Part 1 | Part 2

In this tutorial you will discover:

• How to create realistic reflections and materials
• How to create glowing lights
• How to add atmospheric fog

Welcome back! Last week we conquered Part 1, which was all about modelling the subway scene, and this week we’re getting into the materials and compositing.

Finished Result

Textures used in this tutorial:

• ConcreteBunker0366
• ConcreteBunker0410
• ConcreteLeaking0018
• RustPaint0257

Further inspiration

Not sure where to go with this tutorial? Check out these links for some inspiration:

• Undercity – Documentary about life underground
• The Tube – Short film project produced with Blender
• Japanese Sewer Photos

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial! As you can see my finished result includes a signal box, warning signs and little pebbles on the ground. All of these things are optional, but they really help to sell the authenticity of the scene. So go nuts and see what you can come up with!

In this 42 minute tutorial you will learn how to:

• Use volumetrics to create a realistic fire material
• Use displacements to quickly deform a mesh
• Randomize animation using the noise modifier
• Create glow and glare effects using the compositor

When I posted the interview with Colin last week, many of you kindly informed me that it had been a while since my last tutorial. And you were right! At least 3 weeks to be exact. So rather than post another interview I’ve decided to revert back to some good ‘ol fashioned tutorial fun. Enjoy!

If there’s one thing hollywood loves, it’s muzzle flashes. It lets the viewer know that has gun has been fired and hell is indeed breaking loose.

In fact if you had took a shot everytime you saw one in the Matrix you’d be on the floor before the halfway mark.

One, two, three, floor

The military use flash suppressors to help the soldier remain hidden in night time situations. But where’s the fun in that?

The Finished Result

Based in China? Download the video on this link.

Have fun! I look forward to seeing some of your gun animations in the comments below

During this tutorial you will discover how to:

• Quickly model a detailed lightning bolt
• Make an object disintegrate
• Create light flashes
• Add glow and glare effects in the compositor

Last week I posted the how to create rain tutorial, and was surprised at the number of comments requesting lightning! I guess they go hand in hand or something?

Anyway, it took me a while to get the technique nailed down, but I think I’ve finally worked out an easy way to create and animate a lightning storm within Blender.

Reference image used: ¡Rayos!

Lightning reference videos:

• Lightning Storm #1 Live Lightning Crashes
• National Geographic Special
• Lightning Strikes Qantas Plane
• Townsville lightning strike
• Up close strike

Do you have any real life lightning stories? A near miss? Post it below! I’d be interested to hear them!

In this tutorial you will discover how to:

• Create realistic rain for animations or stills
• Add water droplets to the camera lens
• Drastically reduce your render times with simple rain materials
• Create a glowing sky

Following on from last weeks snow tutorial, it’s time to delve into rain!

Download the textures used:

• Splatter Texture
• Sky Texture

Need some inspiration?

Watch these youtube videos for some creative uses of rain:

• Polar
• Rain town
• AVP
• Dramatic Epic Rain Scene

Let me ask you something, when you slave away for hours in Blender, what are you trying to achieve?

To make cool stuff? Nope. Think bigger.

Give up?

Whether you realize it or not, the sole purpose of all 3d art is to make something look believable.

That’s it. There are no exceptions.

If your image doesn’t relate to the real world in some way, the audience will feel disconnected and become disinterested. It doesn’t matter if your rendering an architectural fly-through of a house or an orc warrior fighting his way out of a volcano, you are still taking something that exists in your mind and producing it as a picture and hoping the audience believes it.

You’re doomed, unless…

Let’s say you spend hours intricately modeling each and every nail of a door frame, you piece together textures to create flawless materials, and you spend a solid week on the lighting setup.  Well guess what? If you hit render now your scene is still going to look fake. The reason for this is simple: You haven’t added camera imperfections.

It sounds like a joke, but it’s absolutely true. Photography is the single most important thing to understand when it comes to learning 3d, but for some reason most artists choose to ignore it.

When you take a real photo with a real camera, do you realize how many flaws are being built into the photo?

Just to name a few:

• Chromatic Abberation
• Vignetting
• Soft Glare
• Light rays
• Reflecting glare
• Bloom
• Lens Flare
• Glare burnout
• Ghost glare
• Depth of Field
• Motion Blur
• Lens Distortion
• Lens dust, scratches, sweat, fingerprints
• Film developing artifacts
• Color grading

Now guess how many of these flaws occur when producing a computer generated image?

NONE. ZERO. ZIP. NADA.

When you hit F12 you will produce a perfect still. Every. Single. Time.

For example, take a look at this image by the talented artist, Marek Denko:

Aside from the perfect lighting, flawless modeling and impressive materials. What else has he incorporated?

Effects. And lots of them.

• Depth of field
• Chromatic Abberation
• Lens scratches, dust & dirt
• Color Grading
• Bloom
• Reflecting glare

These are all things are done outside of the 3d viewport and added in post production. That means that after he slaved over every piece of detail in the scene, he flipped to the compositor and continued working. That is what pushed this scene over the edge.

Have you ever wondered how Pixar achieved that authentic film look in Wall-E?

This was actually the result of many months of work. Before they began working on the meat of the production, they focused entirely on trying to replicate the look of live footage in their 3d software. They even went as far as to consult the Director of Photography from No Country for Old Men, on tips for creating real camera and lighting setups.

“We rented some equipment and used the live-action DP [Marty Rosenberg] who eventually shot some of the live-action elements. He helped us do some lens tests. Our depth of field, our cameras never look as we expect them to.

“Life is nothing but imperfection and the computer likes perfection, so we spent probably 90% of our time putting in all of the imperfections, whether it’s in the design of something or just the unconscious stuff. How the camera lens works in [a real] housing is never perfect, and we tried to put those imperfections [into the virtual camera] so that everything looks like you’re in familiar [live-action] territory.”

-Andrew Stanton

(source: AWN)

The result was a very slick, very believable environment for Wall-E to explore.

Why using the compositor is crucial to your artistic success

The most common question people ask is, why would I want to incorporate camera flaws into my renders? After all camera flaws are exactly that, flaws. So wouldn’t an image that is clean from these flaws look better?

Nope. Let me explain why.

When you look at a white car sitting in the hot sun, your eyes expect to see a reflecting glare. When you look closely at your spoon during breakfast, your eyes expect the bowl of cereal in the background to be out of focus. And at night time when you look at a street lamp, your eyes expect to see rays of light.

I could go on, but I think you get the picture.

Our eyes have become so accustomed to seeing these imperfections that it looks odd when they aren’t there.

Now don’t get me wrong, lighting, materials, textures and lighting are all important and I’m not pretending they aren’t. But unless you learn to take camera effects seriously, you can kiss believability goodbye.

If you are interested in exploring this topic further, I have written an eBook called The Wow Factor, which you can purchase here: http://wowfactorbook.com

In this tutorial you will learn:

• How to create fire and smoke using the new smoke simulator
• A simple lighting trick that will vastly improve the look of your fire
• The correct material settings for fire
• How to make your flames emit burning embers
• An easy heat distortion trick that adds nothing to your rendertimes

Previously, creating fire in Blender was a chore. We were forced to use the outdated particle system combined with the clumsy halo renderer. We cringed as we hit F12 and watched the equivalent of a mustard stain materialize on screen.

Those days are over.

The new smoke simulator can not only create realistic smoke, but a gorgeous fire.

I’ve been working extensively with the smoke simulator over the past few months to find out the best method for creating fire. It’s been a long road but I believe I’ve finally got the formula right.

Last week, I launched an Introduction to Smoke Simulation that covered an in-depth approach to realistic smoke physics.

This week it’s all about fire… and it’s completely free.

What you will get from this tutorial is essentially the 3 months worth of experimenting, testing and adjusting, it took me to create the best looking fire possible.

Here’s a sneak peak at what’s inside:

Download FREE copy of your ebook here

Perfect for advertisements, logos and animations! This tutorial teaches you useful techniques such as modeling with curves, creating a glow effect and making a curve emit light.

Today we’re going to learn how to create this cool neon sign:

The tutorial will take approximately 30 minutes to complete, and you will learn the following:

• Modelling with curves
• Make a curve emit light
• Isolate a render layer
• Using glow and glare effects

Ready? Let’s begin…

Creating the Neon Tube

Add a Bezier Circle and move it to last layer. This will be the radius of our tube.

Add a Bezier Curve to the first layer, and make the Bev Object “Curve Circle”

As you can see the result is circle is far too big for our curve, so enter the edit mode and press Alt+S to scale it down to a more realistic size.

Forming the letters

This step is by far the most time consuming task. Using your path forming skills, form the shape by adding and arranging handles to suit.

If you are new to curves, you might like to check out the BlenderWiki curve guide.

But if you want to wing it, these are the important keys to remember:

Ctrl+Click – Add handle

R – Rotate handle

G – Move handle

Ctrl (whilst rotating) – Rotate in increments of 5 degrees.

Repeat this for the rest of the letters. To save time, try duplicating the first letter and moving the handles around as needed.

Half an hour later...

Adding the neon material

Select your first letter and add a new material as follows:

Rather than selecting each letter one by one and applying the material we are going to use the ‘Make Links’ function to save time. Hold down Shift and select the rest of the word, making sure you select the first letter last. Then hit Ctrl+L and click Materials from the popup menu.

Because the word ‘guru’ in our sign is a different color, we are going to be assigning a different material to the blue one. Select the first letter and add the blue neon material we just created. Click the number next to the material name to make it a single user and rename it to PinkNeon. Then change the color as follows:

Just like we did above, hold down shift and select the rest of the letters in ‘guru’ and press Ctrl+L and select Materials. Each letter should now have a material and be looking something like this:

Creating the highlights

To give the neon tube a more three dimensional appearance, add two spotlights and position one above the words and one below the words as follows:

Set the energy for the top spotlight to 0.9 and 0.4 for the bottom spotlight and select ‘Layer’ for both. This will make the spotlights only affect the neons, instead of the entire scene.

Making the Neons emit light

Add a lamp and parent it to the first letter by first selecting the lamp then the letter and hitting Ctrl+P. Select the letter and go to the Editing Panel (F9) and select ‘CurvePath‘

Clear the origin of the lamp by pressing Alt+O. The lamp should have snapped into place at the start of the curve.

With the lamp still selected go to the Object Panel (F7) and select DupliFrames and set DupOff to 1

This will create duplicates of the lamp along the curve. The DupOff value decreases the number of those duplicates by half so there aren’t so many.

Go to the Shader settings (F5) and change the color and energy settings as follows:

Make sure you click 'Layer'

Now if we render the neon against a plane we should see a faint glow.

Perfect!

Repeat this step for all other letters. Then select all the lamps you just created (making sure the lamp you created first, is selected last) hit Ctrl+L and select ‘Lamp Data‘. That will make every lamp have the same data, so if we want to change the lamp settings in the future it is a lot easier.

Finally move all the spherical lamps to the second layer. The first layer should only contain the words and the spotlights we created earlier.

Your scene should now look like this:

Creating the scene

The scene you want to create is entirely up to you, but mine was essentially two planes, one for the floor and one the wall. For added realism, I also made a metal frame and added some cables as well as black neon backing tubes, but this is optional. Once you have your scene setup the way you want, move everything to the second layer so that the first layer only contains the neons and highlighting lamps.

If you want the exact textures I used for the wall and floor you can download them here: Floor texture – Wall texture

Your scene should now look like this:

Creating the final composition

Click the Render Layers tab in the Scene Panel (F10) and change the name of the scene to ‘Neon’.

Add a new scene by selecting ‘ADD NEW’ from the drop down menu. Change the name of this layer to ‘Scene’. In the second row of layer boxes, deselect the first layer and select the second layer instead.

We are now going to switch over to the node compositor, so change the 3d view to the ‘Node Editor‘.

Click the button with a picture of a face on it. This will switch from Material Nodes to Composite Nodes

Delete the connection between the layer and composition by dragging your mouse over the connection. Then add two blur nodes (Add>Filter>Blur) with the following settings:

Merge the two blur node effects by connecting them to an AlphaOver node (Add>Color>AlphaOver) and set the Fac value to 0.60

Add a Glare node (Add>Filter>Glare) and connect it to the renderlayer with the following settings:

Now we are going to connect the Glare node with the output from the two blur nodes, so add another AlphaOver node and set the Fac value to 0.50. This will make the blur glow effect not as strong:

Now add a Mix node (Add>Color>Mix) and from the drop down menu select Screen. Then connec it with the output from the AlphaOver node, and the output from the render layer.

Now add an RGB curve (Add>Color>RGB Curves) and create a slight ‘S’ shape with the curve. This will increase both the brightness and contrast, giving it a more vivid glow.

We are now going to adding the render layer which contains the Wall and Floor. So go to Add>Input>Render Layers, and change the active layer to scene.

Now add an RGB curve (Add>Color>RGB Curves) after this layer and bend the curve down slightly in the middle which will make the scene slightly darker.

We are now going to connect the two scenes together, so add another Mix node (Add>Color>Mix) and again, change it to Screen from the drop down menu. Connect the output from the two RGB curves like so:

For an added touch of step we are going to add a lens distortion node (Add>Distort>Lens Distortion). This will mimic a reversed fisheye lens and add some slight chromatic abbreation. Connect the output from the last AlphaOver node to the lens distortion node and apply these settings:

Connect the output from the Lens Distortion to the Composite node and your composite is complete!

The finished setup (click for big)

Now go to the Scene panel (F10) and hit ‘Do Composite’ then render! If you can see a blue background at all, then you will need to change that to black in the World settings panel (F5).

If you enjoyed this tutorial, please leave me a comment. If you got stuck at any steps along the way let me know and I’ll be happy to help.