hi there in this tutorial I'm going to cover the
majority of the techniques I used to create this scene so you can see we've got some wood surface
we've got some pumpkins there's some candles inside the pumpkins there's some variation in the
focus of the camera there's actually a little bit of mist in the scene as well or patches of mist
and obviously we've got the Luther called gobos the shadows of the tree moving in the moonlight
this is actually a scene that I rendered in blender Evie so
there are some limitations on what
you can do and so I had to do a few little tricks particularly with the candle flames and the candle
body to get those to work so walk over those name so to begin with let's just to make the basis of
our scene so I'm just going to do one pumpkin and I'll do a simple floor but I'll quickly go through
all of the elements of the scene so we'll make a floor to begin with so we'll just add a simple
plain will apply all transforms for that apply rotation scale
and things like that we'll go into
edit mode put with tab and then with this press you and just say unwrap it's very simple shapes
that I shouldn't be a problem I'll bring up the material window you can easily of course use these
preset windows setups I have my own preference in how I want them to look so I just do it this way
we'll go to the shader editor up there come down to materials and say new and we'll get a basic
material there call this material ground and we'll add an image textur
e now I could have done this
by adding images as planes that I didn't on this occasion and if we click here we can see the text
is themselves on this occasion I think I'll use these sort of slightly algae covered planks so if
we click here we can start to see what it's going to look like once we connect it and obviously at
the moment that's just a color information so I'm not gonna go into lots of advanced material setups
here but I'll show you very quickly how to give it a bit of surface t
exture Hortis emulate surface
texture so I'm going to add converter which is a color ramp and drop that in there so I've got
a monochrome image and now I'm just going to narrow these points in really just so that I can
emphasize what might become the texture of the wood the way you can see things like these knots
and I might go to cardenal just to sharpen it up if you want a smoother texture you can go with
b-spline at the moment we can assume that the white areas are the highlights and the
dark areas
are the low lines they were their areas of the text here that are going to go inward zeebee
lines a bit too soft so there's not here for example would be coming out so we may want to
change the way that that's working and you can see I've just swapped those points over now and
that little knot hold and go in word rather than coming out with so I'll just disconnect that
from there and a nice simple way to create an appearance of a surface texture now is just to add
under vector
a bump node and then take the color output from that color amp and put it into the
height will go to rendered view and then connect the output of the bump map into the normal input
on our principle shader and you can see we've got a very coarse but recognizable pattern on at
what otherwise a blank surface now obviously how to bear in mind the resolution of the texture
image and you can just about see there's some quantization here where the pixels of the image of
visible but in general term
s it's not going to be too bad typically though the strength will be too
high so you need to turn that down quite a bit we just want a subtle surface effect and then we can
connect our color back up to here and agency even more so that the strength of that effect that bump
effect is a little bit too strong we can drop it back a little bit still got an issue with that not
that's obviously white in the original texture so a quick way to fix that if we go to the UV editor
go into edit mode and
there is our object with its UV and I'm just gonna select those two points G
X and just exclude that little point perhaps even all the way back to there it's a fence I think and
that's made two planks wider in this direction but also remove that unsightly not so now we need
a lump in the scene and then just to set that up so that we've got some basic reflections I'm
just gonna add under lights a Sun they called lights rather than lamps now apparently and just
rotating that a bit perhaps a
little lower I want to give it a blue cast and let's go with strength
of three for the moment and if we go to rendered view we can start to see what we're gonna get
I'll also go to the background and we'll just say use nodes and we'll set that simple black for
the moment and again you can see that's not quite right and by the way we can just click here if we
want to invert the sense of our bump mark and in fact that seems to look better and the strength
is still a bit on the high side so Tu
rner down a bit more and at the moment we're in cycles and
GPU compute so I'm going to change that now a TV you can see that's a little bit quicker maybe even
come down a bit further on the bump it's better to be slightly more subtle and maybe even slightly
too subtle and ears to be over the top if you're going for a somewhat realistic look anyway and
evie you can get realism but it's obviously harder to do now that's still a bit shiny I can do some
complicated things or I can do some simpl
e things I'm going to choose to do something simple I'm
going to add another texture which is a simple noise texture take the factor I put and plug that
into displacement I'm gonna add a converter which is a math node and drop that in there and change
it to multiply and then I'm gonna set that let's just try point one for the moment set the scale
of the noise up quite a lot maybe even higher than that set stride 250 set the detail up to at
least 16 and then we'll reduce this to something li
ke point o1 maybe even point zero zero one but
all we're doing now is just adding the 500 on the scale we're adding some bump or a stimulation a
bump actually displacement to the surface that isn't coming from the texture map so it just gives
us something a little bit more realistic and you can see we can go even higher if we want to and
you can try other types of map as well if you wish so that will do for now on the wood it's
not the best set up but it's a nice easy quick one and maybe I'
ll add gamma node into the color
you do get this slight pause with evey while it recalculates things and turn the gamma up slightly
just to darken it now in terms of reflections I think we can have sort of shinier almost wet
wood like that that looks quite good or we can have really rough non reflective wood I think
we'll go with slightly shinier so isn't quite the same as the scene that I made but we're going to
be changing the lighting shortly anyway so we'll come back to here preview ren
der mode and you can
see we get a version of the reflections even here so we're now ready to make our pumpkins worth
putting the ground down first so that you've got a census so there's a very easy primitive mesh
that you can use to create pumpkin and that is a UV sphere it's already partway there for you
the default with 32 segments will probably be fine I'll scale and down slightly and then lift
it up just move that out of the way for a while you could just make one segment and duplicate
it or you could just do this decide how many segments you're gonna go around we're on selecting
lines that's where it's going to go in so I need enough vertices between for it to go out again and
then back in again so I'm going to leave three and then back in so one two three and that's selected
and that works why are so every fourth segment is selected press o to turn on proportional editing
maybe change this to sharp now it's very round at the moment and pumpkins tend to be flattened but
we'll worry about that shortly to begin with let's just scale and reduce the size of our influence
and you can see what starts to happen how extreme you go is up to you and you could go with more
segments if you want I did the quite a few more I think so let's try selecting the middle ones
we're going to add some more vertices to this in a minute and I setting it to smooth I'm just gonna
say shift H and that will hide everything except for my pumpkin back into edit mode and then just
selec
t the very top and bottom vertices scale only on the z axis and then just play around with the
amount you've adjusted it to get the sort of shape that you want right click and say shade smooth but
then also control - just to add a nice subdivision surface and there's the basics of our pumpkin
we need to add a stem so we'll select the middle point there e to extrude turn off proportional
editing scale it in a bit and gz2 drag it up don't actually need those central central vertices
now so we
can delete those we can see we've got a jagged line there so scale said zero they'll
still go in and out a little bit but we'll now extrude that up what push it one side rotate
it drink it a little II and scale inward just a little so it looks like we've got a few upset
normals here so normal is this is an outward or an inward facing face so if we come up to here click
this little arrow come down to here under normals and we click this point here you can see we get
little lines if they're
too small to see you can make them bigger with this if they're too big
and you can't see where they're coming from you can adjust the size here so if they're pointing
outward we can see a long line that's okay but if we look maybe a bit difficult to see we look
here we can see there's a couple facing the other way here so we'll select everything go to mesh
under normals and we'll say recalculate and now you can see there's no weird little shaded part
so we can go and turn that normals displ
ay off again so I selected that ring and heat scale scale
it in most of the way f-for the final way by the way I've hidden the visibility of the subdivision
surface while I'm doing this as it can sometimes get a bit confusing when you're trying to sort out
normals and there's just a few more just ctrl R to add some also if I bring the subdivision surface
back in you can see how it's working now we need to just add another loop here not completely down
to the bottom but close to the bottom p
erhaps one here just so that there's a good differentiation
between the stem and the rest of it so let's just go to materials and add some quick materials so
we'll make this pumpkin body and we'll just get this currently just a simple orange color and
then go back into edit mode we'll select one of these rings ctrl + and a little bit more at
a new material and we'll call this hump Clint stem I'll make this one some kind of green color
for the moment baby dark green color I think and then we
assign that it's quite a bright green I'm
not gonna worry about unwrapping it and strictly there should be something under here as well I'm
gonna display or show this side of the pumpkin you probably want to add more vertices in here
and then a bit of the stem color or something like that but for my purposes that's sufficient
we've got that subtle ribbing that you'd expect from a pumpkin and is already looking okay so if
we told H that brings everything back and we can then position our pu
mpkin on the surface and with
a plain really easy way to see if you're exactly on the surface because it has no thickness so just
G Z until the pumpkin just show through the bottom and if you hold shift down it allows you to move
it more slowly just a little bit of the pumpkin put in through that tells me it's on the surface
you might even need to go slightly lower than that okay so that's the pumpkin man we can have
a look at that preview of the render it's looking fine at the moment I thi
nk the light is much too
bright at the moment so we'll come down a little and the angle is very wide at the moment so the
shadows are very soft and I would think unless it's a cloudy moonlit sky it should be almost a
point light so we go with a much narrower light I've just tried to point one there and you notice
in this case it makes very little difference in cycles that would have made difference but because
we're in AV mode shadows are controlled elsewhere so under the line settings in t
his case of Sun
we can play around with these settings down here to affect the shadow normally it would just be
the angle so if we reduce the softness we go to one may have just been able to see the shadow
became slightly sharper down here if I go much bigger you can see it's a much more blurry shadow
I want a fairly sharp shadow and bias effects the edges of the shadows you can just play around
with those an exponent obviously the the shape of the drop off between the edge of the shadow
w
here its brightest and deeper into the shadow and if you want you can turn on contact shadows
which you can see gives you a little bit more darkness down there it's looking a little light
under there at the moment I turned those on I wanted lots of dynamic contrast in the scene
if you want to see what your scene looks like without these highlights by the way you can just
click here and that gets rid of it so I guess I need to carve my pumpkin so now we're going to
start carving our pumpkins
so back into edit mode press K for the knife tool I'm just gonna
select pre-existing vertices just to make it easy you don't have to impress space and then
K again and we'll do the same over here and then press X and delete faces and that's cut
the first ones as I'm just gonna do a very basic carving for this one but it become more clear
in a moment when we give some inner surfaced and part of the reason for carving them apart
from the fact that that would be traditional is because I wante
d to show the candles that I'm
gonna put inside so give this one a nice sizable gape so I'm now going to go to modify as you can
see I've got my subdivision surface on there at the moment I'm going to add facility by modifier
but just before I do that I actually going to add another material a lot to materials at the moment
gonna add a third one I'm gonna call this pumpkin inside I will make this a sort of light yellowy
maybe light orange each sort of color very light colored as you'd expec
t of a real pumpkin so back
to the modifiers and add a solidify modifier I'm going to push that above the subdivision surface
and then we'll make it a bit thicker but it's hard to see at the moment because it's using
the first material so down here under material offset we click this here you can see it's using
the green material and click it again and it's now using me in a material for the inside but not
for the edge here if I say - for the rim as well now we've got a rim material that al
so reflects
what we would expect and of course we can take his mouth and just pressing G twice we can make
a little wider there you can play around with where you have the subdivision surface modifier
in some ways it looks better like that you know that it doesn't you may also want to apply these
modifiers so that you can make a finer adjustment to the geometry but we'll leave it like that for
now we go back into here there is our very simply carved pumpkin and we can yeah I think I prefer
that method we haven't got a lot of geometry in here which is why it's doing there I could apply
the subdivision surface additional geometry would make this a finer finish as it were but for
demonstration purposes I think this will be fine you can do click a few things like even and
high quality normals which may make a difference and you can also adjust the clamping which
will effectively adjust how it's working as well as the thickness itself and you can go out
rather than in of course I
'm just gonna go into about that so that's made our pumpkin select
the pumpkin and just press H just to hide it and I'm gonna add a simple cylinder shrink that
down lift it up a little bit and obviously this is going to be our candle you're just putting
it on the ground or just above the ground add a few more loops about here and then I'm going to
select the edge here press e scale up right in quite a long way and then feed to extrude again
jesus said that's tilted slightly to one side does
n't have to be we're not really gonna see this
very well it's good to have a slight curve to it and narrow the ending ctrl R and then use the
scroll e we'll just to add a few more vertices here now candles burn they seem to melt the wax
slightly less immediately around the base of the flame but then as you go away you get it a well
formed and then obviously at the edge you have a raised wall again so if we select perhaps that
vertex turn on proportional editing with smooth G Zed and make su
re the circle of influence isn't
too big we can start to bring that down be a bit more like a candle would be we can perhaps select
that turn that on to sharp G Zed and bring it up even further set that back to smooth I was gonna
select a few random vertices so I'm close together some not G Zed and just expand the influence of
it so this is where candles obviously melted away and perhaps some of the wax is ripped down I'm not
gonna worry about simulating there the wax itself but I am gonna
add some more vertices just about
there little loop and controlled to just to add a nice subdivision surface right-click it say shade
smooth and you can see I need some additional vertices here at the wick but other than that
that'll do for my candle shape maybe take that Dana a little bit I will add some extra vertices
there so I'm just going to go to materials now and just say new first one is candle body and for
the moment we'll just give that a slightly yellow color and then another mat
erial and we call that
a ball wick and obviously we just give that a nice sort of really dark brown / black color and assign
that to the wick you can see it's gone slightly too far but we can narrow that in by just adding
some more vertices and bring them in so we're gonna do a bit more with that material but there's
the basics of the candle body what we should be doing of course is naming all of these things if
we come up here that's the cylinder at the moment or pull that candle right bri
ng the pumpkin back
again that's currently a sphere so we'll call that pumpkin and the plane down here we'll call that
brained so now we know what we've got selected hide our pumpkin again so now let's make the flame
there because this is evey yes you can simulate volumetrics in evey but it's a bit challenging
particularly for flame so to get a nice simple but reasonably realistic maybe slightly cartoony
flame effect I decided to not use bodymetrix at all what I used was a cloth simulation
so I
thought back to how some of the artificial candles seem to simulate flames and I went along
those lines so I'm going to add a simple plane to begin with raise that up control are just
to add a loop down the middle life is in edit mode obviously delete those edge vertices ctrl R
and add a few vertices here it's always best to go is slightly less and slightly more vertices to
begin with G X and I'm just going to move those in I wanted sort of widest here and what I'm doing
is I'm trying
to make a sort of teardrop classic flame shape so let's add a subdivision surface to
that so I'm going to select that vertex to select that one ctrl M alt m and say merge at last so
that brings that one over there and then gy just to drag it up a little bit I'm also then going to
come over here and add a mirror modifier push that up above the subdivision surface and now you can
see the sort of shape I'm trying to make that's roughly a flame shape I'm just going to remove
the subdivision su
rface for a minute and then ctrl R and I'll just add an extra set of vertices
there and just bring those and just bring those up like that at this point just to make sure I'm
going to select all the vertices say you and say project from view now we'll come to materials Paul
let's flame obviously this is gonna be an emission material so I'm going to leave the base color of
that basically a white color doesn't really matter and I'm gonna add a color ramp I had quite a
number of colors in here
but essentially the left-hand side I had it black then I had a sort
of dull red color next I went for an orange what a bit brighter then a sort of more dull orange
color and you can see I could create that easily by just adding a new point up here between
now and then just drag it over then a sort of bluish color it's just a sort of cartoony view
of what a flame might look like almond a purple color and then finally black again I used linear
interpolation these two I had quite close to the
middle this one's somewhere around here this one
here and this one's around here you'll obviously need to play around with that yourself this is the
different colors of the flame throughout the body of the flame now this is a flat plane it's not a
volumetric flame it's not 3d you could play around with actually creating a three-dimensional flame
and even using the cloth simulation but I didn't feel it was really necessary so connected that
to the emission on our material I'll just go to re
ndered view obviously at the moment it's just
a random color next I added a texture which is a gradient texture set that to spherical take the
factor out of there and put it into the color ramp know by partly by luck it's pretty well aligned
already and just to improve things I'm just gonna add my subdivision surface back in Nice or ctrl -
and there it is but in order to allow me to play around with how the shape worked and so on I also
added under vector the mapping node connect that into
the vector input of the gradient texture
and then I added in an input which is a texture coordinate node and use the UV output and put
it into there you can then play around with the settings here so scale in this case get something
approximating what you're expecting from your fling of course you can also play around with
where these points sit if you push them closer together you'll get more variation in the color of
your frame and this also allows you to adjust the position of the flames
slightly as well and you
can also try different interpolation methods just to see what they look like but it gives you quite
a lot of control and you can add more or less or fewer points to achieve different effects add
another point in there that perhaps was a bright yellow color and you can see that's brightened
up the base of our flame there I'll go with that for now and then I'm going to just come back into
preview mode rotate on the X 90 then go back into edit mode with everything sel
ected g.z so that
I can put that little origin point there at the base of the flame back out of edit mode and just
scale it down to something appropriate to the size of my candle and then what I did was I grouped it
with the candle so that I could move the candle around and not worry about whether the flames in
the right place with the flame selected we need to go to physics properties and we need to add cloth
if I just press play at this point obviously the candle flame is just gonna drop
through simulation
so go back into edit mode on the candle just select a couple of vertices at the bottom come
into here which is the object data plus on vertex groups and just a sign so we've got a group called
group and that's assigned come back to the physics properties and then scroll down under shape you
can set the pinning group and set an attitude group and now when I press play the candle still
drops but you can see it's pinned just there now I played around with various different e
ffects such
as wind effects and so on but I actually ended up doing it in an even more simple way but before
we get to that let's just set up the material somewhat similar to the way I did know one word
of warning particularly with cloth simulations the size of your meshes new models has an influence
on how certain things behave generally I find that to be more relevant for collisions and we're not
gonna worry about collisions for this simulation but something to be aware of so I'm gonna gi
ve
you the settings I've used but they may not be exactly right they may not even be right for this
version that I've made here because I may not have ended up with something exactly the same size as
what I did originally but we'll go with it anyway and one little point you click up here you can
actually select some presets for materials anyway or create your own for that matter so I stuck with
the defaults for a speed multiplier and quality I'll go into detail on materials simulations agai
n
in a future tutorial but essentially that's how fast things settle into wherever it is they're
gonna go one being the normal time as it was so math I set to naught point once I've got a light
material err viscosity I turndowns air viscosity essentially damps the activity of materials so I
set that at naught point one so a tenth left it on angular bending model stiffness I left at all
the defaults with the exception of bending which I put up to five so the tension and compression
under da
mping I left on the defaults shear I set at naught point one and bending damping I also
set to null point one as I say we'll give this a go in a moment and we'll see if I need to tweak
some of these settings as play that now and you can see at the moment that just drops under
cache make sure that the end point for your cache coincides with however long it is you want
to be able to see this flame so typically the full length of your animation default is 250 and so is
the link the default len
gth for any animation so at the moment that's fine we've already talked
about the pinning group one thing I did need to change under shape we needed dynamic mesh on so
this is basically recognizing if we are putting some movement on the material and we are going
to do that so if the object the mesh is moving in order to for the simulation to recognize that that
mesh is not in exactly the same position as it was when the simulation was started we need to tell it
that it's a dynamic mesh and
to be aware of that otherwise it won't work so we'll turn that on we
don't need to use collisions for this one property weights were not worried about but field weights
we do need to do something so under gravity as you saw at the moment that flame is just dropping we
want it to go up now experimented with just using a wind force but ultimately I wasn't satisfied
with any of those so to make the flame go upward instead of downward I reversed gravity so I set
this to minus 0.1 and now you ca
n see a little flame floats upwards but it's only going upward
because as it were it's dangling in accordance with gravity so what that means is if I apply some
movement to that flame I move it around like this for example you can see it flops around so all I'm
now going to do is give a bit of a wobble on that flame hopefully I'll get something approximating
the movement of a real flame good enough anyway so I've done what I'm about to do multiple times in
various different other simulation
s that I've done so those of you of watch others of my tutorial
probably won't be that surprised on what's coming I'm going to go to the graph editor I'm gonna
make sure I'm at the beginning of my animation with the flame selected hover over the flame
and just press I and I'm just going to record rotation I'm not gonna record position then up
in the graph editor I'm gonna press n to bring up the right hand window and select modifiers
I'm going to open this up here and just select Y rotation
for the moment so hopefully you can
see Y is going into the screen at the moment so that would be left and right which is the main
axis that I want it to rotate on I'm gonna add a modifier which is going to be a noise modifier and
you can see we've got this happening so if I press play now you can see our flame is actually bearing
in mind we've got that cloth simulation on there starting to move a little bit like a real flame
so we probably need to slow that down a little bit so I'm creasi
ng the scale and you can see it's
wobbling more it's actually quite a large offset at the moment but it's going so quickly that
the cloth can't keep up with it I'm also going to right-click on that and say shade smooth not
that we should be having any shadows on it anyway maybe even larger than that but it's a random
pattern which is quite good for our purposes and if we think it's a little bit too stiff we can
add a few more vertices in there but I think given we're not gonna be seeing thi
s frame completely
that's not too bad what it can do though it will slow the simulation down quite a bit it's
actually increased the number of subdivisions i've increased the subdivision surface here
and you can see the cloth sim is below it so it will be acting on the subdivided version of
the flame but you can also see it takes longer to run the simulation the frames per second is
slower but you can always bake it and I strongly recommend that you do bake it so that it doesn't
get upset
if you're changing some other things in the scene if you want to you can experiment with
putting forces in there just to like a wind force to see if that affects it as well I played around
with those but ultimately I wasn't satisfied with that if the deflections on the flame are too
great you can reduce the strength of course I go with 0.5 because we want a flame that moves
around but we don't want it going around too violently typically certainly not for this scene
anyway just a little bit
of subtle movement maybe slightly bigger than that at 0.75 and maybe
slightly faster than that so we go with 14 so there's enough there that we will see the
movement when we're looking at the flame so that's great the only thing is object lights
don't illuminate things in evey so I need to simulate that effect because this is inside
a pumpkin so we should be having some moving shadows and things like that simulate that
I decided to actually add a couple of point lights now I added two beca
use the candle flame
itself does cast a shadow I couldn't find a way to satisfactorily in evey remove that shadow
though I'm sure there are ways so an easy way to simulate this moving candle flame was first of
all to add a couple of lamps so I'll add a light they're called lights now not amps simple point
light a scale it down the radius is quite small there but I'll move it slightly to the front of
the candle and give it a nice yellowish color other than that I left most of the settings
a
t default and then shift key and duplicate so select my light my lamp select my candle flame
we're going to edit mode on the candle flame and I'm gonna select somewhere in the middle that
vertex there in the middle control P make vertex parent and say yes because obviously flame isn't
moving around as a single object bits of it are moving in different ways so what I've done is
I've actually connected that lamp to the vertex at the center of the flame you can see that the
light is associated
with the flame now it doesn't seem to be quite joined to the correct part of the
flame because I've got that subdivision surface on there so there's actually a lot more vertices and
they're moved around as it were it doesn't matter too much the most important thing is that I've
got a lamp that is closely associated with the movement of my candle flame I'm gonna shift B and
create a duplicate and you can see the duplicates already joined and put that there if you wanted to
you could remove
the parent and move it up up to here it doesn't matter too much they're spinning
around a little bit that'll actually just enhance the idea of what's going on so let's just sort
out the material for the candle itself so we'll go for the candle body this one's relatively
straightforward and a subsurface color I'm gonna set a sort of orange color fairly bright orange
color roughness I set down relatively low it's barely shiny obviously by rights this area should
be even shown you and you can
play with different materials if you want to I added a bit of a sheen
I think I got up to about point 6 something like that I left the index of refraction where it was
and I set the subsurface up at about point nine four five you can already see that's having
an effect we go to a rendered view name you can start to see what's happening now there's some
additional things to do again subsurface isn't as straightforward in evey as it is in cycles cycles
it attempts to replicate the physical wo
rld evey attempts to produce something that looks a bit
like the physical world but through little cheats as it worked first of all let's click this and
turn off the control points so that we can see what we're looking at you can see these strange
layers so we'll go to this little computer symbol or whatever it's supposed to be and we'll make a
few changes here so what are the ones I'm going to change is screen space reflections all you'll
see is a slight change here where we're picking up
reflections of the surroundings again it will
slow the render time down slightly but give us a slightly nicer overall effect I also turned on
refraction not sure that made much of a difference I put trace precision down to zero I set edge
fading down at zero and I left everything else at default my animation I turned on motion blur I'm
not gonna worry too much about that but obviously the important thing at the moment is subsurface
scattering so let's increase the samples and you can immedi
ately see something changed in there
I went for 10 and you can see it's basically an increased quality and then jitter thresholds
this is obviously how it smoothes it out a little bit you can see as I go up it's less of a
distinct layering though there are still layers there that is how it works and don't worry too
much about that slight effect around the candle flame because we're not gonna have that they're
like old H and bring our pumpkin back and if I turn the pumpkin around to the cand
les the right
way around I think that can was possibly a little bit too bright at the moment and that's where I
can control it here and I can darken it here as well just so we get a bit more variation on the
candle flame one other thing I should have said about the candle flame we want transmission up
at 1 and that means we don't get light reflecting from our lamps that are in front and behind it
and yeah you can see we've got more of a sort of flame effect as I said it's a cartoony flame
but you can play around with it and get various different effects from it so if we have a look in
there I've now got our little flame moving around there and we've got our pumpkin I just hide
the floor we can box select everything there don't want the lamp and duplicate it that's rotating a little there and we can
just come over here so bring the floor back and we'll know simulate are moving tree shadows
I'm going to add a mesh which is plain but if you've installed it you can use images of
planes
I'll do it simply at the moment I'll just add a plane and we just raise it up have a look at
it you know it mode project from view bones add a new material I'm going to add color node
which is an invert node and that's just because the particular texture I'm going to use and
I'm going to connect that to the Alpha input then I'm going to add a texture which is an
image texture make the color output of that into my in aversion node open that and I used
this one you can create your own
you can draw one it doesn't matter too much you're not going
to see it in a lot of detail mine is black on white which is why I'm using the invert node if
it's white on black you won't need that I just connected into the base color you can see where
we are with it and if you want to we can go to the UV editor select our tree shadow go into edit
mode and then we can just make the tree occupy more of the shape doesn't matter too much we don't
want too hard an edge that's all we don't need th
at but we do need the Alpha I'm going to make
the reflectiveness of the ground I'm gonna make it slightly rougher because it will show up these
shadows a little better and now I'm going to angle this shadow mask to align with my Sun lamp and if
we go into rendered view now you can see we've got a shadow cast all the way across if need be we
can obviously make it bigger but at the moment that's not doing the effect that we actually want
I'm also going to just quickly select my pumpkins hide
them I just turn on which is something I
should have done before contact shadows for these lamps simply because that'll reduce the amount of
light bleeding at the bottom of my pumpkins as I said things don't work exactly the same as they do
in cycles that's a little better so one thing that confused me a little bit using Eevee was I find
I needed to do some different settings for this alpha mask which is essentially what this little
tree object is compared to cycles and obviously that's the
case for a number of settings so one
thing that took me a little time to sort a when I try to create this scene using the Eevee render
engine was that there's another set of settings and the materials that are not so obvious so so if
we go to rendered view you can see at the moment we're just getting a full shadow of this mask that
we've created here so it's not giving us the tree shadow that we were looking for and the reason for
that is there's some settings at the bottom here that are r
elevant to Eevee that we need to use
and under blend mode in shadow mode you can see we just got a Paik under shadow we need to change
that you can use either alpha clip or hashed I didn't see a lot of difference but you need to use
one of them if you select none you actually get no shadows at all and that might be something you
want to do with some objects but for our purposes I'll just select alpha clip and you can see takes
a moment to think about it and then we've got our tree shadow ap
pearing there so there's a number
of ways that we can add some movement to that tree shadow but I'll do something similar to
what we've already done with the flame and that is just used the graph editor to add a little bit
of movement as if there's a sort of slight in the air so I've got the object selected make sure
I'm at the beginning and I'm just gonna press I and record location now I'm going to go to the
graph editor up here open this up and we'll just select Y location for the moment
go to modifiers
we'll add a modifier and we'll select noise and may be difficult to see but yes we can't see it
so you can see we've got some relatively rapid movement there to move that really cursor out the
way that's obviously a little bit too fast and possibly a little too small but we'll see about
the size in a moment but let's just turn the scale up and you can see we're getting a little more
movement there will turn the strength up a bit possibly a bit too much go for
1.25 and see
what that looks like and we can adjust the phase go for
different areas within the random noise maybe we'll make the scale a little smaller I'm just going to size up that mask a
little bit and if we want to we can of course add more noise either the first
to the X again or more likely given this is already a noise selection we added
that to the Y so we'll add this to the X and we'll add a noise modifier
to that turn the scale up a bit as well you and we can try alternates down here you can
try hashed that gives you a slightly fuzzier shadow which may be what you want and you
can obviously play around with some other options as well we go to here I've got rather a
high cube size there the default is much lower than that it's something like that this is
essentially the quality of the shadows I've got soft shadows turned on again that just gives
you some extra control I did use a cube size of 204 eight and you can see that slows the render
down in theory gives you more accurate
shadows whether you really need that for this I don't
know I'm just gonna go for 512 I think and then you can play around with the Cascade size so
again that's going to affect the quality but again I think for most purposes of shadows like
this you don't need a particularly high quality and again you don't necessarily
need high bit depth either so you can see one of the great things here is
this is rendering pretty much the quality that it would render if I hit f12 in real time probably do
a bit more work on the color of those flames and I'm just making them completely rough textured as
well and that that's just making sure we haven't got any strange little highlights appearing and
as I say we can just play around with this to get the flame look that we want I'm just turning
the brightness of those lights down a little bit the way you can find them obviously I didn't name
my candle flames very well there but nevertheless you can see the little point lights are appearing
und
er there so it's quite logical the way that it's presented now just turning those all down
to one watt you could have used old D to create instantiated versions of these lights and then of
course changing one would have changed all of them so the only thing remaining now is that I also
added some simple volumetric mist to the scene and then changed a few settings in the renders
so to do that I'm just gonna add a cube it's gonna hide that object for the moment look from
above and bring my cu
be over to my team scale it up to about the size I need it go down on the
Zed because I don't need lots of mist or I'm not gonna see it and just put it about there we can
make it perhaps a little bigger than that what I don't want to see if I go to wireframe is any of
the corners of that cube you can see the corner is just visible there at the back there so possible I
might see some artifacts probably not but I might so first we're going to edit mode face select
mode select that top face G
Zed and just lift it up - it's out of view and then perhaps this face
G X and just take it out so there the bottom one is actually hidden by the floor plane so I don't
mind about that one and then I'll just go back into solid view I'm going to change the way this
particular cube is displayed because obviously I can't really see what I'm doing at the moment
I'll turn off shadows as well and we're just to say display as a wire and there we can see what's
going on I'm going to give it a new ma
terial and actually while there is a principled volumetric
shader I find it a lot easier just to use a simple volume scatter node for this effect so I'm
gonna add a shader which is a volume scatter so again this isn't necessarily perfectly
accurate but it's easy to set up and easy to understand so if I go to rendered view at this
point can't really see very much at the moment that's because I need to turn on volume metrics
in the render option so you can see they're not on at the moment and
I'll switch on volumetric
lighting because essentially we're scattering light volumetrically so you can see we've got a
very misty scene there it's nice to see that we can actually see something that's quite fun but I
want missed that's not completely solid like that obviously I could just turn the density down and
we'll get more of a slight mist effect perhaps Oh to follow something like that and that's quite
fun that's going nice all I really want is mist that varies in density especiall
y as I want
this to be moving just as part of an effect so I'm going to add my favorite node which
is the color ramp and we'll drop the color output of that into the density of the volume
scatter and then gonna add a texture node which is a noise texture node drop the factor of that
into the color up I used a relatively low scale of about 8 and left detail and Distortion I think
I'll turn distortion apps slightly and that gives you sort of more swirls I then move this bottom
end of the col
or ramp button to the right and you can see we're starting to get some variation
in the density now that's ok but I want the mist to move it's no I don't want it frozen because
I'm not making a still scene here I'm making an animation and to do that in a way that aligns the
mist to change shape rather than just moving the block I'm going to add under vector a mapping node
and take that into the vector input of noise and then I'm going to add an input which is a texture
coordinate input now
when I put this mapping node on blender defaulted to assuming UV coordinates
under this cube is not UV unwrapped so I need to tell it what kind of coordinate system to use
and to work out where pixels are within this cube and I just used generated and there you go it's
back again so what we now need is to cause that to move so we're at the beginning of the animation
so I'll hover over location up here and just press I that's recorded that location so this is the
location of the texture in t
he 3d space and an amount of movement that worked for me over a
thousand frames was one meter so this is only 250 frames so strictly I should go for quarter
a meter but I'll go for half for me too just so that the effect is more visible so we'll go to the
end of the animation change this to naught point 5 press return and then press I over that now we
don't want the miss to be speeding up and slowing down throughout the course of our animations make
sure that mapping node is selected then g
o to the graph editor and you can see the red parameter is
the one that's changing there which is X select X and then go to key interpolation mode linear so
it will move at the same speed from the start all the way through until the end of the animations
we press play now you can see we are getting the mist moving and it's hard to see perhaps but the
shape of each patch of mist is also changing over time as it moves through the three-dimensional
space and we could move it forward and back a
s well of course in this case I've just got it
moving from right to left and that's moving a little more quickly than I have it in my animation
and there's a couple of other things we can do for the volumetrics if we want to we can increase
or make the tile smaller so it seems like the way that volumetric is done quickly for Evie is
that effectively it's creating flat slices of our volumetric effect and then stacking them together
so that from the point of view of the camera they look rough
ly contiguous so it's not calculating
every point in space it's calculating quanta it's quite it's calculating slices the less slices the
more quickly it will calculate that so if we go up to 16 pixels which will be a lower quality
it will actually calculate it more quickly or if I go down to two and be careful with this
because you've got a lot of volumetric sometimes this can cause bender to crash it will take
longer to calculate it and certainly there's a slight difference between three
viewport and final
render but it will be a more convincing render if you're able to see slices you can particularly
see see this when you move around like this see how it takes a moment to sort of fill it all
in I put this up to 16 you may be able to see it sort of more blocky so if you want a really
high-quality one set that to the smallest number and obviously samples would affect that as well
I used 128 again that gives you a higher quality render but it may struggle slightly as you as
you can see these there we're keeping up with the animation so set it low while you're playing
around and setting the speed at which you have the missed move but then put it up to whatever size
you want it to whatever quality you want it to you can turn on volumetric shadows and obviously
that will cause some interesting effects if you got lumps of more dense mist appearing we go
back to the shader editor that's the basically the set up I used but if you wanted you could
increase the densit
y of the mist in the high density areas while not losing the sort of empty
areas by simply adding a math node into here and setting that to multiply so if it's less than
one you're right actually decrease the overall density of the mist but if it's more than one
obviously where there's no mist if there will still be no miss but it will rapidly increase
because you've effectively increased the max density so you can see we're getting some
pretty weird cartoony sort of effects there but you m
ight want something more like that
and of course you can play around here I used EES which gives you a slightly more subtle effect
and you can play around here which means you have a faster or less fast drop-off in the mist and of
course increasing distortion will give you a more swirly sort of mist which may be what you want
I'm just gonna decrease the intensity of this mist a little bit and now we're ready just to
do the last effect so I did this with a moving camera and things like that
very simple we're
just recording the location of the camera and then moving it and recording it again but what I
wanted to show was animating the depth of field so to begin with let's add something into the scene
on which we can focus the camera so I'm just gonna add an empty so an empty is just an object which
can be a number of different shapes you can even have custom shapes I believe but it's never going
to render it has no real dimensions or anything like that but you can use it to con
trol things
and also set where things are looking I'm just going to hide that other window and I'm gonna set
this to about here the position of this empty for this effect only matters in terms of forward
and back as it were how close or how far from the camera it is doesn't really matter left and
right but I'll move it this way just to make it a little clearer so that's the only empty in the
scene you can give it a specific name if you need to but now I'm just gonna go back to select the
c
amera and we'll go to the camera options here and I want to switch on depth of field and you
can see it's all gone very blurry and I'm gonna say focus on object start typing efore empty and
say empty you can see it all come back into focus now I used an f-stop of about naught point 6 so
you can see now the pumpkin at the back there is much less well-focused than the one at the
front door the one at the front isn't perfectly focused and there is a setting in the main scene
settings or depth
of field so this really is more if you've got little speckles of light in the
background it's a bokeh effect something like this you won't really see much of a difference so
I'm gonna select the empty name and I'm gonna move it around and you can see the effect it has I'm
gonna say gy2 move it forward and backward you can see even the foreground pumpkin isn't going
out of focus and as I move that back you can see it comes into focus and then goes out to focus
again so you can already guess
what I'm gonna do I'm just gonna put it fairly close to about the
middle of that pumpkin face now because part of this pumpkin is out of focus that means my depth
of field is a bit too narrow so it's making this foreground pumpkin look like it's actually a
miniature thing as if we're looking through a microscope so for this particular scene it wasn't
quite the same with my other one I need to have perhaps not quite as tight a depth of field so
I'll increase this number here this f-stop to r
educe the amount of D focus slightly so that will
mean that the background pumpkin comes slightly more into focus but you can see now more and more
of this one is becoming focused as it should and obviously we're in a very preview version of focus
at the moment I go to the render view name can still see it slightly soft there perhaps we'll go
up to 1.5 we'll go for 1.6 and we'll call it a day there the exact number will depend on the size of
your scene the actual dimensions of your scene an
d the particular camera settings that you're using
but from my scene here this one will do so I'm not going to animate the camera but what I will do
is animate this empty and I'm gonna go with the default Bezier curve for its animation so we'll
look from above and at the beginning of the scene perhaps act it about 25 frames so one second will
store the location and then we'll go to frame 225 so about a second before the end of our animation
g.y and just take it back it doesn't really matter
about it to X location so if you want to move it
off to the side just to be sure you're precisely in the right place then that's fine it doesn't
really make any difference and we'll press I and store the location again so if we go back to the
beginning press play you can see it does nothing for a moment then starts to accelerate and it's
fairly quickly then lose its focus to the valley in fact I think I'm not happy with with it taking
quite so long to refocus because I'll have a lot time w
ith it out of focus there so what we can
do rather than having to re-record all those those two points again we can just open up a new
screen and go to the dope sheet and there is the empty so if we press a to unselect everything I
have to press it twice click that little point there and just press G and just drag it back so
we'll come maybe to frame a hundred so now when we do it it'll actually move a lot more quickly
it'll only take about four seconds to change focus which is what we're d
oing and there it goes
so if we now look from front and we go into rendered view go to the beginning of the animation
press play and we've got a Miss rolling through and then you can see the focus changing from the
foreground to the background and there it is so if I turn off the distracting control elements
which is just clicking that middle point there go back to the beginning basically watch this
background one because it's a relatively wide fit depth of field anyway which it should be
and you'll see over time that one in the back comes into focus and there it is and this one
a default foreground goes out of focus and if we wanted to of course if we did one of perhaps
simulate miniature we can increase that f-stop so I put that up to one or decreased it rather
to make the depth of field more pronounced you and you can see that see that working now there
that one's coming into focus that one's going out to focus and that's a classic effect for
focusing the attention now th
at's all for this tutorial so I hope you find that useful if
you did let me know and I'll see you in the next tutorial thanks a lot so I hope you found
that interesting if you did let me know if you enjoy these tutorials don't forget to click
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I'll see you in the next tutorial thanks a lot
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