Creating a Nebula in Blender Eevee

Hello, I am Kiara Tyler-Cooper, and I'm a 3D animator!

I spent a few days working on this nebula animation, hope you enjoy!

I did plenty of research on YouTube, looking into how volumetric clouds are created in Blender. Mainly rewatching videos from Poly3Blend, Samuel Krug VFX, and Lsienn 3d

As my software of choice, I used Blender 4.4, specifically Eevee render engine with raytracing on

After rendering, I used After Effects to add music as well as fine-tune colors

Before starting the scene, I added a starry night HDRI from Polyhaven to add a background and global lighting. Using this as my base for the nebula.

I started with a cube and added a principal volume node to it, connecting it to the volume node in the material output.

By adding a Noise texture node into density and emission strength, it creates a more natural cloudy/smoky look.

To better control the noise, I added math nodes and a math range node to control the material.

Due to it being volumetric compared to a texture, it has more dimensions than a flat texture and needs more refined control.

Nebulas aren't usually one color but a giant prism of color 🌈

This node setup of Color ramps and Hue/Saturation/Value nodes allows me to create many different colors in a way that is most efficient.

I created a camera and placed it inside the Nebula cube.

Now I enter render view and start to add lights to brighten the nebula and give attention to certain parts.

First image: no lights

Second image: 2 point lights added

Third image: 2 point lights added

For another layer of detail, I keyframed the distortion channel on the noise node to add a very small amount of movement. This makes the nebula feel less static and solid and more floaty and gaseous.

I took the rendered sequence to After Effects, and I added brightness/contrast and Levels effects to the footage to further add more color depth

And for music, I added some casual jazz

And finished! Thank you for reading and following along with me. ✨👽