hey this is Kev with blender binge back with another tutorial for you this time
we're gonna be making medically illustrated stem cell looking thingies
and if you go any type in stem cells you see like a ton of images that look very
similar to this so I'm just gonna say that this is probably the agreed-upon
way to illustrate stem cells out in the world if you're not looking at it under
an electron microscope got it let's get started the first thing I'm
gonna do is I'm going to use a default cube I'm gonna select him and I'm gonna
hit control v on the keyboard now why the heck would I do that here's why if I
go over to the modifiers tab over here that just added in a subdivision surface
so I didn't have to go look ahead modifier and buy subdivision surface and
then set out so I was just able to do it control v normally I would never hit
control v because that would choke most computers but being that we started with
a cube low resolution we just get this so now what I'll do is viewport is set
at 5 render I'm going to set at 5 so that way when I hit render later I don't
have an oops look at that it looks like crap it's gonna look like pretty much
what I want it to look like ok you'll see later
now second thing I'll do is I'll create the nucleus so to do that I'm just gonna
go to add modifier I'm going to say displace and it makes it huge not what I
want I'm gonna hit new it makes it small again not what I want
Thank You blender so what I'll do is I'll hit this little thingy over here
show texture tab intro texture and texture tab which is the same as hitting
this so I'm not sure why these are both here but hey that's cool whatever so I'm
gonna hit that and I'm gonna say type not image or movie and I'm gonna say
Voronoi and boom hey look at that that's kind of cool
and then distance metric I'm gonna change this to distance squared there's
no real reason I'm doing this other than the fact that I just kind of like the
way it looks so I'm gonna take this I'm gonna say object I'm gonna say shade
smooth and then I'm gonna go back to my little wrench here for modifiers I'm
going to turn the strength down I'm gonna go negative like point 3 and look
at that I now get this cool like blobby look and that's just what I would
imagine the Selden stem cell nucleus would look like because I fiber saw one
here life which I haven't and you probably
haven't either what's your a scientist so what I'm gonna do now is I'm gonna
make the membrane to do that I think I'm gonna add a you know I'm gonna just
duplicate this cuz why not I like I have it like why not duplicate it right
though shift D duplicate it so click once so it's not tied to this move tool
and then you're gonna hit s on the keyboard and scale it up just a little
bit and with this I can kind of just take down the strength of this and I can
also go ahead and instead of using Voronoi here I can use light let's see
noise I don't like that Stu sheets to choose let's say stuccis doosh doosh
doosh e stucci sounds good maybe purlins improve purlins sure
that's fine that'll probably work for what we need right now so now let's go
ahead and begin to shade this thing so the first thing I'll do is I'm gonna
turn on evey so I'm gonna go over here to rendered up
this little thing I'm gonna go to my little back of the camera thingy or
whatever render and I'm going to say screen space reflections I'm gonna go in
here I'm gonna turn off half rest trace and I'm gonna turn on refraction yeah I
like that yeah that'll work men shadows I think I'll turn on high
bit and soft shadows cuz why not I'm I'm in here I'll use it that's fine and
that's probably good enough I think I have everything set the way I want it so
I'm happy yes happy so what I'll do now is I will use the shading so I could go
here and use the shading tab but I think I just want to use this so I'm just
gonna go down pull up a little window here and I'm going to say shader editor
so now I have a shader editor and we can see everything and it looks great and
blah blah so what I'll do is I'm gonna say my original cube which is the one
inside here I'm gonna rename to nucleus it's not new coulis
nucular its nucleus and then I'm gonna change cube ah double click and say
membrane insane whatever so check that out or cool I like that now oh okay so
membrane I have this material I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna say transmission
all the way up and you see absolutely nothing happening in here the reason for
that that we don't see through this is because they don't give us this by
default so we have to go down here to material alright for membrane material
we can go scroll all the way down and blend mode I'll say alpha clip turn on
screen space refraction okay so we'll play with refraction depth and we're not
gonna really touch that yet what we need to do also is realize that nucleus and
membrane-bound the same material so let's go to nucleus here let's go to the
materials tab scroll up and we're gonna add a new material to nucleus and so I'm
going to go ahead and I'm going to name this one membrane and this one I'm gonna
hit new I'm going to call this nucleus shader or whatever and I'm gonna hit tab
with nucleus and then I'm just gonna hit a sign so yeah I have nucleus on a sign
and hit tab again and now I have the nucleus inside there so for nucleus here
I can go ahead base color change it to whatever I want like red it's fine and I
could turn the roughness down make it shiny leave that as is and what I could
do here on membrane now is I could turn the roughness down and you see we're
seeing through it well that's kind of nice and what if see how it's like
really refracted if I don't want it to be super refracted I can take the
refraction depth and kind of play with that
and you can I mean you can get really really accurate here but if you're doing
just like kind of artistic looking stuff you can just kind of leave it as is and
find something that you're kind of happy with and then I'm pretty okay with for
now so roughness here you can turn that up and give it more of like a rough kind
of membrane but you get the you get the picture
next what I'll do is I'm going to play with the world so I'm gonna go over here
to object I don't change this to world and if I scroll with my mouse and I pull
out here I could see I have a background background here change it to black
nothing change it to white see everything so you can play with this or
you can do something really interesting with this and go add or hit shift a
either one go to texture I'll say Voronoi I'll color to color and there I
have kind of a cell looking shader and again you could put anything in the
background here HDRI anything anything you want but I'm just gonna do this for
the sake of this video and then I'll make it a kind of a bluish color maybe
so I'll go shift a get a converter color ramp take Voronoi out here factor to
factor color to color and now I can go ahead and change this to whatever color
I want so I'll go like a kind of light blue I don't know something like that
and you can play with the scale and just kind of get something that looks
somewhat interesting to you and you can also take another Voronoi shifty take
the factor plug that into like scale and start getting really kind of broken up
looking stuff so there's a million things you can do here there's no one
way to make anything look cool I'm just doing this for the sake of the video to
throw a background in here and start getting some refraction and reflection
in this object okay so next let's play with the camera will
so I'm just gonna take the camera and position it so I'm gonna select a camera
and I'm gonna hit alt R and alt G that centers it and clears out the rotation
now what I could do is select this little arrow up here and I'll go to
rotation on the X I'll hit 90 that's just gonna face it right down that way
go to the move tool pull it back a little bit and now I could hit 0 and
there we go so we're starting to get something that's passable as a as a you
know decent composition so now we can work on the lighting so notice I did not
turn on lock camera to view if you do that you can kind of scroll around and
move the camera around but I'm gonna leave that off for now and I'm just
gonna work on lighting so quick quick and dirty lighting here simply gonna add
and empty into the center and then I'm gonna add in a light and I'm gonna say
area light and I'll pull back pull that area light up and then I think what I'll
do is I will I'm gonna make that stare at the center so what I'll do with that
is go to constraint hit track to Target choose my empty and then for this one
I'll use negative Z and I'll just leave it at that it's not active right now
because it's not working but we're gonna we're gonna change that in a minute
so I'm gonna hit shift D now to duplicate this guy and pull them around
and you'll notice that he still has the constraint on it so now all I have to do
is just kind of find find his happy place which is on the Y so you leave
that there just hit up Y and there you go so now I have this guy staring
straight at this as well and then I can duplicate him shift D okay pull him over
and he's looking that way too so now I have kind of a three-point lighting
setup where I can just find whatever looks cool to me
and go with it so what I can do now is hit zero again and start playing with
the lights so area light one is above us
I don't even need this on anymore but I'll just leave it for the for the sake
of it why not it's not hurting anything and I'll say power 150 and I could take
the size here maybe go 25 it's pretty big and 1,500 I start getting something
something workable 15000 I start getting something really crazy and I could see
that this thing is a kind of flickering so to fix that this is really quick fix
not sure this is like a really great solution or not
but you could take viewport here sampling so if you go here to render and
just turn that down to zero and that just kind of takes that flick or I'll
for now so we're not looking at anything it's crazy so now I get to take these
area lights here and I can play around a little bit more so I can click on the
light so a hit area click on the light and I can give it more so let's say 150
from the side 1500 from the side blow that up to like 8 1,500 other side blow
that up to 18 and then you can move these around and kind of find something
that you're happy with and these work is lights in the real world so the further
you pull them away the less intense they get and they pull them up on the wall on
a Z pull them back a little bit more and you start getting start getting lights
and a look that you can kind of dig you can go back and play with these it as
well so let's see if I go to world and I go to object here
okay roughness it's up a bit you can see you pull it out pull it in and start
getting something that looks kind of selfish and now we can also do is I can
back out of here so what I'll do is I'll go to get a view lock camera view scroll
out a little bit and I can make this guy membrane hit s make them a little bit
bigger and now I'm starting to get this shape
so I can also go to membrane here or nucleus and what I'll do is I'll turn on
some subsurface scattering and my base color here I kind of push up something
interesting and the membrane here also really play with the strength and I can
also go back to texture here play with the size a little bit make it more
membrane II go back here strength like negative one and you start getting
something something usable no we could also do here is take our area lights
kind of pull them out and get something that kind of works
now it'll do is I can duplicate the heck out of this thing so I'm going to take
off look lock camera to view and I'm gonna hit B on the keyboard and select
both of these I'm just I don't want area selected I just want my nucleus and my
membrane selected okay hit shift D pull that out you can scale this guy down a
little bit okay shift D pull him out shifty shifty shifty shifty and you
start getting something kind of interesting lastly here I can add
another light all the way in the back so I can go add light throw a point light
in there turn it way up and push it all the way back maybe take another one here
and pull them into the front
and see what we get all right we're getting more light now looking a little
bit better getting nice reflections off the other
lights they're starting to reflect each other and I can keep going with this and
massaging it it's almost something I'm really happy with but the video will go
on and on and on and on and on forever so at some point we have to keep going
so what I'm gonna do here is get camera and I'm gonna just throw in depth of
field now so I'm gonna say camera I'm gonna add another empty in here this
time maybe a cone so I can see it it has scale it up just like it see it it's not
a not a rendering object so don't worry about it and then I'm gonna camera I'm
gonna say depth of field focus on it be empty
0:01 look at it name did cone whatever doesn't matter and I'm going to say
f-stop is it's kind of arbitrary with the blender units so if it's not working
for you you can just kind of find your your your spot if you want where the
ones in the back start blurring out and then the ones in the front you know
where your aim is is fine see now cool thing is about adding this empty is now
if I move this guy so let's say if I move him on the Y back forward I can
control my depth of field so you can get those like cool rack focus effects and
so you just kind of want to leave him where he was at zero and that's fine
so now if I render this you'll see what it looks like alright so there's a basic
very basic looking very clean looking shot of the representation of a cell of
a of a stem cell other things we can do we can add more lights we can brighten
it up so let's see what it looks like when I go and duplicate a bunch more of
these I'm gonna pause the video and come back with it more duplicated alright so
here we are back I duplicated this a lot more times and another thing you can do
is if you don't like the look of the uniformity of all this stuff and I
generally don't what we could have done in the beginning and didn't do is take
the membrane and change from texture coordinates from local to global and
you can do that on a few of these the ones that are you know visible and
that'll that'll change the look and feel of this and then you can adjust to your
liking but this looks kind of membrane II to me now and I'm kind of digging it
and you can also play with the roughness a little bit and make it a little more
thick a little more globby whatever and play around and see if you like it
so if I render this now we'll see what it looks like and that's looking pretty
stem cell II so other than this you can just go ahead and add a lot more stuff
in here just make it look more like a more natural environment but that pretty
much gives you the the gist of how you would go about doing something like this
so if you liked this video please hit like subscribe share it hit that little
Bell notification because I keep making more and I will keep making more of
these for you thanks talk to you later bye