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So the main pillars of our lighting formula have already been put into place, now we can

play with the details. how about spicing it all up with some dust particles, such atmospheric

enhancements to our lighting setup is the perfect opportunity to enhance the sense of

place that we try to recreate on onset, to add the markers of authenticity and believability,

which is as important in CG graphics is if not more important than in classical cinematography,

before we pepper up our beautiful sunbeams with dust, I think I'll toggle off the visibility of

the fog layer to make it slightly more performant in terms of viewport speed.

so I've added a new collection called dust, now I'm going to teleport to one of the project files

included with the course, namely the .blend file with the dust effect, here we can see a

classical dust imitation technique implemented, a particle texture applied to material transparency,

what we can do without diving deep into its material settings is just select the plane,

it is a one polygon plane indeed, so with the plane being selected, now Ctrl C, copy objects,

navigate back to our gorgeous mineral scene and then Ctrl V to paste it.

now if everything went right, the transparency should show up in both the material preview and

rendered modes, what I'll try to do with this fake particle sprite now is put in such way so it falls

right into focus, so the viewer can technically appreciate the intricacies of this thing, for the

convenience his sake I have switched temporarily to the material preview mode to work in real time

and so it feels like it should be in focus now.

as for the shader it's nothing more than the alpha texture applied to a plane, really and some neutral

colored emission that probably shouldn't go over the top, it is meant as a fairly subtle

effect to sell the sunshine that passes through the particles passing through the air, like every

other such effect it shouldn't jump straight in our faces, it should be used in a minimal way.

I think what I'll do is turn down the emission strength considerably, so it's barely visible, but

still visible, you know what I mean and I will also Infuse some peachiness into the emission tint to

make it look like it's illuminated by our sun lamp indeed which has this warmer property to its color,

I think it's still a little bit too crude, I will reduce the emission strength furthermore,

now it looks to me like it could help us indeed to sell the effect of the sun beams passing

through the denser air, that's good, maybe we can press Shift D a few times to create a few layers

of dust to make it more three-dimensional, let's say, one placed in the backdrop and the other one

barely touching the lens so we see the nice out of focus circles of bokeh, cool! so Shift D again,

that is the third dust plane that we have created, I wonder, can you see these blurred

highlights that look almost like the lens dirt? I think the aberrations like that is such a nice

touch both in terms of selling the atmosphere and just for its aesthetic pleasure. it reminds

me of real photography where you capture such things even if you don't want it, sometimes it

just happens naturally and we have to simulate it all from scratch :) it is not fair, not fair! :)

to remove the anamorphic squeeze feel free to reset the aperture ratio to 1, but personally

I adore the horizontal squeeze effect of the out of focus elements, it gives away

the cinematic vibe by association with the real anamorphic lenses, it's just beautiful I think.

so let's keep it anamorphic and turn back the fog layer on while we are on it.

it is fair to say that one of the functions of lighting is to enhance the sense of place

to help sell the location's believability by adding those small and not so small details.

unfortunately for us 3D lighting gaffers, there is a performance cost associated with stacking

layers on top of layers on top of layers. the more volumetric we go in terms of adding fog and the

more transparency layers we stack, the harder it becomes for Cycles to render, so if you feel that

at this point your computer started struggling with it, feel free to toggle some layers off

temporarily. for example the haze layer, then when needed you'll toggle it back on just for a second,

have a look, toggle it back off until the final render where you enable all bells and whistles.