Better, Faster 3D Nature with Megascans ( Blender Nature Workflow 001 )

[Music] hey this is Lux Avellino and today I'm going to show you guys how I use quick Cilmi gas cans in my blender workflow this is a 3d photo scanned asset library so it's a bunch of nature organic exterior assets that have been photo scanned and optimized for 3d CGI great stuff super high quality and there's not a lot of people giving information about how to use this blender so I want to show how I'm using these in my workflow and how you can use them to quickly get a lot more out of what you're doing a lot faster because these are super high quality assets there are a lot of fun to use and I want to show you how to use them so we're gonna go over here to the library and once you've popped onto the website mega scans se and you've created an account you'll be able to come in here to the library and access these free assets without paying anything and I'm gonna use a couple of these as I demo so you guys can follow along and there's 3d assets into the assets and I'm gonna show you kind of how to use all of these so if you click on one of these assets you're gonna get you know a little preview and then the important part of the download settings over here and we've got a lot of different options I usually just download everything but if your Internet's a little slower or if you don't want to wait that long you can just pick the albedo which is the color the normal the roughness and the specular and I'm gonna let you know if you're not familiar with some of these things are or you're not familiar with the physically based rendering workflow you might want to go watch andrew prices video on PVR in blender because I'm not going to go through that I'm kind of going to assume you know most of that but you'll need albedo normal roughness and specular those are the most important ones and then these are the models right here you've got the high poly source which is the original scan and then these different levels of detail and the lowest the zero has the most vertices and five has the least courtesies so this one has been reduced down a lot and this one would be a lot closer to the high poly source like I said I just download thing but I've already got them downloaded then it's a little bit different with the 2d assets if you go into the download settings you won't have the models but you still have the same texture maps and you can choose a resolution to K or kak so once you've downloaded those will go into blender and I already got these downloaded I usually download them as the FBX but I think you got an obj option [Music] I usually work with the lod zero because it's pretty manageable so you can see this one's actually only pull 14,000 Hertz or 29,000 he tries and then what I'm gonna do this is just part of my workflow but I usually control B in object mode to bring in a preview window and I'm gonna add an HDR eye real quick to me that just makes it a lot easier to know what I'm getting and to get a good high-quality preview so I've already got this setup plugged into an environment texture plugged into the background shader I've got a list of HDR eyes go to HDR I Haven comm if you need something good lots of great stuff there you probably already know about it and then we're gonna add material to this object it already has one but we'll just delete everything except the output and I'm going to be using the principle shader quite a lot because it's awesome I think honestly always start with the principal shader work from there I mean unless you're dealing with something that's like transparent or this is just a great place to start for a lot of diffuse objects so we're gonna go back to the tree stump we're gonna bring our albedo and that's plugged into the base color and already just with the albedo plugged in you can see how much detail you have in here and how nice it looks because since it's a photo scan all the geometry matches up perfectly to the texture so it just looks fantastic so quickly and you're going to get it to look a lot nicer all you have to do is add the normal map non color data go back in normal and the normals are sorted by level of detail so remember which level of detail you used and pick that normal map and then already you can see like it's just incredible how quickly you can get super fantastic results you can see it feels like cheating because you get such great results so quickly but we're gonna do a little more so we're gonna come in and pull in the specular and the roughness and the roughness we can just plug into the roughness channel and the specular into the specular channel if that wasn't obvious enough and sometimes depending on the model what I'll do you know you might want to bump up the normal a little bit honestly it's usually pretty good by default another thing you might want to do is plug a color ramp into the specular into the roughness if you're trying to get a slightly different result and you could make this a little bit more a little more contrast in there if you're trying to get something a little bit more stylized or a little bit more dramatic or if you just want it to look wet you can move that around I'm not quite getting that because I think I'll have to turn down the normal a little bit if you want to look more wet [Applause] [Music] and you might have to turn up the specularity yeah but you get the idea you could tweak these settings a lot but even by default they look really great so we're gonna bring in a ground plane scale that up we're just going to really quickly control a apply rotation scale tab you unwrap that so we have a nice UV map and if you want to quickly duplicate your nice little shaders or physically-based shaders you can just come in here I'll use the tree shader again for this one and obviously that's completely wrong but at least you've got all these set up we'll just hit the plus key so we don't change the tree shader but then we can come in here and if you go to your wherever you download it your ground plane soil mud is one what I have and just start swapping out the textures makes a little bit faster so it's just plug and play at this point plugging in each of the textures for the ones that we had roughness and then finally normal [Music] and there you go there's your ground plane and bring it up a little bit so there's okay now obviously this doesn't look really great because it's super flat but what you can do if you wanted to add a bunch of geometry to this really quickly subdivide then you can go in add your displace modifier because it comes with a displacement map as well so you're gonna have to add a new texture go into texture panel go to your displace texture and then open up the texture that's provided and there's an e XR and a JP j jpg I just use the jpg because it's easier a little bit faster and this is obviously not quite right let's smooth shade that and then go in here I think we want to change this to UV that's better but we could probably pull the strength downs like 0.5 maybe even point to but already it looks a little nicer and you could add more geometry to make that look better too but what we're gonna do is we're going to just add some more detail so import well actually add another plane [Music] rotate that I'm just gonna isolate this and use one of our materials and I'm not even naming these right I'm just going to just feel it quickly so obviously you're gonna want to make nice names for your new materials so they're not just all asset wood tree and I'm gonna go in here and unwrap this first and now I'm gonna grab I actually used probably this plant grass to create some some grass grass dried go into albedo so we've already seen how we did a ground plane and how we do a 3d object right and super simple but this is a little bit more is a little bit different once you start getting into like these atlases is what they call them so it doesn't look quite right with just albedo we're gonna start plugging in some more things here Thank You Larry [Music] Roughness normal and obviously this still doesn't look right because we need to mix it with transparent shader so we're going to use a mix a derp I have a transparent shader plug that in and in order to get that right we're going to use the opacity map that they provide and when you plug that into the mix shader' the factor I guess we have to swap these around but there you go there is your grass now as it is this does not look that great if we go into material mode you can see first off you have to rotate this but you're going to want to cut these out and I haven't found a super fun way to do this other than just coming in here tweaking this and then applying the scale unwrap again and you've pretty much got that one right you can duplicate this and then come in here and if you pull up your [Music] albedo for the grass you can move the map over so that it's not the one you want move this down scaling the X but as you can see as you scaled on the X over here it's distorting it over here so it's just kind of fiddly if someone's got a better way of doing this let me know I'm sure there's a add-on or a plug-in or something you could use but then what I've done is I'll come over here and then just scale this back to where it was and try and match it up nicely origin geometry so now we've got a couple little parts here but point Bing pretty quickly you've got a couple pieces here that when you go into your rendered view you know for the most part that looks pretty nice now it's not gonna look great from every angle and honestly if you're using a bunch of grass so if you're like trying to fill this whole area with grass I would recommend using 3d grass now they do actually have some 3d grass on here like this just real quick see if that'll download in time these are kind of large if you download the high-resolution textures but this is actually completely 3d models and this might be better quality if you're trying to fill up a large space because what ends up happening and again if you guys have a solution for this let me know if you've got a bunch of these blender has to calculate the opacity so it's do it has to shoot transparency ray through here right and I'm probably doing all the wrong terms but it's got to try and calculate where this should be invisible right this outline right here and if you have too many of them stacked up like let's say you had a particle system where it's filling up this whole area it's got to go through like a hundred or a thousand transparent objects just to get to the end and so which end up having to do is you have to end up on your light pass and unless you crank up the transparency to like 200 or 300 you end up getting this little black spots where it couldn't get through all the grass because there's too many choice for transparent objects stacked up so when you hike this light path up a lot it ends up making a render take forever so it's usually a lot better to use 3d model graphs instead like something like Andrew prices grass essentials that's one that I really like a lot or they have a lot of 3d photos and graphs in here as well so I can actually show you what that looks like I'll just important that Mestral but because that's also going to be you know 3d Oh silly me I have to abstract you first [Music] now [Music] oh and they've got a couple variations of the two which is nice I'll just go into the first variation pull out the led zero okay here's a fun problem you might run into every now and then you'll get an FBX where it says ASC I'm sorry yeah yeah ASC - FBX files are not supported what you have to do then is pull open something like Autodesk FBX converter and this is actually free to download if you just google it pull in the FBX files and you could do all of them at the same time I'm just going to do this one to show you and just convert it to FBX 2013 it's just the wrong type of XPS file and blender won't accept it but it takes like two seconds to convert it and then you can come in here file import and it'll have a folder with the converted files FBX 2013 and you can pull that in just fine so now we have this which is our new grass which looks fantastic and we'll just pull in another one these textures hit the plus side and I pulled in the this texture because it's already got the opacity set up and we can just go in real quick to the textures folder billboard is a bunch of textures all put onto so it takes all those variations and puts them on one image but it's so it reduces the number of images you need but it's lower resolution Atlas will just be a separate texture for each variation so I'm gonna use that go albedo same thing plug-in the specularity roughness and normal and then over here plug-in the opacity wondering if that looks right oh I think it's upside down there you go so actually with this I take that back this is probably going to run into the same problem that the other one will because whenever you have to use an opacity mask you're gonna end up running into that problem where if it has to go through too many transparent objects you're gonna have to hike up the light path the light paths in your render so high that it almost becomes just ridiculously long to render one frame so if you're willing to do that this isn't a bad method but honestly most of the time I might recommend using just completely 3d models grass which is going to be more polygons but honestly that's gonna be easier to render than trying to hike up the light path at high enough to make it worth it to use all these transparencies so pretty quickly you can see you can put together some cool stuff that just makes you know creating nature scenes or organic pieces a lot faster and a lot more fun I'll be putting out some more videos soon to show you kind of how I use this in my workflow how I do like how I like mock out a scene and stuff like that and I'll be showing you how a little bit how I made this scene right here so you can see what my workflow looks like and how I get into some of the composition and stuff like that and some of the other organic tools I use like blender gurus grass essentials but if you guys have any questions drop them in the comments below and I'll try to answer as many as I can but until next time [Music]

Channel: Lex Avellino

Views: 55,922

Keywords: blender, blender3d, megascans, nature, 3d, modeling, cgi, quixel

Id: Md43PxEEFnE

Length: 19min 3sec (1143 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 03 2018