Blender 4.0 Beginner Tutorial | Low Poly Worlds

hey everyone it's steve here from cg geek and i'm back again for the msi creator awards 2022 contest i'm a judge for the 3d creation category the theme is create your own utopia and you have till the end of may may 30th to get your submissions in is a ton of fun and you can win some incredible prizes so you'll definitely want to enter so today i'll be teaching you how to create your own utopia low poly world using blender and cycles and for this project msi sent over their rtx 3090 supreme x really the coolest 3090 available on the market right now it's got the triple fan cooler so it keeps the 3090 temps really low while being really quiet and also just looking super cool with the rgb lighting so that's the gpu i'm using and as you can imagine it's incredibly fast in blender 3.0 now with optics without further ado pull up a chair sit back and relax and let's have some fun creating some low poly worlds so go ahead and fire up the latest version of blender and let's go ahead and start creating our world so we'll start by just scaling our cube up about three times by hitting s and three and then i'm going to scale it down along these z axis by hitting s and z so we have a platform for our low poly world here this is just the base ground so we'll go ahead and give it a material right off the bat why not this will just be a nice brownish color and start rendering right off the bat by jumping to the rendered view here and we'll switch that over from ev to cycles and then change the device to gpu compute so i'm using that rtx 3090 for all the rendering here also i'll go ahead and open up my hdr lighting right away for the scene so everything looks nice and pretty in real time as we're rendering it so i'm just opening up an hdr here from poly haven i'm going to take the strength down this a bit just to a 0.5 and then i'm going to jump to the render settings here and if you go down to film you can check transparent so you don't see that in the background but it's adding some lighting to the scene making it look prettier all right so now with a nice sort of brownish color here for our ground maybe make it a little bit darker as well we can go ahead and start working on the ground so i'm going to tap into edit mode i'm going to grab a vertice here and then hit l on my keyboard to select the whole cube i'll hit shift d and pull it up along the z axis now i'm going to scale it along the shift z by hitting shift and z to make it wider but not taller and then we'll scale it down along this head a little bit as well as well because it's a little tall there that's looking pretty good now i'm going to go ahead and go ctrl r to add in an edge loop on both sides here and then i'll grab the rest of the mesh here right click and subdivide it perfect now i'll hit l to select that top mesh and i'll hit ctrl t on my keyboard to triangulate the mesh this is gonna help make it look nice and low poly now if i hit o to enable proportional editing here you can see that if i choose connected only i can grab some of these vertices and start pulling up sections of the mesh here to make it look like we have some sort of hills and valleys going along on our mesh here just give it a little bit of an organic sort of look to make it look like up and down giving us some of that variation so you see some of those faces sticking up nicely not bad at all and on the ground here i'm going to turn the roughness all the way up to 1 so it's not shiny perfect now we can make a new material this one will be a nice green color something along the lines of this here and then if you tab in edit mode hit l to select just the top mesh there and assign it because we have our new color in the scene again we're going to take the roughness down on the grass so just give that a one play around the color a little bit to get the right color that you kind of go on for the scene maybe a little darker alright now we want to cut a river through the center of this and this actually isn't too hard to do what i'm going to do is i'm going to jump to top view i'm going to go shift a and add in a cube this is going to be the size of the river that we want to cut through here so i'm going to hit g pull it up along the z axis there and i'll hit s and x to scale it along the x-axis and this is going to basically be where the river is cut out of my scene so i can tab in edit mode put a few cuts in this cube and then grab those verses and just give them a little bit of side to side movement so the creek here or the stream or whatever you want to call it isn't perfectly straight make it look a little bit more organic and then we'll grab our ground mesh here jump to the modifier settings and go ahead and add in a boolean modifier we're gonna grab the object of that cube as long as it's set to difference and fast you can see that if i hide this cube now we have a nice river cut out of our creek and that looks really good you can grab your cube object here and kind of play around with it to choose where you want that to be exactly how deep you want the creek to be etc but it's really easy to mess around with and once you have something that you think looks pretty good i'm just hiding the mesh there i'll go ahead and click the drop down there and click apply for that boolean modifier now you might want to hit three in the keyboard to switch to face select and grab all those faces in the middle and just make sure that those are all assigned to the green material as well i just thought that looked a little bit better and we'll go ahead and add in our creak now running across the center of our scene so for this it's just going to be a plane scale it down a little bit grab it along the z-axis and we'll scale it along the x-axis something like that looks pretty good then i'll tab into edit mode grab the two vertices on the end here and i'll just extrude extrude them down along the z axis something like so now we're going to want to put a cut down the middle cut there and then a few cuts in the center by using our scroll wheel and going ctrl r and clicking and this just gives us some more variation to make this look a little bit more low poly a quick technique for doing this is using proportional editing but changing it to random and now if i go g along the z and just kind of scroll my wheel real big you can see we kind of get a low poly wave effect going through that creek i'm also going to go ahead now and add in a solidify modifier on our creek there we'll crank the thickness up a little bit something like so next up we can add a material to our creek so i'm just going to go ahead to our materials tab go new material then i'm gonna go ahead and split our window so we can bring up a shader editor to work on this material a little bit more switching this window to the shader editor hitting end to close off the properties tab i'm giving it just a little bit of a blue color here and then i'm going to pull this principle shader out of the way a little bit i'll give it more specular by cranking that all the way up so it's nice and shiny a little bit of sheen can kind of help as well by adding some value there but then i'm going to go shift it and add in a shader mix shader where we have it right there shader right there then i'll go shift a and add in a glass shader go ahead and plug this into the bottom socket and you can see that this just gives it a little bit more of that shiny reflectiveness that is looking pretty cool i'll go ahead and duplicate that mix shader and then go shift a and add in a new shader glossy as well we'll change this to sharp i'll go ahead and plug that into the bottom socket and this you want to go a less of a mix factor here but putting a little bit of that in there makes it look nice and kind of like water as well not too bad maybe make the color of the water here a little bit more blue that's looking good let's grab the lamp that is sitting in the blender scene here and change it to a sun lamp we'll take the value down to a three actually and give it a little bit of a warmer color but this will just be adding some more shadows to our scene and as you can see that looks pretty nice when we kind of have it to the side there then i'm going to grab our water and go ctrl t just like i did before and add in a little bit of variation then to that and that just gives it more of that low poly look that i was talking about and that's looking pretty good you can go ahead and play around with some of these vertices to give your ground a little bit of variation okay so next up let's go ahead and add some low poly trees to the scene so i'll start off with some pine trees over on the side here and these are super easy i'm just going to shift right click to put my cursor over there shift a add in a cube we'll scale the cube way down i'll hit period on my number pad to zoom in on that cube tab in edit mode and then hit 3 to make sure i'm using face select so i can just grab the top face there i'm going to hit e to extrude and scale it up a bit something like that and then i'll hit e to extrude again pull it up nice and high and scale it down to a very small point there then i'll hit g and pull it up a little bit higher there and as you can see that right there is a pine tree in itself and we can definitely go ahead and just ctrl r put a cut in the middle hit g to kind of move that to give it a little bit of personality ctrl t to make it um triangular and we'll add a little bit of variation to that now using the proportional editing with the randomized node there and i'm just going to give it a new material this material will be sort of a nice shade of green a little bit off color to the ground though give it another material this will be just sort of a brown color for the uh for the bark on the trunk of that tree so you can tab in edit mode here hit three to go to face select and actually if you check the x-ray button here we can see the faces on the other side let's grab all those faces and assign the bark to those so there's a cute little tree if i ever did c1 now we can go ahead and make some variations of this pine tree so i'm just going to rotate that pine tree so now let's make another variation of our pine tree here for this i'm just going to go ahead and add in another cube very similar to before scale it down nice and small for the trunk tab in edit mode grab that top face extrude scale it and then extrude up and scale it to a point again now what i'm going to do is i'm going to go ctrl r i will go down about here and i'm going to scale it in a bit then i'm going to ctrl r and we'll pull this edge loop down i'm going to scale this one up a bit and as you can see right away this is super easy to add that kind of pine tree look to the scene control r again and i'll actually grab the first one there scale that down and we have sort of a cute looking pine tree not bad at all we can go ahead and slap on our own sort of pine color for this one this should be like a little bit more of a bluish bluish color pine tree i think that looks kind of nice and then a bark material for the trunk there we'll go ahead and put plus so we can just grab the same same brown material we already created there and assign that to that so now on top view you go ahead and duplicate this pine tree rotating it around and adding in you know just a few variations of it maybe make this one scaled down a little bit but then shift s along with zed to make it sort of short and fat this one could be a little bit taller just kind of forming our low poly utopia now i think it's time we place our camera so i'm going to grab our camera and i'm going to jump to side view here where i think a good angle is i'm going to go alt control 0 to snap it to that view just go ahead and place it there by hitting g and moving over and i think it looks best for a low poly scene like this to have a very zoomed in view so i'm gonna actually change our focal length here under the camera settings to 200 millimeters and then i'm just gonna have to hit g and pull out using the middle mouse button to zoom that out a bit so we have everything in the scene as we can see there perfect now you might be able to scale up some of your pine trees if things are looking a little bit small in scale for your liking and that's looking pretty cute i think on to the next part of our low poly world here i'm going to go over to the side here and we'll add in some rocks these are going to be super easy i'm just going to add in an icosphere and make it one subdivision so nice and small here scale it down a bit and making sure proportional editing is still enabled there i'm just going to go ahead and pull up a shape here i'll grab some of the faces along the bottom and i'll scale those up and as you can see it's really easy to just quickly get some weird looking rock shapes and i can shift d duplicate that rotate along the z-axis here scale it down and then using proportional editing easily change the shape of that real quick for the material on these it's just going to be a little bit of a darker slightly blue color i'm going to go shift a and add in another aquasphere scale this one down and just scale this one up along the z there for a little bit of variation pull some of these faces out along the bottom a bit pull some of these down from the top and there we just have a cool sort of little bit of rock rocky formation and then we can go ahead and add some cute little pine trees around it by grabbing the pine tree here and shifting it kind of filling out our nature scene if you uh if you like and any of these you can go ahead and add a little bit of variation to maybe grab this little pine tree and we'll stick him over in this corner here with a little bit of a different rotation a little bit of an angle there maybe scale a little bit more narrow i think i'll go ahead and add one more pine tree by duplicating this one over here maybe this will be a little bit bigger and maybe we'll give it a different color so we have a little bit of variation you can just click the five button there to make it a separate material and then you can go ahead and tweak that material to be a little bit different this one will be kind of overhanging the overhang in the creek here a little bit that might look kind of cute all right now we'll create one another variation of trees for this side of the scene here for this i'm just going to go ahead and add in an icosphere icosphere this one will change to two subdivisions pull it up scale it down and we'll give this a random color something like one of the trees that we already have there and for these i'm just going to grab it and shift d it duplicate it and scale it for a different size we'll give this one a new material something like that tap into edit mode and assign that new material to it and now you can just kind of duplicate these icon spheres around to kind of make this little poly looking sort of tree sort of thing-ish you can get creative with this make it look uh kind of abstract but they also kind of have their own unique low-poly flare to them kind of pull it up a little bit like that and if you tap into edit mode you can also do a little bit with proportional editing to make them look a little less perfectly round so just giving them a little bit of that random proportional editing shape adds a little bit of that organic sort of unique look to them which is kind of cool just moving a verse face around a little bit with proportional editing enabled there all right i think i like the look of that so i'll scale all those down a little bit place them over here and then you can hit ctrl j to make them all one object now we need a quick quick and dirty trunk so what i'm going to do for this is with face select enabled here i'm just going to grab a few faces along the bottom of these there we go and i'll extrude and scale them down but i want to turn off the porcelain for this yeah scale them down something like that all to a central point where then i'll just duplicate one of these faces by hitting shift d rotate it and scale this one up a little bit place it right in the middle there and extrude this down for the trunk of the tree now if i just hit l i can select that add in new material we'll give this one the bark material there and assign it to it i can also grab these little faces here hit ctrl plus with the number pad to increase that selection and assign those as branches as well but now you can see that's kind of a cute little chunky chunky little poly tree there that will work uh just fine for our scene here i want to scale it down along with y a little bit that's rather cute though and you can go ahead and duplicate this tree as well for another one back here maybe a little smaller cool now a few final details because those always look really cool in these low poly scenes we'll just be adding in a little ecosphere here and there that is a dark green bush i'm just going to give this material of our dark green here maybe hit that button to make it even darker green and scale it down for a little chunky bush now if you tab in edit mode again with proportional editing enabled we can make this look a little bit different and then hit period to jump to that bush right there and i'll just duplicate it rotate it around scale it duplicate again just kind of adding in some of these cute little bushes around the scene i thought it added quite a bit to the to the character of the scene you know making it look a little bit more filled out and super easy to add these details in really fast something like that just adds a good amount to the scene and you can add some of these bushes as well over to your trees here a few little bushes around the base of these trees can kind of go a long way to add to the scene also a few cute little rocks maybe in the creek here looks nice so i'm going to go shift a add an icosphere take this one down to just a value of one scale it down tab to edit mode give it a little bit of variation scale it down a little bit more and then just duplicate this around a little bit just rotating it scaling it that looks pretty good we'll duplicate both those pull them over here grab them up along the zed because we're stuck in the middle of the mesh here jump in the top you might make this easier there we go scale them down just kind of stink them in the water there a little bit now i should mention that this scene is sort of based off some artwork by an artist that goes from the name of i think it's pavel and he's got all kinds of different low poly worlds that he creates so if you guys need some inspiration you can check out some of his work if you want some more inspiration it's always fun to see other people's takes on it too so if you create something cool post it on instagram and tag cg geeks so i can see what you created because i love seeing the awesome stuff that you guys come up with so the last bit was a little campfire now on this side of the scene just to kind of fill it out so what i started off doing is going shift a adding in a circle we'll take this down to just like eight faces i'll tab in edit mode and i'll extrude it pull it up a little bit scale it down again we're using the randomizing here to give it some nice variation then i'll extrude one more time and scale it in real nice and tight scale it all the way down to zero okay now we can kind of pull some of these faces up and this is just sort of the platform in the ground where our campfire is going to be located for this we'll give it its own material sort of a sandy like material here looks kind of good something along those lines then we just need some bricks for around the fireplace now you may have noticed that i actually kind of incorporated the msi creator awards logo in this by doing the twisting bricks in a variation of color that fits the logo of the awards this year which was just kind of a way to incorporate the logo in a sneaky way into my finished scene but for the tutorial i'll just show you the basic process for the way i did this i'm gonna go shift a add in a plane scale it down grab it along the zed so we can pull it out of the mesh there a little bit tab in edit mode and i'm just going to make sort of a triangular shaped brick here a little bit of variation to it and extrude it up so we have a rock again using proportional editing now we can give it a little bit of variation and give this its own material this will just be a slightly bluish grayish rock nothing too crazy and i will rotate it tap out edit mode i'll rotate it scale it down so we have sort of cool looking rock and then just place it down at ground level there right around there looks good now for a fireplace what i can do is i can just place my cursor where i want the fire to be and then hit period on my number pad and choose 3d cursor so now when i rotate it's going to rotate around the 3d cursor here so i can just go shift d rotate add a new brick there shift d rotate and actually if you hit shift r now it will just repeat that last step and rotate those blocks all the way around now that gives you a good layout to start working with i do recommend at this point that you grab them all unselect everything else hit ctrl j so they're all one object and then use proportional editing just to kind of add some variation to these rocks you don't want something looking too similar because low poly is supposed to be imperfect and that's what kind of gives it that charm and maybe make one variation of the rock color here for something a little bit different this can be a little bit of a off-colored rock and you can grab some of this by just hovering over with your cursor and hitting l and assign this color to those that looks kind of nice and from camera view you can see we have some blocks showing up doesn't look too bad we just need to kind of place these around so it does look a little better from the camera view here now lastly we can go ahead and add a little bit of a flame actually to this um fire fire pit here for this i'm going to go shift a add in a plane rotate it so it's kind of facing the camera there scale it down then i'm going to tab into edit mode and give it a few loop cuts there and a few loop cuts there then i'm going to grab the vertices in the corner here turn off proportional editing and just pull out random flame shape kind of pull these vertices around giving ourselves sort of a random looking bit of fire it's really actually not that hard to just kind of pull these vertices around getting something that kind of looks like a cartoon cartoon amount of fire kind of popping out of the ground here that looks actually just fine you scale it down and pull some of these out even brighter and the material for this i'm just going to hit new is actually going to be not a principle but an emission shader then you can go ahead and give this a nice orangey color something like that crank the strength up a little bit higher and there you have your flame that looks pretty cute for last little bit of color you can go down now to your color management and give it a higher contrast look by giving it a medium high contrast there maybe increase the exposure just a little bit on the scene if you think it's a little dark take the brightness down a little bit on that water maybe make it just a little bit of a deeper blue color water there and there is your low poly world created in blender i can't wait to see what you guys might create with this tutorial or it might be creating for the msi creator awards 2020 too but that's going to do it for me guys thanks so much for watching if you have a question leave it as a comment in the comment section below if you like the video hit that thumbs up button have fun creating your own low poly utopia and i'll see you guys in the next one peace

Channel: CG Geek

Views: 476,857

Keywords: Blender, Low poly, Tutorial, Easy, Beginner, World, Tree, Mountian, Rocks, Water, Low Poly water, Game engine, Unreal, Unity, Game dev, Free, Fast, CG Geek

Id: ELiqWceCk0Q

Length: 21min 21sec (1281 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 16 2022