Create a sci fi resource crystal in Blender

Hello, I'm Carl with Art of Carl B. Welcome to this tutorial on creating some interesting crystals in Blender. Earlier in the week, I posted this image on Instagram. Since then, quite a few of you have been asking for a tutorial, so here we are. I'll take you through modeling and texturing, as well as lighting and rendering. This will deal primarily with cycles, but the same material works to some extent in Eevee as well. So let's jump into it. All right, let's open up Blender and we'll start a new general scene. Before we start anything, there is an add-on we want to enable, which is bool tool. So click on edit, go to preferences, add-ons, and in the search type bool. There you go. Make sure there is a check mark next to that add-on and come down here and save preferences. This is going to give a few abilities with boolean operations, just shortcut keys and some settings that it sets automatically, saving us a few clicks. So with that, let's continue. Add a cube, and we're going to move that up one, and let's set our origin to the 3D cursor. So now, with the 3D cursor as our manipulation point, let's scale that up on the Z. So this will be the basic shape for our crystal, or the space that it's going to take up. We're going to use a bunch of boolean operations to carve away at it and make it into the crystal that we are going for. So I'll apply rotation and scale by hitting control A, and this is where I'll introduce you to bool tool. So let's add a cube, and let's just move it around a little. If we have that selected and then select our primary object and hit control minus, and this is only when bool tool is enabled, it adds a boolean modifier to our object, and so we can move that around, rotate, and do whatever, and that's going to give us the ability to chop away at our crystal. You'll see it's kind of moving crazily. That's because I have our point of reference as being the 3D cursor. So what I'm going to do is start making copies of this object, and rotating it around, and adding another boolean operation. I'll do this over and over until we have the shape we're going for, so I'll just fast forward all of this for you. Alright, I think that looks pretty good. What we'll do is apply all of our boolean modifiers, and select the inverse with control I, and delete. There we go, we have a pretty good looking crystal. We still have some chips and such that should be taken out of it, so let's do that with a few more boolean operations. I'll add a few more cubes, and we'll apply all of these. Alright, so we're back down to one object. Let's rename that, hit F2, I'll call it crystal. And that is really all the modeling that's involved in making the base mesh for this, so we're going to move on to adding some bevels so that the edges are not all completely infinitely sharp, because in reality, that's not what happens. So what we're going to do is set up for a boolean, or I'm sorry, a bevel modifier, and we want this to only affect certain edges. So we'll hit wait, and this will only affect edges that we have marked as beveled. So right now, let's just select everything and hit mean bevel weight, we'll set it to one all the way at the top. So let's zoom in a little and see what's happening. See, it's beveling every edge that is marked that way. In this case, it's every edge. We're going to change this to two segments, and bring it down to 0.01. That's pretty good. Now, let's go to shade smooth by right clicking. And it all looks pretty good. Let's let's make sure our rotation scale is applied. And we're going to add another modifier, which is going to be the triangulate. Yes, this is all triangles, not all quads this time around. I often, I will usually make every model all quads. But in this case, we're not going to be deforming the mesh. And it's not going to be animated in any way. So triangles are just fine. I have some problems here with some overlapping geometry. Once the applied, just moved that along, it's along the edge it's attached to this vertice. So the way to do that is double tap G rather than a single G. And if you need to extend past, just hit C for constrain. So there we are. And if we go to wireframe, you'll see what the triangulate modifier is doing. That is pretty much it. It turns everything to triangles so that we don't have n gons. n gons are bad no matter what the situation. I say no matter what, but most of the time, you don't want n gons. So I think we're ready to UV unwrap. To unwrap this, we're going to bring up our UV editor and turn on sync UV sync selection. That means anything we do on this side will have will will affect our 3d viewport and vice versa. And let's go in here, select all faces, hit U for unwrap, and either U again or click unwrap. And we obviously have some problems. That is because we did not mark our seams. So let's do that now. We're going to make this really easy. Hit 2 for for edge selection and select one of our edges that is beveled. And shift G will bring up our select similar menu, hit bevel. So everything that has the same bevel weight will be selected. And we will control E for the edge menu, N for mark seams. So that looks pretty good. I see we missed an edge here that should be, oh it is, okay, it's beveled. So now let's go back to face selection, all, U, unwrap. There we are. Everything is in proportion because we applied our rotation and scale. Let's go out of edit mode, turn off our wireframe because that's annoying. And we're going to apply our triangulate modifier. So now when we go into edit mode, it actually affected the mesh. It's not just a modifier anymore. And we're not going to apply our bevel just yet. In fact, we may not even need to at all. That is really the setup for creating the material and applying it. We do need to unwrap because this is not all procedural. There is a roughness map involved. That's why we had to unwrap. So with that, let's move on to material creation. So I just mentioned that we'll be using a roughness map. To get that, the one I used is from cc0textures.com. However, Textures 1 is a site that will search cc0textures.com as well as a number of other creative commons licenses or sites that release materials under the creative commons license. So what we can do is type plastic. This is a plastic material that I used. And I used this one, which is from cc0textures.com. And when you click this, it'll take you to the site that's actually hosting that. And you can download your 2k or 4k maps. I'm using just the 2k. You can use 4k if you want. It just takes more memory when you're rendering and can have a higher quality result. So download that. And we're going to only use the roughness map. None of the other maps that are in that pack. Back in Blender, we're going to close our UV editor. We don't need that anymore. And we'll split our screen again and go to shader editor. I like to put it across the because that's just the way things span out. Before we create the material, let's put in some lighting and such so that we can actually see it in rendered mode. So I'm going to create a plane for a floor plane, scale that up to some large size, put in a camera so that we have something to render from. And we'll move that up, hit zero on the numpad to go to camera view. G middle mouse button will allow us to move the camera back and forth. Home will zoom extents of your camera view. And let's just move that up on the z axis and just kind of fit everything in there. I just have a square resolution setup. It's 1080 by 1080. You can set whatever you want. But there's a lot of blank space for a render if you have a widescreen resolution set. So I'm just kind of saving some time with the square one. Plus, this works great on Instagram. So we need a light. I used a spotlight with a fairly high wattage setting. And let's go to camera view. Now, let's go to rendered, rendered mode, rendered view, you'll see, we don't really see a whole lot. And I'm about to make that even worse by changing our world color to black. And with the lamp selected, go to the lamp tab, change this to something insane, like 100,000. That was more than 100,000. That was a million. There we go. Not that it makes a whole lot of difference once it's that bright. And we'll kind of rotate that around. That's fine for now. We'll adjust it later. If you hit Ctrl B, and drag a box around your camera view, it will constrain the render to just that area. That way you're not being so unkind to your graphics card. Now, let's select our crystal, hit new for a new material. And that material pack that you just downloaded from CC zero textures should be unzipped and you can drag your roughness map right in. And we'll plug that into the roughness node. If we change our transmission up to one, you get an idea of what that's doing to the surface. We're not going to see a whole lot until we give it a color. Let's rotate it around on the z axis till we're till we're catching the light the way we want. In fact, let's move the light around rather than the crystal. Well, we have to change a few other settings first anyway. So let's turn off our transmission. Our roughness can stay there. I'm going to turn down that light, say 50,000. And we'd have a little bit of a node set up to create so that we can generate those cracks that should be all over the surface. So let's start with that. We'll start with a burden, Voronoi. I'm not sure how you pronounce that texture. So shift a to add a node search and VOR. There you go. Let's plug that the distance node right into our base color so we can see what we're doing and change F1 to distance to edge. So that gives us the base for our cracks. Let's turn the scale down so we have far fewer cracks. Now this is going to change, so don't bother with your scale past this point. We'll go add a mapping node and a texture coordinate node. We'll take the object coordinates as our base of our coordinate system. That way when we move the object around, rotate it, and that kind of thing, the texture is going to move with it rather than moving along the surface. So there we go. We have that. Now these lines need to be a little more jagged, so let's add in a noise texture to modify that. We'll go here, we'll take the factor, and we want to mix it with this. So we need an RGB mixer. Put factor into color 2. Aha, that looks a little better. So let's turn our scale up a little more. A lot more. 12. Or 10. 10 looks alright. And I like to turn the detail up as far as it'll go, which is 16. And we can play with our mix until we like the way these look. So you don't want them to be too... If you mix too much of the noise, it just becomes marble looking. It doesn't look like cracks anymore. Actually, let's just take it down to 0.1 or 0.2. That looks alright. Now we have all this other gray. We just want black and white. We don't want all this gray in between. So what we can do is the trusty color ramp will help us with that. So we'll type color ramp, put that in here, and we'll drag the white to almost on top of the black node. They're going to have to be really thin because this will be a bump node that we'll plug it into, and that has a tendency to make these look wider than the way we made them. I just switched to look dev mode so that it wouldn't be so intensive, but it's tough to really see what's going on. So what I'm going to do, that setup is complete. So let's move this down here. If you don't know, control space will take the window or the view area that you have your cursor over and make it full screen, and then control space again will bring you out of it. Alright, so back here, let's add a bump, and we want that to go into height. So we can see what's going on. We'll come back here, plug that into normal, and we're not going to see a whole lot unless we go back to rendered mode. There's some pretty good cracks. What we want to do is turn that down quite a bit. That was too much. 0.5 looks alright to me. Change yours to whatever you want. If the cracking and such is not really where you want it to be, you can move material around by moving the location in your mapping node. You can scale on a particular axis or all of them. I'm going to stick with that for the moment. It's a lot of cracks. I don't know if I really like that. In fact, what's that look like? That's pretty good. Alright, so let's change our transmission back up to 1. Now this is not looking exactly like the way I want it. Why is that? I'm not sure. Let's move our light around and let's rotate on our z-axis. What I want to see is that scuffing. That looks fine for now. Of course, we want these to be in a crystal formation so we need to do that. We need to basically instance this a bunch and put them in a formation that looks good. To do that, let's start by putting everything besides our primary model into a different collection. Let's create a new one called the stuff. Put it there and we'll turn off stuff. There we go. We just have this and what we're going to do is instance this. Not copy, but instance. An instance takes up less memory and it is essentially the same object over and over rather than copies that look the same initially. When you edit one, all will be edited. Alt-D is what we press to do that rather than shift-D. Shift-D is duplicate. We'll rotate that this way and I'll just start moving that around until it looks like an organic kind of composition. I think that looks alright for our crystal formation. Now, let's switch to our rendered mode. Hitting home first. Z8 is rendered mode. Our light is clearly not showing off all the faceted portions of this. Okay, we're back. I paused because I could not figure out why the material was not working correctly and it was a pretty basic mistake. If you look at our material on our roughness map, this needs to be set to non-color. When you drag and drop an image in, it's automatically going to Roughness needs to be a grayscale. Even though that image is grayscale, the node for the image needs to be set to non-color. Now, we have all this nice scuffed surface and it should look perfectly fine now. Let's give it another rotation around the Z axis. On the Render tab, we want to start by putting our render samples up fairly high. I put them up to 4K. We're going to have a lot of noise in this image. That's why we need that fairly high. There are a few things we can do to mitigate that. If we go to Render Layers, we will check Normal, UV, and Denoising. These are information that we want to have in our render so that the compositor can use the Denoise node on it. Speaking of the compositor, let's bring that up. We are right here. Click Use Nodes. There's a lot you can do with this, but we'll just do the simplest setup, which is Denoise. Plug that in. Noisy Image, Noisy Normal, Noisy Albedo, and we'll plug that in here. This will only take effect after the render goes through, so this will do its best to get rid of noise. You do want to give it a fairly high quality image because we're dealing with all these transparencies. It's going to have a tough time of it. We'll go here and we've set that. Here we can set our render image size. I'm going to take this down by 70%, which is basically 720p. Let's give it a render. We'll hit F12 to do so. We can see our render has finished. It's not that great a quality. You can see a lot of the denoising didn't work that well. If we look in our compositor here, take Image over to Image, that'll bypass our denoising. You can see that that's the image without the denoising going on. A few things we can do. One, we can go over to our Render tab, go to Light Paths, and turn off all our caustics. You're going to notice a difference in that it's not going to show light in its shadow, only reflections. What we can do is take this plane, go to Shader Editor, and give it something reflective. Let's make it a dark gray and change our roughness to 0.3. Now we have actual reflections without needing to have the color come through the caustics of the light shining through. I'm going to turn that back over to solid. Let's give it another render. We finished our render again, this time without caustics. It doesn't seem like there's a whole lot less noise than there was. Let's give that a moment. It does look a bit better, but really the solution is more samples, more render samples. Play around with it, see what works best for you. That's that. There are a few closing pointers. If I turn off that other layer and I select one of these, turn on proportional editing and go to random, we can rotate one of these on their local Z and all of them will rotate at a different rate than each other. That'll give us a little more random look, rather than just all rotating around a central point, all facing the same way. There's that. Also, if we go over to the shader editor, I'm sure you figured this out already, you can choose whatever color you want. This will dictate the color of your crystal. Go ahead and play with your settings until you have something you like. Give it a render and post it on social media. Be sure to tag Art of Carl B. I'd love to see what you make. That is it for this tutorial. I hope you enjoyed watching and that you learned something along the way. If you liked this video, find Art of Carl B on Instagram, Facebook, and here on YouTube. Give it a like, subscribe, and turn on your notifications. Until next time, I'm Carl with Art of Carl B.