Blender - Sculpting Terrain

all right so we're going to do a little terrain sculpting here so we're going to start with a little bit of a classroom session and basically go over some different terrain features so uh you know hill is pretty self-explanatory it's just a hill right it goes down around and it's the top of a hill that's pretty much what it is so saddle is this little thing in the middle here uh oftentimes it's found between two hills has a depression on this side depression on this side keep that in mind these are your major terrain features usually here we have a valley think of a river flowing between two mountains it's often what creates valleys but could also be something like a glacier anyways so one side's going to be a little bit higher the other side's going to go down and then it's usually higher on each side like so a ridge more or less it's going to flow in a direction like so so it'll be higher on this side might be lower on this side and then lower here and lower here compression is basically like a sinkhole that's what it is it's just a little divot in the land and that's all that is these are your secondary features so draw is going to be this guy in the middle pay particular attention to this shape it's going in this direction it's kind of like a valley in a way except that it's a it's a minor feature so it's not as big as a valley same with spur here but it's like the inverse it's going out like so kind of like a ridge but it's a much smaller feature okay and these usually come from the tops of hills just keep that in mind uh cliffs everybody knows what a cliff is for the most part it's a near vertical or vertical uh face there right to a piece of terrain cuts this is often done when creating roadways you might be going through some mountains and you'll notice that there's like a cliff or something like right here okay basically what they've done is there's a um there's a spur coming out like this and they've blown it up with dynamite and then they moved a bunch of bulldozers through to cut a flat road next to that section so thing is like mountain passes and stuff that's kind of what that is anyways a fill is very similar so it might be like a roadway here okay and they filled in this land a little bit because there might be some water here a lake or an ocean and they might want to create a sea wall or something so that's kind of what a fill is basically all right we're gonna go ahead and jump into sculpting now so i'm going to hide those get it all out of the way press shift a create mesh plane tilde key view selected all right now we're going to jump into uh edit mode here select this face i'm going to subdivide it open up the subdivide menu down here and we're going to bump it up to 10 not good enough we're going to subdivide it one more time and bump it up to 10. okay so we need a little bit of mesh here to work on i'm gonna hop over to sculpt mode now just a side note the um if you're gonna be putting this into a game that you're gonna use an alpha map to transfer it over or whatever you want to lock x and y so you're only going up and down with the mesh you're not moving it left to right or forward and backwards and that way you can create alpha maps real easily and you can create displacement maps et cetera et cetera and we'll make it sculpt a little bit differently it's not going to feel quite the same but uh it'll be all right so we're going to start with the draw tool here and i'm going gonna turn off these wire frames now the trick about terrain is you're gonna use those terrain features to kind of create whatever terrain you want that's really the fundamentals there and so mountains and cliffs and ridges they all kind of follow the same kind of rules for the most part it helps to have photographic reference so keep that in mind look at photos look at aerial photos like satellite views looking down on mountains those ones are real good they help out quite a bit but also just look at regular photos and i'm going to start with very little strength here we're using sculpt draw and i'm just going to start knocking in some ideas of terrain features that i might want to create okay and i really don't know what i want to make here so i'm going to adjust my size i am using a tablet a drawing an art tablet so if you have a pressure sensitive pen i highly recommend using it and i'm just going to create a little bit of a shape like this now i'm going to work up i'm going to make sure i don't go back down on the plane here so we need to define some hilltops here so let's do a hilltop here let's do a hilltop here we're going to sculpt out around right here and this is going to take a little bit of practice but it's not too bad we're just sculpting that's all we're doing and we don't have to be very precise with this because these are going to more than likely just be distant mountains not necessarily plain areas because a lot of times you're gonna end up creating your terrain in the uh game engine that you're working in but you certainly can take this and put it into a game engine just so you know let's put a hilltop here and so this is almost a saddle right here it's not quite let's actually make it a saddle okay we'll go with we'll go with three hilltops and earth and a saddle in between them like so all right and now we can actually uh sculpt this out let's make them a little bit bigger since we're working with such a low resolution mesh here let's just make them a little bit bigger work them out it's okay to be a little crazy at this point because we're not real sure what we're doing and where yet okay i'm i'm digging this kind of little ridge here so work out the sides a little bit make it a little bit thicker okay let's make one of these a little bit bigger than the other all right so this is pretty good let's draw a spur here spur out here spur out here this one can have a little spur here a little spur there okay pull those out a little bit keep in mind like i said the spurs are thicker up here and they get thinner down here you kind of want to mimic those a little bit and if you look at a top-down image of mountains and cliffs and all that fun stuff you'll notice that there's a certain pattern to how they are created so i'm going to use draw sharp here and change the stroke spacing to one percent this usually helps out quite a bit but i'm going to do this a little bit strong to get started so this is a hilltop bill top that's another hilltop hilltop hilltop there's a lot of little hilltops and ridges so keep that in mind they're everywhere um and they just kind of are like little secondary hilltops and stuff so you can do things like that try not to make them too symmetrical you can put three over here break up that pattern a little bit okay so um when you look at mountain ranges from the top or ridges they have very unique patterns sometimes they're smooth sometimes they do like a straight line and then curve the other way they do some cool stuff so i mean it's just really it depends on on that particular mountain but they do some of these interesting kind of shapes sometimes they're just straight lines like that so keep that in mind and uh we're going to connect these dots doing that with this sculpt draw sharp we're gonna drag them all the way to the floor here okay go a little bit easier towards the bottom okay but once you mimic that pattern a little bit it actually makes everything look a lot nicer okay there we go i got that one going they can extend these spurs can extend quite a ways out okay are these ridges if you want to call them that they're basically the same thing all right so this is going to be kind of steep but um i want to create a sharp cut and then make it wider at the base i must smooth this pretty heavily i think okay let's do a little section down like that so now we have some draws going on just hitting ctrl to go back the other way all right see where this is going got this kind of shape now we're going to smooth it all out a little bit we'll do the tops these areas and towards the base here we're actually going to smooth it quite a bit more and get up in there in between the draws as well smooth those up all right and that is the basic idea of creating terrain in a nutshell i mean you can go crazy with this and up upres it so you can do another subdivision if you need to just keep going at it personally i wouldn't do that but not yet anyways instead what i would focus on is creating these kind of like secondary draws and cut out shapes here we can kind of get this going on really work your fundamentals first like you want to make sure these shapes are right and they're going to create what you want the patterns and the designs you want i'll make a little section here like that like a little saddle there a little drawing here okay you see where this is going now this is pretty universal you can do this in any game engine and it'll work out just fine we're just going to keep going through it real quick and at this point you can go ahead and start this on your own you don't have to keep watching this video for me to explain the rest you um kind of approach this in your own ways this is just how i do it i've seen a lot of other artists create mountains in completely different ways so it's entirely up to you on how you want it to come together and how you want to build it a lot of these will either be near vertical or they'll start to slope out just keep that in mind this can be a little bit challenging to understand at first but not too bad a lot of them come straight out to the side too which is pretty interesting and lower terrain just ends up being noisy usually so it's not you know you could do like little stuff like this it's usually pretty noisy you might cut in some like a little water way kind of stuff and then just smooth it out not a big deal you can see how this is starting to work might make the brush a little smaller to get a bit more interest going personally i put it on the little plus sign up here so it draws like the regular draw tool instead of being opposite because sometimes it gets annoying when it's opposite and you switch between the two all right i get it finished up here you see how this is going now doing really small low detailed stuff is super easy as it gets more detailed it's going to become a little bit more complicated you're going to have a lot more to do so you do want to use alphas as much as possible so use some kind of alpha textures and things like that so you can fake cliffs or rocks or boulders and all kinds of other fun stuff because it can get can get pretty pretty intense i'm not gonna lie so so far i'm liking this i might cut a little bit out of that one yeah and keep working it okay so i had a bunch of little nuances down here like i said i don't normally go down well i'm breaking my rule right now i do want to kind of finish this out like that it's a good reason why you don't want to do that so you can properly create an alpha and i'm just going to give you a quick example how you can do that alphas are really easy to generate with the grab dock add-on and so basically you go to the link in the description below i'll have it there you can download the grab doc add-on i'm gonna work this all the way out to the edges even though it's not really required but you can see how some of this low terrain stuff still matters sometimes you might create right shape sometimes you might get it wrong it takes a little bit of practice but download grab doc go to edit preferences add-ons install it all that good stuff and uh you'll be able to create alpha maps super quick and easy uh getting kind of just this fractal stuff going on here on the edges i'm gonna actually smooth this all out just a tiny bit so it looks a little bit nicer nothing too crazy i got rid of so much detail let's just do like a very light pass turn that strength down real low there something like that maybe all right and once you have that add-on we're going to shade this smooth so right-click shade smooth once you have the add-on installed you can go here press n go to grab dock set up scene boom there you go you'll see that it's actually intersecting with this mesh it may or may not be something you want in my case it's not something i want so i'm going to actually move up this mesh until it's just sitting above the axis there okay once i do that i can go into here set a export folder name what i'm going to export in this case i would just do only the height so i can create an alpha so click height there that's a preview and you can see we can create that kind of an image real quick we just click export now uh once we once we do that and so we can actually sculpt with this again or we could take it into something like unity um it may not work 100 perfect when you transfer it into a game engine you might have to adjust things a little bit but um you know that's going to be that's going to be a process that you have to go through okay and um so for the most part that's it you have sculpted terrain that quick that easy and that's kind of the proper way to do it so you can create ridges like this you can create cliffs and all kinds of other things canyons and et cetera et cetera it's great for low quality uh distant objects so this is a background mountain not a big deal you can generate those alphas and use those in game engines when you're sculpting in game engines so that's something you might want to do so you can make certain pieces or certain different shapes and stuff now how does this compare to say the a dot n dot t landscape add-on uh so lance the a dot in you got to type it in when you try to enable this thing it comes with blender you just got to type in a dot and it should pop up and um landscape generator right here click it we're going to add it we're going to use a preset here we're just going to do um let's see let's just do a cliff okay we'll put a cliff in real quick you see what a cliff looks like we want to do another one let's do large terrain you see it does this number a little too large for me let's find something else like stones oh no it's way down there i didn't know what that was messa looking for one like what we got going on oh here's one there we go mountain of course so i don't know if they had a ridge in there but you can see their mountain shade is smooth same resolution and ours is going to be a lot lot more tidied up and pretty prettier anyways it's real smooth right now there's got a little bit of noise to it but it's basically theirs is trying to do the same thing it's just um you know it does automatically but now we're doing it manually more or less so keep that in mind and you can also add noise in here using a displacement or using some kind of alpha texture so i'm going to use alpha texture sculpt draw i'm using alpha manager here but i want to click new go down here so this is how you do it without the alphas manager click open and i'm going to go to my textures folder and i have a folder called alphas i have one called sand sand01.tiff there you go and so this sand height map okay i generated this from a textures.com image i took it into substance bitmap to material and generated a height map that's all i did and um so you can sculpt things like this out or you can you can find another free program to create height maps from images it will work for you okay now once we've done that we can switch it from tiled to area plane go to stroke go to anchored if i just drag should be able to drag here okay hope i got the wrong object selected my bad so that's too strong obviously i can add a little bit of noise to this and it's gonna do okay or you could use instead of using sand you could just use a noise image but that little extra bit i think adds quite a lot to it and doing it on the tops here to break them up just a little bit more it's quite useful right along the ridge edge maybe a little too much but find a balance there that you want put them on top of the hills all right maybe down here at the base make it a little bit bumpier maybe a little too much huh all right you don't want to overdo it just very slight uh touch there all right so i'll let you be the judge of which one you think looks better and um which one makes more sense so just keep in mind you can make any kind of formation you want because you know the rules of landscape now and there's only certain types of terrain features in the world so um there are some like special rarities that are kind of one-offs but generally speaking they follow those five major ones and the uh the secondaries there the draw and the spurs they're pretty much ridges and valleys more or less kind of limited speaking there but yeah so that's it thanks for watching the video and i will check you out in the next one take care

Channel: PzThree

Views: 12,080

Keywords: tutorial, how, to, guide, easy, fast, quick, explination, blender, 2.8, 2.9, 2.92, 2.91, 3d, modeling, game, development, dev, concept, art, design, visual, use, tools, what, does, where, pz3, graphics, beginners, indepth, advanced, best, practice, 2.93, simple, basic, artist, uv, mapping, unreal, unity, engine, addons, review, pzthree, 3.0, effects, learn, detailed, pro, advice, studio, lighting, materials, normals, maps, substance, painter, designer, mesh, for, sale, lazy, face, vertex, color, modifier, decal, baking, cycles, eevee, baker, environment, hard, surface

Id: -wqMvq5F2Uo

Length: 26min 49sec (1609 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 05 2021