From the course: Blender: Tips, Tricks and Techniques

Forming fog and mist - Blender Tutorial

From the course: Blender: Tips, Tricks and Techniques

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Forming fog and mist

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- [David] Have you ever wanted to make your scenes murky or foggy? Well, in this week's Blender Tip, Tricks, and Techniques, I'm going to show you how to do that with an often overlooked Render Pass called the Miss Pass, let me show you. First, let's switch to Cycles. And then let's come up here and go to User Preferences and let's turn on, Node Wrangler in the add ons. If it's not checkbox, let's click on it. Go to Save User Settings. Let's get out of this. And let's delete this cube and this lamp. Shift A, let's add a plane, make it really long. And I'm going to add a few things shift A, a monkey. Right about here, shift A, another monkey about here. And shift A one more way in the distance. Now if I want to, I can S Y, lengthen this plane a little bit. And I'm going to grab my camera ... Maybe I'll go into camera mode in fact. And lock Camera to View. And let's kind of get this monkeys in a cool compositional order, there we go. We can zoom in a little bit here. That looks pretty decent so we have a few monkeys far away. Maybe I'll take one more shift the Y. Put them way into the distance. There we are and we can go ahead and hit N and T and close this out really quick. Zero to get into camera view. Let's just make some new materials for each and every one of these monkeys. Doesn't have to be anything crazy. I can make these colors a little different, sort of similar. Doesn't completely matter, just want to get a little color. Color variance so we kind of know which monkey is which. Okay, so now let's go into Scene, Passes, turn on Miss. The next thing we want to do is go to world, Miss Pass. And you'll see some numbers here. These corresponds to your Blender units. So let's measure those out really quick. You can hit seven and five and Z or zed to get into wireframe. And then you hit spacebar, type in ruler. And wherever you click and drag on ruler ... So let's try that again. If it disappears, just literally spacebar, ruler. And wherever you click and drag, as long as you don't let go, you can get some measurements. So looks like my first monkey's about five Blender units away. So that's good, so we're at about five. Let me zoom out here a little bit. Looks like that monkey is really far. So space bar ruler, click and drag. That one's about 90 or so meters away. So let's go ahead and save that is ... We'll give a little bit more, say, 120. Alright, so that's really important. So then, camera view again. We need to add one more thing so let's shift A, Lamp. And let's go to Sun. You can bring that up here. Crank up to shrink a little bit. It should be pretty decent. Camera View, you can do a Quick Rendered Preview. Alright, that looks pretty good. So let's get out of that, Render Settings. We're almost done here. I'll crank it up to a 100%. And more importantly, for the purpose of this video, I'm going to make the samples 32. So let's go ahead and just render that. Alright, so now we have a render. So let's go ahead and move this over a little bit, split this view, go to Node Editor. Down here, click on Render Scenes. Use Nodes, zoom in a little bit. You'll see a few things right here. The first thing is composite which is our render result. And the next thing is render layers. That is if I come over here to composite, I can see RenderLayer. And I can then go to Combine and play with the different layers. And see what I have and one of those is Mist. So remember, switch to RenderLayer, Mist. And you can see right now, we have Mist. That's interesting, how do we use it? Let's go back up to Combine and switch this to Composite. And let's add a couple of nodes. First is shift A, a ColorRamp. And next is shift A, Mix. Alright, so let's put that here. Let's drag our image into the top of the mix. Let's go ahead and drag our Mist into the factor. And then let's take the image, throw it into factor up here. And then finally, let's drag image to image and you'll get that. Now if you want to, with Node Wrangler on, you can also control shift click and you'll generate a Viewer Node. I have to come over here to switch to Viewer. And then control shift click a couple of times to turn it back on. And this is cool because now you can go ahead and say, what's the ColorAmp look like? What is the Mix look like? And compare all of these. So I'm going to go to Mix and now you can see everything is going to white so let's pick a color that will really stand out, something light blue, there we go. And I can see that some of these monkeys are getting a little hazy. And I can control that amount of haze by just sliding these sliders. So if I go more black, there's less haze. And if I go more white, there's way more haze. So much that I've completely enveloped the monkey. In fact, I can get to the point where we have no other monkeys, just this monkey in front of us. So I can come over here and finesse these little guys. And the cool thing is, this mix gives me the ability to play with any color that I want. Or I can click on Mix, if I zoom into this. And I can pick any sort of blend type such as Multiply. And make things pretty cool. Or overlay but I'm going to keep it on Mix. And there you go, you have now made a very simple misty, foggy, kind of scene that you can control after render. Or if you're going to export this to another program, you'll also have ... If I control shift click this, you'll also just have this Miss Pass which you can manipulate in anything else like After Effects, NUKE, or Photoshop. And there you go, you've now generated a Miss Pass which you can use in any programs such as NUKE, After Effects, or of course, in Blender. Using this pass is really powerful and I highly recommend you add it to your workflow so you can control the look of things after you've rendered them. Until next time, this is David for Blender's Tips, Tricks, and Techniques.

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