. So in this case, I want to put the strength maybe at even ten. So now you can see that the rate at which it changes is a little bit longer instead of it being so close together, right? So now we have a more of a smooth going on and off and on and off. Then yeah play around with the strength, we can pull it up to have a bigger difference between the high points and the low points, as you can see here. I don't want it to be all the way black. So be careful with going too high in this strength setting here. But around here will be fine. So now you can see that it goes on and off and on and off. And yeah, that actually will look great. So you could add in even more detail. So let's say we have these here, then I can just duplicate all of this, contrac contra v, and move this a little bit further away. And then add it in here. And for this noise texture that we have here, I can just play a little bit around with the scale. Maybe we put the scale at 70. So now you can see that we have two different ones. They're hard to distinguish. But if we also play around with this color a little bit, maybe we make this a bit more pinkish, you can see that we have more different kinds of stars. And also, this one, we can animate. Maybe this one goes 0.4, right click insert keyframe. I would personally actually put the keyframe, first at one. Then right click and inside keyframe. Otherwise, it's sometimes starts at the frame 60, right, because you put there the keyframe. Select this, go here, and then add a modifier noise and here, it's going to be exactly the same, right? So first, I want to make the scale a little bit bigger. So around ten or 11, would be fine. And then let's look what this looks like. It goes a little bit too deep. So play around with the strength. And that's it. So right now, we have some yellowish or orange stars in the background and some pink ones. And of course, we have our background itself. So I encourage you to play around of this, also the colors of the color ramp, like the background itself. Just make whatever you think looks cool. But this is how we create the background and how we animate those little stars blinking in the background. So I hope you guys learn from it, and let's go on to the next part. 8. 1.7 animation: So we have animated both the background texture and the water texture, right? But we need to animate everything else as well. So let's go back here into animation, and we can start to animate. The first thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to click on zero to go into my camera view. And I want to see from where we are going to see the animation, do I need to switch and move stuff around? Yes, I do. I don't like the way that we're looking at this right now. But we can actually keep our camera and background like this and we can just move all of the other objects around. So the first thing that we want to do is we want to rotate our planet, right? So I'm going to select both the ocean and then the mountains, click on Control P and then do set parent to object. Now, this planet mountains is the parent of the oceans, let's say. So if I move the planet mountain, you can see that the oceans move with it. I don't have to animate them individually. So go to the first frame, in this case, that is frame zero, click on, and then do Ist key frame at rotation. Then at frame 120, we're going to rotate around the Z axis for 360 degrees. So R z 360, click on and then do rotation. So now the planet rotates a full round. Awesome. The thing is, you can see that the planet is first quite slow, then speeds up, and then slows down again. Looks cool, but I don't want it in this case. I want it to be just very linear. So how do we do this? Well, a very quick short cut or short key is click on T and then do linear. First, select the keyframes that you want to have a linear, then T and then linear. But what is actually happening here? Well, let me actually drag this out. Get a graph editor in here, and here we can see what is happening. I need to make it a bit smaller, so we can actually see what's happening. This line is essentially our animation, and you can see that it is not linear. We have a curve in here, and this shows us the speed. I first slow speeds up, speeds up, and then slows down again. This is what we want to change. Also here, you can select them, click on T, and then do to linear. You can even do it in key interpation mode and put it here to linear. Now it is linear, and what you will see is from frame zero to frame 120, it will have the same speed at all times. The next thing, we want to move our asteroids around. One thing that you've got to keep in mind is if we first rotate it in a cool way, let's say, I'm going to put it here, looks quite awesome. Then by the way, don't do this yet. I'm just going to show you what's going to happen. It's going to probably wrong. Then I'm going to do rotation at here, and then rotate around the Z axis 360 degrees I rotation. You will see that it starts to rotate in quite a weird way. Okay. So it doesn't really work in this manner. So I'm going to click on Control that a few times, so it's back in its spot. And what we need to do is we need to first create an empty, okay? Create an empty plane axis. This empty, we can actually rename. So I'm first going to put also, by the way, I'm going to put the plane outside of the asteroids and also this empty because the only thing which needs to fit inside the collection of the asteroids are the asteroid big, medium and small. So this empty is going to be asteroid. Asteroid empty. What we want to do is we want to select this circle, which actually is our emitter, right? This is our particle system. So we can also rename this to asteroid particle system. So once we have the asteroid particle system and the asteroid empty, we are going to hide this leg planet here, select our asteroid particle system, and then we shift, select the asteroid empty, click a Control P and do set parent object. So now this parti system is parented to this object. What we can do now is I can rotate this empty round to whatever I want. Let's say Let's say I wanted to look like this, something like this. Then what I can do is I can select this ward particle system, make sure I'm a frame zero, rotation, then 120 rotate two times and then do 360 degrees rotation. As you can see now, it stays nice into its own place because we use the empty and now just rotates around its own origin. So this is what we want. That is how you do it, and yeah, that's it. And you can do multiple things with this. You can still also animate this empty if you would like to. But in my case, I'm not going to do that, and I also want this animation to be linear. I don't want it to slow down at any point. Also, for this one, I'm going to select it. Make sure all of my key frames are selected, click on T, and then do linear. So now it always rotates. Awesome. To animate the comt, we first need to fix something we did before. So in some of your cases, you don't need to fix this, but in my case, I do need to fix it. So I'm going to select my comt and I see here that my deformation axis is in this case, still on the y. But if you want to animate it that correctly, you can see that if I rotate that, it doesn't rotate around the axis, right? So it's just a little bit annoying. So we need to change deform axis from the y to the Z and instantly, our com just yeah, change position. So how can we fix this? Well, it depends on which axis you were, right? So if you already were in the deform x t, you don't need to change anything. But if you were on the x or the y axis, you do need to change something. And the one thing that I just found out is you just need to do r to rotate and click on double times x or double times y, and you will see in which case it will work for you. So I need to do X X. And you can see that now, I can move it in position, right? If I also open this item bar, you can see that I can see the rotation changing this here. Focus on here. All right. So I'm going to rotate it to where I like it. So in this case, R two times x and then around here. And you can see that around here, it seems actually perfect. So the rotation in my case, will be 180. I'm just going to do zero and zero on the y on the z axis. So now it's perfectly into place on the deform axis. So now if I rotate this circle around the axis, you can see that it actually works. So now we can do the next part. We're going to do exactly the same as this asteroid ring. But we're going to use another empty. So here, add an empty plane axis. This is going to be, of course, out of the asteroid collection, and this empty is going to be the Commet empty. Now, select the Commet and this circle, the comet circle, and then as last the comet empty Control P and click on object. Now when we move this, we can just move where if you want, and if we want to rotate it, we can rotate this when you click two times on. Okay? So, click on zero. Move it in a good position. Click on Add age, to unhide everything, and then yeah, find your position. So maybe I want to rotate it a little bit more like this. And then select this circle here. Go to your first frame. Click on rotation, go to your last frame, rotate Z, Z, then 360 degrees I rotation. In my case, it goes the wrong way. So I'm going to select it, go to item, and you can see that I go to 360 seems to be okay. So maybe I'll go to minus three 60 s. So I'll go to my key frame. Go here, -360 and then replace key frame. So right click replace keyframe. And now it goes right way. Also, for this one, you can see that it slows down at the end, and it starts slow in the beginning. So I'm just going to select them both, T and then linear. So now everything moves like it should. So my camera is a little bit too small here, so you can see that this part of the commet goes through, so I might move my camera a little bit backwards. Just like this. A little bit backwards. Okay. And here we are. Awesome. Everything still fits. And in the next part, I'm going to show you how we actually pixelate this. See you guys there. 9. 1.8 Render the pixelated effect: Our model is done. We, of course, still have some clouds that we can make and we can make an atmosphere around it. But I will keep this for the extras because I first want to explain to you guys how we are actually going to create the pixlated effect. I'm going to show you two techniques, and one technique is just putting the resolution down so we get the pixels in that way, right? So that is quite normal. But there's also a way to still keep this resolution, but have a pixlat effect. It depends a little bit what you want to achieve. With the bigger resolution, I do see a little bit of a better image. So if you really want to go for just a very cool looking image, then I will use that technique or if you really want to use the pixilate effect for games or whatever, then you just put the resolution lower. So the resolution lower is quite simple. You just divide it maybe by eight and this one also. And now what will happen is when I click on F 12, you can see we have a very small image coming up. This is small because we have a limited amount of pixels. If I zoom in, you can see that we already have a few pixels showing up. So this is a literally it. If you want bigger pixels, then you just put the resolution down again. So divided by two, divided by two. Click on F 12 to render it, and now you can see that A even have a smaller image. So now if I zoom in more, you can see that these pixels are bigger, right? So let's save this one, save as. I'm going to save it as as you can see I already made a video before, but try out, I think it's one 20 by 68, right? So save as, and that's it. So if you just have a resolution of 1920 by 1080, which looks like this. You see that you have a very clean, model. There's not nothing like pixelated about this, right? So how do we change this size of the image to a pixelate effect. It's very easy. I'm just going to close this, and I'll go here into the compositing. The two nodes that are available already are the random layers in which we just rander this image and the composite node. To actually addit our image and see what's going to happen, we are going to use a fewer node, fewer. The image of the undulators goes into the image of the viewer and here you can see that, this is the image that we have. Now, we want to pixelate this. It's quite easy. Add a pixelate node goes in here and you can see that nothing changes. This is because we need to add two other nodes. It's just going to be a scale node here and here. Now, we need to scale these down and up to make sure that we get the right pixels. If we put the first one down, so 0.1 by 0.1, You can see now that we have this smaller image with pixels, right, with the lower amount of pixels. But now we're going to scale it up again. So 10.5 by 10.5. And now you can see that we have a big image with our pixlate effect. So what I'm now going to do is I'm going to put this image into this one of the composite. And now if I click on F 12, you will see that we render it with the pixels, and now you can save it to whatever you want. Save and this will be like 90 21,080. So why did I show these two techniques? Well, let's go into hot shop. So here you can see the big image that we had. Of course, if we zoom a lot in, you can see this small one. This small one, of course, also takes way less to render and is quite useful for games, let's say, and the big one will be useful maybe if you want to showcase it on Instagram or whatever. Let just make something cool. Those are two different ways to create this picultd effect. So how do we create a video you might ask? It is quite simple. What you need to do is you need to go here into your output properties. Select a new folder, so I'm going to create a new folder into the output. It just rename this to Planet, whatever, render or movie. Make sure you go inside and accept, once you have created this extra folder, what you can do, you can choose your file format. I personally like to use the PNG because what happens with a PNG file is every separate frame that we have here, so 120 frames, it will create a separate image. I then go inside maybe Premier Pro or even inside the Blender compositor and then create a video out of it. But why do we need to create all separate images, you might ask? Well, if let's say my blender crash at frame 70. What I can do, if I have my file format at PNG or TIF, TIP is even better, by the way, but if I have my file format at an image, then if it crashed at 70, I can just repeat it from 71, right? But if it crashes within movie file, the whole movie file will be corrupted. So then I need to render everything from before. Inside EV, it doesn't really matter. And yeah so now you could even just choose this one if you want. But if you're inside cycles, it really, really matters because if it just crashes, you need to maybe render a whole 3 hours again, and we don't want that, okay? So keep it into your mind that probably you just want to render with a nice tiff, and then render animation. And here you can see that a whole animation is going to be rendered. This doesn't take too long. And what you will be able to see is that if we go here, every single image file will be saved here. So in the end, it will look something like this. Right? So that is how we create this. And in the next part, I'm going to show you some extras like this atmosphere around here and these clouds. So, I see you guys there. 10. 1.9 atmosphere: So in the last part, I showed you how we actually create this, the pixilated effect, right. But there are, of course, also extra things that we can do here, right? So let's start with the atmosphere. So we're just going to add a very simple UP sphere, make it a bit bigger, and then shades smooth and go to shading. Well, create a new material, and this is going to be our adhere. I think you write it like that. I'm not sure. So what we're going to do now is let's too in a little bit, and we are going to or the rando fuel pchding or the material fuel pchding and we are going to create our material right now. So as every material that we did here, we're going to start of an emission node, emission and emission goes into the surface. Now this whole sphere emits light. But we only want this little outside edge to actually light up. The first thing that we're going to create is a transparent shader here, transparent node, and then we're going to mix this with the emission. Let's change our emission color here, and we're going to add a layer weight. And we're going to use the Fernal after the fernel create a color ramp, put it in here. So we want to play a round of this a little bit. The thing is we need to make sure that EV actually also sees the transparency in this material. So go here and also this blend mode is going to be Alpha blend. So now we can see through the model. Before that, we couldn't do it because yeah, we need to go inside the material and then change it to Alpha blend. V also recognizes the transparency shader. So now we want to play around with the color ramp and the layer weight, okay? So just play around 50, see how far we needed to go. I think we might need to switch them up. Yes, this is better. So only the outside will be lit up. Okay. So as you can see here, we have a nice edge, and you can make this edge smooer or less smooth with these sliders here. So if I move them close together, you can see that it gets a bit smoother. Yeah, we can even just play around of these options here. Then the color, I actually wanted to be the same as the stars. So what was it like a bit orangey, something like this. And then, of course, you can play around with the strength as well. And this is how we created atmosphere around the planet. I would also highly suggest to get a subdivision surface in here, so it's more round, yeah, that's it. So in the next part, I will explain to you how you can create those clouds. I see you guys there. 11. 1.10 clouds: So right now, we're going to create some clouds. So what we want to do is we want to just duplicate this atmosphere. So we have just a sphere. And then what we're going to do is we're going to duplicate this atmosphere material, and we're going to rename this two clouds. So we don't have to delete everything from the material. Only the lay weight and the color ramp can go away. Now, I'm going to do Shift H, so I only focus on whatever we just selected, which is the clouds, right? We can even rename this. So now it's inside the asteroids, we don't want it. So I'm going to put it outside here, rename it to clouds. And what we want to do here is we want to add a texture so we can actually see those clouds. So I'm going to do this with an image texture. So image texture, and we're going to open this one. And you can, of course, download it. It's available for you guys as well. So open one. And what we want to do here is we want to just put the color in here and see what is happening. So right now you can see that one part is a little bit darker, which is the emission or which is the transparency, and of course, the other stuff is transparent. So we need to play a little bit around with this because it doesn't really work yet, right? We need a small little cloud here. So we're going to add a texture coordinate and a mapping note UV goes into the vector here, and this factor goes into the vector of the background image texture here. And we can play around with the location, and of course, the scale as well. So let's first do the scale. Let's put this maybe four and this one is four. And here we can see we have two of these yeah, little splotches, and, a lot is happening here, but not really the right stuff. So I'm going to add a color ramp. And we can play around with this texture here. So I think I need to switch the colors as you can see. And here we have our little clouds. There are a few too many, and this is because we have repeat on, then it keeps repeating this image. But we can also do extend, and then we can play around with this with a location and stuff. But it just doesn't get repeated the whole time. So we want a elongated shape. Make sure we put it in the middle again. It's just a little bit of fiddling around, but it's not too hard. So stuff like this will look okay, right? Maybe even smaller, nine, whatever. And once you have a shape that you like of this cloud, what you want to do is we want to create more of them, right? Because one is cool, but more is even cooler. So what you can do is you can duplicate all of this, contra C, contra, and then we want more of these clouds. So we need to mix it together. But how do we mix a color ramp? Well, very easy. Shift A at a mix RGB, And now we can mix this RGB. So color of the first color ramp goes into the color of this mixed node and the second one goes in the second color node, and then we're going to combine this color with this mixed shade, okay? So everything here gets moved a bit backwards, but here you can see that it's quite simple. So is this working? Yes. But why do we not see two clouds? That is because the location at both of them is exactly the same. But if I move this location around, you can see that now we have a second little cloud, right? So you can just move it around to where you want. Something around here looks cool. And you can get as many of these as you want in here. So just duplicate all of this. Again, bum. Then this color ramp here goes into here, and the mixed shader of this color ramp goes into the color of this mix shader. Now, of course, also, this one, we need to move a little bit, but you can see that it works as intended. We have three little clouds here. And the only thing you have to do for animation is just move this around. So just go to zero, rotation, and then a frame 120, rotates at 360 degrees I rotation. Of course, this is also a curve again. So if you go to the time line. You can see that it's slow in the beginning, speeds up at the middle and then slows down again, so click on T and then do linear. And here we have just a nice linear animation of our clouds. So the last thing that I want you guys to do is really look at your image and see what you want to change. So maybe you want this background, not to be purple. Maybe you want it to be an other color. Or you could even go in here like, Hey, I like this atmosphere, but it's a bit too bright for me. Okay, it's very simple. You can just put the emission rate lower 0.9, right? So please play a little bit around with everything. It doesn't have to be exactly the same numbers as I have because every scene is a little bit different. So play around with them, make up some cool stuff, and I hope to see all the renders from you guys.