Arriving To Techno City - Blender Breakdown / Reddit Q&A

hey everyone in this video I will go over the process behind my latest project arriving to techn City and I will focus on answering in more details the questions I got from Reddit mainly how to achieve a sense of massive scale and go over some of my texturing workflow thank you for all of you showed this piece already by the way I really appreciate it first to talk a bit about the project itself this piece was inspired by the inkel a graphic novel written by Jovi and illustrated by mobus specifically this image showing the character arriving to techn City I first attempted simply recreating this image but I was not satisfied with it it was too empty and getting the same look would have required too much cheating around the colors and lighting and I wanted my work to stay quite realistic so I wanted to get closer to the train I played around with the camera and format of the image and I got to this interesting angle pretty quickly I knew I wanted to have a citycape instead of empty terrain and I would have to of the train a bit more detailed now that we are so close to it so I gathered a few references in pure ref that we can see right here so I have my base references from the comic book and then I gathered some references of the type of City I would want to make something quite disopan sci-fi a bit of references for the train itself for the railway around it train station some of the buildings for the city mainly for the shape IDs I made a building that is quite similar to that one and then I just have some work in progress frames at the bottom so in the end here is what my scene looks like in blender's viewport now to get to the questions I got from Reddit one that came back ofen was how to get a sense of massive scale for more details on that I really recommend watching this video from critical Giants that cover this topic quite well but I can give you some tips that applied in this particular project first having a scale reference something that is always good to have when making environments is a reference of something that we can immediately recognize and know the scale of the simplest thing is to place a character because everybody can identify a person and have an idea of the average human height but this can also be an element like a lamp poost a window a car just something that we are used to Here For example we have a few elements that we are familiar with we have a character some type of lamp post we have railings now that we have these Foundation of scale with elements that we know it is easier to create a sense of scale by comparision when we see this slam POS that we associate with something quite big in real life looking so tiny next to this structure it really gives us that impression of massive scale the camera the way you place your camera and which settings you use will also play a role in giving a sense of scale A good rule for camera placement when doing visual effects is to have the camera somewhere a human being could actually be to take the shot shot what often gives up a really CG feel is the camera being just randomly in the air or in no logical location or for animated shots even in big movies having cameras doing impossible movements just flying randomly in the air really breaks the realism and the immersion in the scene some things that the first Pacific cream does well is to keep the camera grounded which immediately makes the makas in Kaiu look huge so here by staying at character level on the train you get a similar perspective as him and you feel the massive scale of the structure he is approaching also composition plays A Part the fact that the massive structure in the foreground is not entirely visible all the top part is out of view it really gives a sense of how big it is that it can't even fit in the frame now for camera settings using a wide lens can help as it makes elements close to the camera will look big and distant elements look smaller it creates a feeling of Greater distance between the foreground and the background a longer focal length will usually flatten the depth now there are exceptions and you can get a feeling of distance with a longer focal length it's really a case by casee scenario and depends on the effects you're trying to get but usually a wide lens can make it easier to achieve a sense of Epic scale and finally atmospheric perspective this is an easy one just by adding volumetric to your scene you will quickly give a feel of distance to your environments it will simulate the atmospheric perspectives that you can see in real life now be careful to not overdo it but a subtle use of volumetric will definitely help get that distance feeling I also got a few questions regarding texturing first where do I get my textures I often use the easy PBR addon in blender which is basically just linking to the mncg library you can easily download materials in the resolution and format that you prefer and you can either assign the material directly to your object or you can bring a note group in your current material this is useful if you want to mix multiple textures or material together I also use Imes from textures.com that I've had for a while in my hard drive I think now it's unfortunately subscription based only even for low res texture which sucks but real life image based textures are always best if you want to achieve realism you can try to find textures on websites like unsplash pixels or pixabay and if they are not seamless there is a lot of tutorials to make seamless textures either in blender directly or in Photoshop but you can also use them as overlays or decals for example other on or sites I sometimes use but not as often are the substance addon linking to the substance Library Sanctus there is a free version with a few materials blender kit has some user made materials some are free some you can access if you get the premium version of blender kit poly Haven also has some free materials on top of their great hdris but in general PBR materials are nice but if you want to achieve realism it's always better to go with real image based ures on this project in particular I also relied heavily on maps I created with J placement it is not actively supported anymore but you can still find it on GitHub I think I will put the link below it is a quite well-known little software now but in case you don't know it here is a quick look at it all right so when you open it it's just this little software you can click here and select the version you prefer so the classic version has quite a lot of different types of elements you just click or use hot key and it will just generate a map with a random pattern with these elements so you can control the number of iterations you want more or less shapes and for each shape you can enable or disable them as you prefer like if you don't want any of those and just want basic cubes for example can control the scale of each shape and then you can just save height save normal I usually just save the height uh but you also have version two that has some quite more sci-fi pattern this is mostly what I used in my project so you have In Here Also different versions you have the classic set we have a crab pack which looks more like computer inside Electronics details Big Data looks more like GD shapes arrag similar to the classic set and same thing here you can just adjust the background brightness so for example if you have a lot less iterations and you set it as black like for example if you want to use that as like a an alpha map having it as black directly will make it fully transparent and if you plan on using it as like a displacement or bump then leaving it at kind of like a middle gray value will just serve as the Baseline of the bump you can also toggle colorizer on it there is different presets so you can choose and you can use that as like a base color for your material and then you have other types velvet I don't really use those a lot wire like can be useful to create some kind of Grid or even like Road patterns can be useful and then that grid can also be useful to fake lights that's actually what I started with to fake lights on or Windows in buildings just using that as a mask for like an emissive and same you can control the shapes like those wouldn't make much sense but you could yeah keep only one if you want more like window shape or dots so yeah this is a pretty useful software about my texturing workflow for large scale scenes or objects in this particular project something that helps is having the same texture base and look for almost everything in the scene then I make variations of those materials and I tweak the color roughness the texture scale or the edge breakup mask now because this is a dystopian sci-fi environment this monochromatic uniform look makes sense and works fine but this might not be the case for all types of environments usually the more variations and breakups the better now something that comes with texturing large elements is styling in the textures so on this massive structure for example I have a texture of Windows and if I left it by default it will look really repetitive and tiled even though I'm mixing three different types of windows so in this case I just use textures as masks and noise to break up the visible repetition pattern of the windows but for other types of textures mostly for ground terrain organic textures usually if you set the texture scale to work in the foreground it will create a really and repetitive effect as it goes in the distance but setting it to work in the distance will just make the texture way too large and low resolution blurry in the foreground so for that a good technique is to use distance blending I will link a video showcasing this method in details but basically you can use the depth in your camera information to create masks and have different texture scales for different distances from the camera now using textures to fake details something else that got noticed on Reddit was that the geometry of the main structure was really basic but in the render it looks very detailed for that the JS placement Maps were important I use these details as bump plugged in the normal of my Shader and I set the value pretty high for elements in the distance and a bit lower for the city buildings another thing that has details is having layers it is also really simple geometry I just duplicated a ring of faces from the main structure slightly move it away and on this geometry I apply the material using a JS placement texture but also using an alpha from this texture to break up that uniform plain and fake a detail geometry you can add multiple layers of those to get even more details but keep in mind that Alpha is still going to cost a little bit of performance in the end in the render and don't forget to up the amount of transparency bounces if you have layers of Alphas you can also add layers of details with simple geometries and the wireframe modifier to make some types of metal structures especially if you have a shot in movement it will give some Parallax effect to have more layers and give a sense of complexity to your elements another question was if I use asset packs how much of it is my own work so for this project the only elements I have not made myself were a few small props to detail the train and some of the rooftops they were from fre Gribble packs on blender swap from space head I will link it in the description the ships also actually made from these gribbles just throwing a few GEOS together to get some ship shapes and the character clothes were from sketch Fab I will also link it in the description but everything else from the buildings to the main structure the main parts of the train it was all made from scratch but it is all very basic modeling it's just insets extrudes bevels nothing fancy how long did this project take me so this project took me overall a bit of 2 weeks to make but with days without working on it at all other days barely touching it so I would say a week of actual work on this project as for render times I rendered this image in two layers the CG without volume Matrix and then the volume pass only with the geometri as hold out it allows for less noise and a bit more control in post each render layer took around 10 to 15 minutes to render I rendered the 4x5 ratio I initially put 4,000 by 5,000 and only rendered half R so I got a 2,000x 2500 pixel image 400 samples were just fine transparency enabled so I have more control to put the sky I want in post and finally how to do big projects without your PC crashing or what are my PC stats well first optimizing geometry not adding unnecessary modeling details if it's not clearly visible instancing your geometry instead of duplicating so using altd instead of shift d like the second main structure in my scene is just an instance of the collection of the first one so that second one is not going to add anything to the memory adding details only where needed focusing only on what is visible through the camera if we look at my scene on the right side there is absolutely nothing past that little row of buildings you can also separate your render passes like I did with the volumetric which can help when you launch your render to not run out of memory if there is too many things to calculate at once but you can also do the extra steps that I could have done for this project and separate your scene in different layers and work on those layers in separate blender scenes it just requires a bit more Scene management and Logistics I haven't done it for any of my projects so far but I will link a video by Mish Mish another a French 3D artist that's recently got into the top five of the Eternal Ascent Challenge and he talks about this approach that he used for his project as for my PC setup it is really not particularly crazy good I am planning on updating it this year but for now I have a RTX 260 GPU and 32 GB of RAM and on this project I clearly had a bunch of crushes and even total PC3 that were quite annoying so that's about it for this video let me know if there is something you would like me to cover more more in details on this project I haven't G too much in details about my scattering setups or my postprocess in Photoshop for example so if that's something you would like to see let me know otherwise the next step for me on this project will be to make an animated version I already have a first animated camera for it but this will require doing a lot more work adding details in areas that we were not seeing so far like the right side of the city the transition from terrain to City at the beginning of the shot animating the ships but I will take a break from this project first and I will come back to it later make sure to subscribe to see when I post something new and let me know what you think about this type of content in the comments it's the first time I'm doing this type of video so let me know how I did and let me know if there is anything in particular you would like to see otherwise follow me here on Instagram or art station to see my future projects and thanks for watching

Channel: ChapCG

Views: 10,281

Keywords: chapcg, blender, 3d, 3d art, blender project, vfx, cgi, cg environment, vfx breakdown, blender tutorial, concept art, 3d environment, modeling, texturing, rendering, davinci resolve, reddit, q&a

Id: c3es25c5JWI

Length: 15min 25sec (925 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 20 2024