How To Make Epic Auroras in Blender Eevee

What better thing to do in lockdown than to make this fully 3d animated Northern Lights? In this tutorial we go in depth on shader nodes such as: Color Ramp, Map Range, RGB Curve and Noise. And I promise not to wear a giant Bob Ross wig while doing it.
This tutorial is ok for beginners but you need to know your way around the Blender interface, so if you're just starting out I recommend going through the official Blender Fundamentals training first:
• Blender Fundamentals 2.8
HDRI Used:
hdrihaven.com/...
Links for reference images used during the video:
unsplash.com/p...
unsplash.com/p...
unsplash.com/p...
Enjoy!
0:00 Intro
0:27 Initial scene setup
2:41 Initial Aurora shader setup
5:47 Adding basic shapes
13:24 Adding the vertical fading
18:36 Adding colour
20:19 Making the streak effect
28:53 Fixing rendering issues
30:38 Fading the edges
32:43 Animating the ribbons
38:11 Basic environment
40:36 Examples of this technique

[@DylanNeill3D]

Hey everyone, first new long form tutorial in a while, hopefully not too rusty! Enjoy and please post your results on Instagram!

[@drcelicdavor]

Not rusty at all :) keep going

[@ShonHarito2]

Honestly, I'm amazed that you've so few subs and also video. I love the way you explain things; Being concise yet also not goiong on and on for ages. Straight to the point with all that's really needed. I've learned more about the idea of how to use nodes from this video of yours, basically in those 40 minutes ( it felt like 8-10!!) than from HOURS of other youtubers videos. Amazing. Sub from me, and I really hope to see more of your content. Keep it up, I'm loving it.

[@TalkingSpatial]

this was so much fun, thank you for posting. I'm going to see if I can't apply it to an animated HDRI sky

[@just_rogers]

duuuuuuude you blew my mind when you stretched the color ramp

[@jimmac]

“back in my day” made me laugh. and then cry.

[@RicardoVargas21]

Never even touched blender.... Watched the whole thing! Beautiful + Entertaining. Might as well get into it in the future.

[@RowanSteyn3D]

I literally just needed northern lights for the next scene I’m working on, nice :)

[@00_01]

Incredibly detailed and thorough tutorial, I love learning what the nodes ACTUALLY do and you did not disappoint. Thank you sir

[@harryboteler5332]

Really beautiful! Also your presentation is inimitable: you really explain things well, with an aurora of calmness that makes your videos very easy to digest. Please, please do more of these full-length tutorials.

[@cestunchopin4928]

Thanks a lot! Explanations are just so simple with you and understandable. With nodes, its just not easy to picture it and you did a great job along the vid to show what certain things do. I will experiment for sure and send you my result.

[@MasonPayne]

I love your tutorials! They are clear and easy to follow and informative. I can't wait to try this one out. Thanks for the hard work and the top notch production value.

[@lucancoutts]

Hey, thank you man! This was an incredibly helpful tutorial, super easy to follow along to. Your attention to detail doesn't go unappreciated.

[@BlenderDaily]

Awesome effect. Can‘t wait to try it out!✌🏻

[@creeyuwan2733]

Thank you, Dylan, for explaining Generated Texture Coordinate!

[@linolafettatnet]

Nice work! I wanted to do a 60s tutorial on how i did my auroras, but you now have a much better guide here. Thanks for sharing!

[@wanchoke]

Very nice tutorial. Thank you very much.

[@Danzanus]

Watched some of your tutorials and always had a feeling that you remind me someone... Mix Shader of 2: 1 - Linus Gabriel Sebastian (Linus Tech Tips YT channel). Not a duplicate, but even mimics are common to me :) 2 - David Tennant (Doctor Who show). Overall and specially shots when he is in glasses. PS: Tutorials are SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO GOOD. Learned like a whole new world to me. Cant stop watching. So so SO GOOD. I felt like i loosing inspiration to learn new stuff in blender and you just bring it to a whole new level to me. The feeling like when i just started 3D and it was pure magic to me, like a kid before Christmas. Thank you so much!

[@DylanNeill3D]

Lol mix shader. So like 0.9 David Tennant and 0.1 Linus right? Right??? Thanks for the kind words! Glad you like the vids.

[@indmych]

"''G YY is the local axis." Worth the watch right there. But wait, there's more!

[@matthiass.2787]

Aurora Borealis!? At this time of year, at this time of day, in this part of the country, localized entirely within my computer!? Thank you for the great tutorial! :)

[@hubbcap18]

After getting such fantastic results from your ocean tutorial I'm so excited to try this one when I get home from work tonight! Thanks :)

[@folksnote]

i love this tutorial

[@nibblrrr7124]

Awesome, I've been wondering how to do this! I'm curious to play around with the coordinate noise (8:22). I just learned that Musgrave produces positive & negative values (which usually get clipped to black), so using _Add_ instead of _Mix_ might make it more intuitive to control the noise amount with the mix factor? OTOH that weird warping kinda looks cool... As always, really well explained, and the end result looks great. Thanks!

[@jonatansvar8076]

i found that on the ribbon color ramp, it looked very cool to have the black with a value of 0.002

[@ladyViviaen]

thank you so much for this tutorial! learned a lot about nodes and also volumetrics, uploaded the render to my channel too!

[@taktikalvisuals747]

really good tutorial 👌

[@cslavov]

There is a quick solution for the constant deleting of the viewer node, you ctrl-click your final shader node (the one that goes into the output of your shader).

[@j.mcallister6641]

For anyone who feels too lazy to manually set the position of the ribbons with the colour ramp: you can achieve much the same thing in a more procedural way using a 1D noise texture. Use the gradient factor as the W input to a 1D noise (or if you want more control over variation, use the X component of the vector input to a 2D noise), and then use a colour ramp (or curves, or map range) to clip the shadows and highlights. But obviously this method has less direct creative control than the colour ramp method

[@mello5495]

You're an excellent teacher. Thank you

[@sauravsajeev1915]

I made it using principled volume. It worked 🙂

[@aaronvdw]

Really informative and well-explained - thanks for making this video.

[@duende1158]

great tutorial(you can press s in the shader editor to start searching)

[@eddyjuillerat835]

Nice

[@antonshakhovnin]

Your tutorials are great, please make more!

[@webdraftdesign]

Really good video! Will use this in a project soon.

[@creeyuwan2733]

AMAZING ! I learned soo much ! Thanks Dylan !

[@p0tat0_sensei69]

Nice , and subbed

[@alejandrogarcia9637]

Nice tutorial! Now I just need one about how to model skinners´ kitchen.

[@BlenderBob]

Awesome tutorial! Thanks!

[@ramenman3781]

looks great!

[@garywpearson1955]

Magnificent!

[@leekolb2027]

Learned a lot, thanks!

[@hoshihikaru37]

Great!!! Thank you so much for sharing!!!

[@hazard4]

Great video mate.

[@BBROSint]

Great Tutorial. Thank you!

[@melong8608]

this is amaaaazing!!!

[@arslavruhin]

man, you rock! thanks for the tutorial!

[@chapx0461]

Where is the HDRI?

[@NikhilKumar-ry7eg]

I just found your channel... And it really helped me in creating my assets, so I searched for your patreon Id or such, to support.. But I couldn't find any?

[@guilhermebressan5689]

Fell in love with your pacing/detailed explanations! Really easy to follow. Would it be possible to make the lights form a word?

[@MangelGRP]

Awesome!

[@keitholwell]

Can anyone guess as to why this works for me in Cycles but not Eevee? When I use Eevee the Aurora just draws as a blank space from a very early point in the tutorial. I'm assuming I have some preference wrong somewhere... Still new to blender so probably something obvious. (Got to say though that this tutorial is amazing. Learned so much from Dylan. Dude, you're a great teacher.)

[@bhargavpatel_]

thank you

[@kiddymii5681]

Brooo, so cooollll!!!!!!!

[@olec.salomonsen9716]

Hi Dylan, thank you for this. If you wanted to adapt the volumetric light / emission shader to the curvature of a sphere (planet), how would you approach this? As it is now light follows a straight line/axis.

[@sametaylak2698]

I really like your works. Can you make a video about dynamic foam and waves on the ocean? I really want to learn dynamic painting

[@nibblrrr7124]

I wonder if enabling Bloom could take care of the bottom appearing less streaky? 24:48 Also, I'll give wobbling 2D sheets instead of volumetrics a shot.

[@yoopgim9931]

If I were to want to apply this to a torus(viewed at a diagonal angle from below), how would I do so? Any tips, suggestions, or resources would be great.

[@Artmaster555]

This is an incredible tutorial, it looks great in eevee , but I don't understand why this effect cannot be done in Cycles. It turns out just an empty square. Please explain

[@ThomasPOV]

hello and thank you for this video tutorial I tried to do as you but I have 2-3 "errors" _ I can see the 1st ribbon very well and the 2nd a little, but not too much the 3rd and 4th _ I don't really see the gradient from green to red Do you have an idea ?

[@honeyleaf2499]

how many times did people click 0 to go to camera view and restart the video?

[@laiying6192]

A fantastic tutorial, thank you so much, Dylan!! I created the aurora based on it but I found the 3D and/or anime cannot be exported to the developer working on Unity. I am a very beginner at 3D and animation. Could you tell me if there are any solutions? 😂😂😂 Thanks!!!

[@austin-multicellular]

I am using this in a render of Jupiter, is there any way to get this to form into a circle?

[@dhruvdevc]

Why did you disappear??????? We need you

[@DylanNeill3D]

Had a big project on last couple of months that took all my spare time. Project ends today... Starting work on more videos on Monday

[@AC-cw4sk]

How do i import this into ue4?

[@mjyanimations1062]

I think Im one of the few poeple who uses the shading tab instead of bringing up the materials editor in the layout tab

[@nomadeam7005]

Tutorial to how to create feathers with the hair sistem

[@sangeetmarkande]

hdri?

[@jjfoerch]

I didn't understand - what is the purpose of the gradient across the X dimension?

[@tommywong7345]

May I know how do you export the aurora as .gltf file or .obj, what I get is a white solid box

[@byKunle]

is this the last video for the channel :(

[@cashtanimations]

this was one of THE BEST tutorials I have ever seen! maybe a little bit longer than desired, but you kept it simple yet comprehensive and took your time to really explain stuff, so I didnt just blindly copy everything you did, but actually learned something! thanks for that. also, here is my Aurora animation: kzbin.info/www/bejne/rajUoWaNYtBnhdE

[@r.k.b2055]

**stupid virus** ?!?! Virus : Get em.

[@micitothings]

2 views but 6 likes 🤔🤔🤔🤔

[@nibblrrr7124]

Yeah, what YT counts as a "view" is surprisingly complicated, and has to be added up among different Google servers across the globe. Errors & delays from that can become obvious on small view counts. (I think Tom Scott made a video on this? AFAIR back then it just counted site hits below 300, and then became stuck until the servers were on the same page.)

[@soejrd24978]

Did you totally stop making tutorials?

[@DylanNeill3D]

I'll be back

[@AC-cw4sk]

this tut is hard af if you have no basic knowledge of blender

[@ShonHarito2]

To create from scratch? I totally agree. It's not just blender, there's so much math and also understanding how all those nodes not only work by themselves, but also together. Not to speak about understanding what should come first, what second etc... It's amazing. Have you seen Nodvember 2020? It was soooo amazing.

[@5ucAyman]

hey really nice tutorial but my ears bleed