Summary: Step 1. Get a free sky image from Unsplash Step 2. Plug the image into both the Base color and the Emission of the Principled BSDF Step 3. copy the rotation of the image plane to the camera (it's better to use the copy rotation constraint IMO) Step 4. Match the horizon line in the image to the horizon in your 3D scene Step 5. Use a sky texture (Nishita) for your environment Step 5. Turn off shadow visibility for the plane so it doesn't cast a massive shadow over your scene Step 6. Make sure the lighting in you scene roughly matches the lighting direction of the cloud image (or flip the cloud image horizontally to match your scene lights better)
Back when I was new to Blender I couldn't figure how to make HDRi's look good so I tried this and thought "huh, this seems like a pretty dumb fix but it works, I bet a professional would look at this and think it's a crappy trick". Thank you for confirming that sometimes the simplest solution is the best.
I literally just spend the last 2 days trying and researching this. Thanks youtube but a bit late. Something I learned is that getting the mist pass to combine mountains with mountains from a photo can look really good! Edit: if you use this in an animation. Animating the top edge of the image a bit to the left or right using a shape key creates a cool parralalex effect. Gives the idea the clouds are moving.
The addon "Import Images as Planes" would make it even easier since it automatically sizes the plane to the image aspect ratio, no UV stretching... Also you could still mix this with HDRi s to get realistic environment lighting. Although "free" HDRi are more difficult to find.
Don't forget to set the roughness to 1 so the image doesn't look washed out. Also you can put a hue/saturarion node to make tweak the colors a little bit.
I always ask around when I see people post of a render with beautiful sky yet for some reason they never care to answer. Thank you, I think the sky is very important.
Cube unwrap squad unite! Nice work. I know how to do this stuff but never put it all together like this. You could also add the image as a background on the camera but you can't control the brightness of it. Thanks!
I often do this now with more realistic renders like the one I posted two weeks ago on my twitter and Instagram accounts, if I had watched this sooner I could have applied it when I made the final renders instead of shuffling the plane around. Next time I try it out when I make a more realist render, Thanks for the tips in this video.
If you Image is not high resolution enough, you have plenty of Ai upscaling nowday that can bring your image up to 8k. great tutorial. thanks for the trick very usefull!
nice tutorial. would you please also give some recommendations where we can get urban building facade images to use then as windows background in interior renders? thanks
Hm... Yes, admitted, this can give you some very beautiful and realistic results. Which is not that much of a surprise, when you _take_ something beautiful and realistic and just paste it into your scene. But from a video that had "create" and "in Blender" in the title, I had expected a bit more.
One downaide with using it as a plane in the backgrt and as an emitfer is that the image looks much flatter in terms of contrast. I boticed the image looks much better when it was open in the uv editor. Why not add it comp later to keep the contrast? You can always render thr image transparent and use the backdrop plane only as visual reference
That's amazing, but now I have an issue where it's one of my objects that is casting a shadow onto the sky plane! Is there a way in the object settings/material settings to have it not receive shadows?
and .... what if you move the camera? So in feature film VFX we often do this in Nuke, but instead of sticking it on a plane, we project onto Spheres, ideally you have a spherical stitches texture as well. That way the camera can pan freely.
Your tutorials have been awesome but I would like to add a catch to this. Sometimes when you really want those indirect lighting details, you don't get it by this method, so in solution for this use sky texture for the direct lightning and thus indirect lighting from the direct ones, and you also add your hdri with mix rgb that will provide you more indirect lighting information, cause what I think is, proper indirect lighting is responsible for photorealism and also cinematic look, if you get your indirect lighting wrong , the render will look more like render and less photoreal. Hope this helps
Love your tuts…simple and to the point explaining the how/why. One question, do these work in animated scenes just as well or just reserved for stills?
Hey In my Principled BSDF I don´t have the circle in emission to connect it, only have emission with a dropdown with color and strength, How do I change it?
Hi, is it possible to put the image in a sphere or semi-sphere to create some kind of a dome so when i move the camera the sky is always visible on final render ?
Total beginner here, trying to get my head around the camera. I think its in position and then when i go to check its still blank and not where i need it and shows nothing
can you tell me how I can set up that live-preview window on the bottom right of your screen? I have seen this many times but I wonder how I can set up a window like this, clean and without obstructions and without seeing the grid...
Summary:
Step 1. Get a free sky image from Unsplash
Step 2. Plug the image into both the Base color and the Emission of the Principled BSDF
Step 3. copy the rotation of the image plane to the camera (it's better to use the copy rotation constraint IMO)
Step 4. Match the horizon line in the image to the horizon in your 3D scene
Step 5. Use a sky texture (Nishita) for your environment
Step 5. Turn off shadow visibility for the plane so it doesn't cast a massive shadow over your scene
Step 6. Make sure the lighting in you scene roughly matches the lighting direction of the cloud image (or flip the cloud image horizontally to match your scene lights better)
Thanks mate will be saving that to the desktop
Neat!
Could you please do that for all the tutorials I watch and forget? Lol…maybe chat gbt can do it?
Idk why but my Sky texture is way to bright
This channel has became one of my favorite so quickly. Thanks for the great content.
it's my favorite too 🔥
Thank you for not gatekeeping and sharing all of this AMAZING material with us.
Thank you so much . As a beginner i've seen a lot of tutorial on how to model , render etc but nobody talks about the sky , so thats really helped me!
You should definitely do a breakdown of the mountain sunset scene example you showed, the lighting is amazing. It'd be cool to see how you did it!
Back when I was new to Blender I couldn't figure how to make HDRi's look good so I tried this and thought "huh, this seems like a pretty dumb fix but it works, I bet a professional would look at this and think it's a crappy trick". Thank you for confirming that sometimes the simplest solution is the best.
Scaling to flip the image seems so simple, but I never even considered that! Genius, my dude! Thanks a ton!
I literally just spend the last 2 days trying and researching this. Thanks youtube but a bit late. Something I learned is that getting the mist pass to combine mountains with mountains from a photo can look really good!
Edit: if you use this in an animation. Animating the top edge of the image a bit to the left or right using a shape key creates a cool parralalex effect. Gives the idea the clouds are moving.
wow channel has been only posting 1 month and already very high quality tutorials and absolutely necessary ones
I really like your 10 minute tutorials, they're incredibly useful. Keep going!
Great to see Max sharing his techniques. Top class digital artist.
These are great man! I'm a c4d user but all these techniques and practices still apply!
dude, you are a GOAT for uploading all these vids recently. thanks for sharing!
Instantly subscribed yesterday. This is now the best channel for blender content. Thanks for sharing with us.
I'm excited for the future of this channel mate, I'm glad I was early.
Thanks for your valuable content, no bullshit, only solid and practical advice.
The addon "Import Images as Planes" would make it even easier since it automatically sizes the plane to the image aspect ratio, no UV stretching... Also you could still mix this with HDRi s to get realistic environment lighting. Although "free" HDRi are more difficult to find.
AmbientCG has an awesome collection of free HDRi and textures check them out :)
polyhaven
free 8k images
I'm finding these tutorials incredibly useful. Thank you
Don't forget to set the roughness to 1 so the image doesn't look washed out. Also you can put a hue/saturarion node to make tweak the colors a little bit.
I knew about using images as backgrounds, but parenting it to camera trick is just great, I will definitely use that from now on.
Damn, Max's getting consistent. Excited for your future content bro!👀
Awesome ! This channel is an open window to a world of possibilities. Thank you again for sharing this
Very useful for me whos blender knowledge is only 2 months. Subscribed for sure 🙏
If you want to copy another object rotation, you can add an object constraint and click on copy rotation. Great video!
so simple yet so genius, thanks!
You got my sub. Thanks for the info. Straight to the point and ain't confusing. Looking forward
i am actually doing this from so long, this saves a lot of time
Neat little tutorial, Max. I wanna teach like you when I grow up :-)
holy ur channel is growing fast. good job man, really fun to watch these
Exactly what I have been searching for!! Thank you for the amazing tutorial, Max!
I’m so glad your channel was in my recommended! Your walkthroughs are great!
thanks for teaching this to me, what a great technique.
i searching whole yt for this tutorial , i learned a lot
thanks for the tutorial sir
This guy is going places! Mark my words!
I always ask around when I see people post of a render with beautiful sky yet for some reason they never care to answer. Thank you, I think the sky is very important.
Been using blender for 3+ years and after watching countless blender videos, I consider this channel to be second only to Ian Hubert imo
Cube unwrap squad unite! Nice work. I know how to do this stuff but never put it all together like this. You could also add the image as a background on the camera but you can't control the brightness of it. Thanks!
Thanks for this video man. Solved my most of the problems.
i discovered your channel 5 mins. ago, instantly subscribed
Aah...yes finally I can finish my render 🔥
Great video 👍
Such a detailed tutorial 🥹 thank you so much for this tutorial
Love your content bro, keep up the good work!
I often do this now with more realistic renders like the one I posted two weeks ago on my twitter and Instagram accounts, if I had watched this sooner I could have applied it when I made the final renders instead of shuffling the plane around. Next time I try it out when I make a more realist render, Thanks for the tips in this video.
This is what i need, thanks man. Keep it up 👍👍
This video saved the day 👏
Great tutorial. I'm liking the content you're providing....glad I subscribed.
Thank you so much! I love it :) I watched this video and just clicked subscribe
Thank you so much Max! Keep up the great work. 😎
mate your tutorial are awesome!!!
If you Image is not high resolution enough, you have plenty of Ai upscaling nowday that can bring your image up to 8k. great tutorial. thanks for the trick very usefull!
Make sure the upscaling "model" was trained to handle photos and/or textures specifically. Use a generic upscaler at your own risk.
MAN!!!!1 KEEP THESE COMING
You are awesome bro in everything 😘❤️🔥🙂
Great video Max! Thanks for the tips 🔥
i love this channel
Thank you! Exactly what I was looking for!
nice tutorial. would you please also give some recommendations where we can get urban building facade images to use then as windows background in interior renders? thanks
Ah really lovely tutorial ✨
incredible
pls never stop making videos.
Hm...
Yes, admitted, this can give you some very beautiful and realistic results. Which is not that much of a surprise, when you _take_ something beautiful and realistic and just paste it into your scene.
But from a video that had "create" and "in Blender" in the title, I had expected a bit more.
Awesome content! I already see I'll be spending a lot of time on your channel :)
Thank you for sharing!
Try Add ons -> Images as Planes
That saves a lot of hassle with UVs etc
One downaide with using it as a plane in the backgrt and as an emitfer is that the image looks much flatter in terms of contrast. I boticed the image looks much better when it was open in the uv editor. Why not add it comp later to keep the contrast? You can always render thr image transparent and use the backdrop plane only as visual reference
These tips are amazing. I have no excuse to not be making stuff now haha
That's amazing, but now I have an issue where it's one of my objects that is casting a shadow onto the sky plane! Is there a way in the object settings/material settings to have it not receive shadows?
For photorealistic resoults just use photos, easy
Thank you mann..❤
Thanks for sharing this man
really usefull
How did you make the ground , the reflection is majestic ,
and .... what if you move the camera? So in feature film VFX we often do this in Nuke, but instead of sticking it on a plane, we project onto Spheres, ideally you have a spherical stitches texture as well. That way the camera can pan freely.
amazing job, thx dude
Your tutorials have been awesome but I would like to add a catch to this.
Sometimes when you really want those indirect lighting details, you don't get it by this method, so in solution for this use sky texture for the direct lightning and thus indirect lighting from the direct ones, and you also add your hdri with mix rgb that will provide you more indirect lighting information, cause what I think is, proper indirect lighting is responsible for photorealism and also cinematic look, if you get your indirect lighting wrong , the render will look more like render and less photoreal.
Hope this helps
What about when you animate your camera to rotate on z axis in an animation?
Would you make tutorial about realistic water?
Same. Please share the realistic water secret!
Chuckcg made a tutorial About that
Could you do a tutorial on the second example you put up please? This is incredible!
Might God bless you !🙏🏼🙏🏼🔥🔥👍🏼👍🏼
do you have tutorial for such a great water?
U can jus use copy loc constraint if ur camera shakes
hey, i have a question... how have you got that second viewport showing the rendered view with the camera perspective?
Check out Max’s ‘how to make amazing renders…’ video about 2:00 in
Love your tuts…simple and to the point explaining the how/why. One question, do these work in animated scenes just as well or just reserved for stills?
Very good ! Thanks !
can you make a quick tutorial for output render settings and best optimization. My renders are always pixelated when i zoom in
Hey In my Principled BSDF I don´t have the circle in emission to connect it, only have emission with a dropdown with color and strength, How do I change it?
New subscriber here: Why is there no mention of the water in the scene and does the picture of the sky reflect on the water or not?
"and thats it" video done at 1:01
I love your tutorial so much!Can you make a video about how to make fog or clouds to your senses？
Hi, is it possible to put the image in a sphere or semi-sphere to create some kind of a dome so when i move the camera the sky is always visible on final render ?
Doesn't the plane still be able to block the light of the sun, or does unchecking the shadow box fix that?
Hi, I'm a beginner. How do you get the render view that's on the bottom right of your screen that updates every time you make a change in the scene?
make a video on how u have managed everything , textures scenes etc
genius idea
where do you get those images?
I would like to ask , for your art work do you use kit bash or created everything from scratch?
Awesome.
what if the sky has no horizon ?
Lol i just asked this yesterday. Thankyou.
-Facepalm- I had no idea you could disable shadows for individual objects...Thanks
what if the light in the sky picture is coming from like behind the clouds and not from the left or right
How do i make a night scene with sky texture?
Total beginner here, trying to get my head around the camera. I think its in position and then when i go to check its still blank and not where i need it and shows nothing
can you tell me how I can set up that live-preview window on the bottom right of your screen?
I have seen this many times but I wonder how I can set up a window like this, clean and without obstructions and without seeing the grid...
Check out Max’s ‘how to make amazing renders…’ video about 2:00 in