Blender Tutorial: Blender, Megascans and You!

how's it going everyone coming at you today with a brand new tutorial it's been a while and we're gonna be delving into mega scans with blender so I don't know if you guys have ever used mega scans before but we're just gonna do a quick little introduction to its workflow with blender I use it in my workflow for almost every single scene that I do and it's a great asset to the studio here and it's a great tool to be able to use so if you head on over to quick cyl you'll be on their website here and you can start searching through their mega scans library all throughout here but the product that you should get is bridge bridge links everything together and it comes in this app that you can see here so when you first open it you'll be right here I've been working on this tutorial seen a little bit but you'll be here and you'll see everything on the home page here we're going to be sticking with the free section so everyone can follow along in this tutorial yeah so in the free section here you can see they've got a wide range of different options that you can choose from from a scene we're gonna stick with some of the basics here so we're gonna use this broken stump and we're also going to use the forest ground roots here as well as the grass so you combine all that together and we're gonna use Eevee as well for blender 2.8 and you combine all that together and we'll get something like this when we're all set and done with everything in the tutorial it's very easy very basic but I definitely want to get the word out there of mega scans it's it's very reasonably priced each month and you get a lot a lot a lot of stuff so if you are ever interested in purchasing mega scans and starting a trial with them you'll be able to get a wide range of different options to choose from from 3d models to materials and brushes with surface displacements and all that kind of stuff this will all be available to you but like I said we're gonna stick with the free section so everyone can follow along now taking a look at the finished blender file here again I'll come out of full view here and I'll show you the type of scene that we're working on here so you can see all three of these assets brought together in evey so we got the forest floor with our particle system of the grass and the trees stub here and this is all running in real time using EB and then we simply do indirect lighting here with a cube map to bake the lighting and we'll just add other options here with bloom ambient occlusion screen-space reflections we'll get into all that later on but yeah let's go ahead and get started with mega scans and blender okay so we've got the brand new version of blender this is blender 2.83 this is the current release so anything with 2.8 and up will work with EB so let's go ahead and get started let's just dive right into this not trying to make this a long tutorial at all so yeah let's go ahead and delete the cube and the lamp like you usually do and we'll replace this with a plane and we'll scale this up to about like a 10 we'll just give it enough room to work with here in the scene yeah so let's go here and click on tab and then right-click subdivide will bring up the menu here and I'm gonna give this about 40 cuts so lots of geometry to work with because we really want to tighten up the vertices and make enough vertices so we can see the bump of those roots really come from the ground and I'll show you that later when we get to it so we're just setting that up right now and let's go ahead and add in a subdivision subsurface as well so we're going to bump that all the way up but I'm gonna leave the viewport a little bit lower so our viewport isn't completely shocked okay so now we have all this geometry to work with for our scene okay let's go ahead and get the texture and materials so when you first set up bridge and you're in this library and you see all this stuff you'll have to go through and have an export to blender like it'll have to be enabled now if you guys want a full video on how to set up blender with mega scans and make them merge together go ahead and comment down below or leave a like or whatever just let me know that you want that because in the settings here you have to set up a folder where everything is going to be downloaded and you'll select your engine as well so we've got blender we've got our local library path set up that's where everything is going to be downloaded so when we go to bridge and we select the texture that we want you'll have all the asset info and then you'll have the download settings now I think for free nhanh pain mega scans customers I think you guys will have to K I specifically have 8k so I'll just use that and you can select the maps that you want you can also change to higher resolution if you want EXR files and the export settings again this is where you up blender so if we want to actually export the 8k we can do that if we leave it at 4k but we download 8k this will convert the 4k or the I'm sorry the 8k to 4k when it sends to blender I know there's a lot of technical details again if you guys want a full video on that I'll make that but for now just follow along so I've already downloaded this I've already purchased it it's free like I said this whole section here is free so you guys should be able to download and follow along so we're just going to go ahead and click on export export to blender it'll convert the textures here and then it'll say exported successfully now I'll link a video from mega scans that shows you the entire process of how to build bridge with blender to link them up and to start downloading all this stuff so that will be down down below so we've already exported that let's go ahead and come back over and let's go ahead and select that from the materials so we'll go and select that it takes a little bit sometimes to because it has to read all of the files but we'll go into material view here so we can see real quick and there we go so it's pretty basic but what's cool about this is when you open up the shader editor so in the shader editor manga scans has done about 95% of the work already which is awesome it is already set up the color map with the the AO map for the shadows here's your specularity and your gloss the normal and the bump all plugged into where it should be and only thing that we have to change when this opens up is this guy right here I don't like that node and what it does I don't feel that it's completely accurate to what we're trying to do so whenever I have that I just delete it and we'll replace that with a converter math will drop this in here because we're gonna need one for the specularity and the gloss I'll set that to multiply and then let's duplicate that plug in the color to the roughness and just like that okay now we're not really seeing anything because we don't really have any light source like we can kind of see here a little bit but not really so again make sure that these are on non color the only one that should be colored here is the actual color albedo color ramp or color image so you can see when we change that we actually get a lot more glossiness in the scene and that's where we can now play with the amount of glossiness here so the more you turn this up the more you'll get so I'm gonna keep it very low I don't really want to shiny of a ground and then this also affects the roughness so the higher you go the less rough it is the lower you go the more rough it is okay so I'm just gonna set this about just go to and 1.4 for the top one now everything else is at your discretion you can change the bump around you can change the normal map around it's completely up to you I don't want to take up too much of the time though so let's move on to the displacement so like I said we already set up our subdivision now we're gonna make this not just a flat texture we're gonna actually add bump and detail to the scene and important thing save all the time because dealing with high-resolution textures can definitely crash blender a lot so we're gonna go ahead and add in a displacement will check new go ahead and click on open and now this is where you'll have to navigate if I can talk correctly navigate to the folder where everything is set up so I've already got it opened up here because I've been working on it but usually it goes to your users folder documents and then make a scans library that's usually where it goes all the time now again I'm gonna use the 8k displacement again I'm pretty sure everyone else is going to be limited to 2k if you had a free mega scans account but we're gonna go ahead and click on open for whatever displacement you have okay and you can see it starts to do all of its stuff now we haven't adjusted the UV map at all but go ahead and select UV it won't change anything because we haven't scaled anything down yet yeah so let's go ahead and hit that at a point 1 and there you go you can start to see you get a little warning for us here you can start to see the detail coming through very very cool now let's go ahead and right-click shade smooth so it looks a little bit nicer and you can see why we're keeping the viewport very low I mean we're already at almost 500,000 vertices working with mega scans for final scenes you can have a lot of vertices I've had scenes that I've had about 10 million vertices or so it's been quite crazy surprised that my computer has actually survived that but you can see when you up the viewport the more detail you're gonna get I mean this is basic displacement but this is the beauty of photo scanning because all of mega scans assets are photo scans so we'll leave the render high so when we actually it'll do level 6 I'm just gonna leave the viewport at 4 okay okay so that's our ground that's our ground pretty much done and dusted let's go ahead and quickly take a sidebar and add in our environment texture so if you click on here and then you hit E we'll add in an environment texture so I'll go ahead and click on open now most of these HDR's that you see here are from HDR Haven I'll link them down below in the description as well awesome website to get high-resolution free HDR's those guys know what they're doing I use them for all HDR's in the studio here so I can't recommend them more than that like they do amazing stuff so I'm gonna use the sunset fairway which again you can find on HDR HDR I Haven something like that I'll link it in the description so go ahead and click on that and we'll open that up cool cool all right let's go into a rendered view so we can start to see how things are looking here with the lighting and everything all right looking pretty good looking pretty good okay you can start to see where we're coming in at now let's get into the technical aspects real quick before we head back into the meat and potatoes of the tutorial now a lot of these settings you won't see you yours isn't gonna look like this yet but if you follow along yours will look like this here in a second so for color management we're always using film like and I always keep mine out of base medium contrast when I actually render I shoot in log or I should say I render in log so that way later on in Photoshop I can adjust it however I want because I shot log I don't want to be limited to the contrast that is already in here but for working in it and getting the technical aspects right in the look of it I work in film lick at base contrast okay ambient occlusion I always set mine to one the higher you go I think the more you get but I would you really don't see anything past one meter I mean until you actually get more stuff in the scene you might see that so let me just add in like a random cube here or something so you can kind of see so you can see there that it's based off of the the distance of that so this cube like this wouldn't be making that big the shadow so like you want to increase it to give et more depth and shadows but you really don't want to go too high so I usually just keep it at one I found that one works pretty well okay and then of course I think everyone's most favorite I love this one bloom that just gives you automatic glow to the scene it's you know its glow try not to go overboard with it I try not to it's kind of hard sometimes not to but you can control the radius that really doesn't do much I think this tightens it up a little bit or something like that I'm not sure but bloom is bloom depth of field you don't really at the touch subscript is scattering I always increase my samples I think the default is like eight or so I just give a little more to it now if it's something that is directly influenced with some subsurface scattering then I'll turn that up a lot just to give it more samples screen space reflections that's the big one here for glossiness and reflections so if I turn this on and off you can kind of see what it's doing but really you want to just you want to turn this precision mount up this gives more accuracy I believe you can adjust the roughness as well here but make sure this is on because that's always going to give you the reflections that you're looking for and after that we'll delve into the indirect lighting later on when we actually set up our art cube map or whatever that thing is called but yeah I think that is pretty much it for the settings so yours your viewport should be looking about like this now so let's go ahead and add in the rest of our stuff here so back in bridge let's go back to bridge real quick we'll get that tree stump here so again I've already purchased downloaded all that good stuff so I'm just gonna go ahead and click on export again you can add in these are different levels here so log zero to five log five is obviously going to be the most low poly log zero is going to be the most high poly so back here in blender you can see it's rotated the wrong way so we'll rotate it along the Y by 90 degrees and bring that back up okay so I'm just gonna position this about right here kind of get those roots in the ground they're a little more okay cool there we go it's coming along sweet I'm gonna move the floor here a little bit their shots gonna be here so I want more a little more ground that way all right let's go ahead and control alt and we've had zero set up our camera here so I'm just gonna double tap our to rotate along there I'm just gonna get a nice nice shot here cool okay so camera settings pretty basic I'm gonna focus on the tree stump and obviously f-stop pretty powerful with Eevee it's really fun to play around with it's hard for me not to go overboard with depth of field because I like the shallow depth of field because it gives such a cool effect but I have to constantly tell myself to pull back you know it's too much it's too much depth of field okay so that is tree now let's look at his settings so again we have that little invert node that comes into it we just have to change some settings from mega scan sometimes that's just the reality of it so yeah let's just link up those two there now if you didn't know how I got those so quickly I just simply got these from the other one ctrl C go to your other asset control V and they'll drop right in there okay all right so again non-color data for some reason the specularity always comes in as srgb I don't know why but it does that all the time for mega scans so just change that over and you will be off to the races okay now it's hard to tell on this lighting the type of roughness that we've got you can kind of see it there we don't want the tree too rough but I do want to increase the bump there a little bit maybe play around with the normal amount a little bit there okay now if we look come out of render view back into here I don't know what mega scans does but this does not look like the most high poly model but this is log zero so I've had to play around with settings before basically what I found for right now is the best option is to go into edit mode with whatever you 3d asset you get from manga scans it always looks so low poly so go into edit mode type N to bring up the tool bar here and we're gonna change the mean increase to about a point three it's very minimal but it basically tightens up the vertices now you don't want to go too much because unfortunately it's triangulated so I'll show you what I mean so when we go and add in a subdivision subsurface it takes a little bit to recognize this in blender too it's gonna freeze here for a little bit welcome back here in a second okay so you can see there it does tighten up the vertices a little bit let me turn it off and then turn it back on again and freeze my computer again okay so you see there it does add more detail but so you have to add in a subdivision subsurface to any asset you get from mega scans to really get the look of a high-resolution 3d model but you don't want to go too overboard like I said because when you really starting to tighten up the vertices by adding in more subdivision you're gonna get the look of the triangulated faces like those are gonna be very prevalent to the scene okay so you can already see here my computer's struggling this is actually a really good computer but it is definitely on the struggle bus right now I'm just gonna leave that off but in the render it will show up okay let's move on to the grass so I'm gonna go ahead and save this and let's head back on over to bridge and if you scroll all the way down to the bottom you should see these grass particles so here is the grass we've got all these different types of assets and all the different maps so again I've already downloaded it already done all of the meat potatoes so I'm just gonna go ahead and export that to blender suite okay so let's go ahead now it's really small and it goes into the middle of the scene so let's go ahead and like kind of get in here and I have to hide that tree real quick okay so it's gonna come in looking like this all these different types of particles here so let's just move it out of the scene because we don't want it to be shown and automatically what I'm gonna do is ctrl G make these a collection group okay so let's rename this to grass okay cool cool so now let's bring back the tree stump here we need to paint around the tree so we don't want the grass shooting through the tree when we add in the particle system so let's select our ground here real quick and wait paint and basically we are going to paint around the tree as much as we can okay it doesn't have to be exact it doesn't have to be perfect at all and I'm just getting here little bit marks there's big gap there okay so now we can just go ahead and paint the rest of the scene here it's lagging a little bit cuz I've got the subdivision on so we'll just move that around there just so we can get enough here actually I'm gonna subtract a little bit of this just to kind of add in some randomness to the scene cuz its nature everything is random okay let's go back to object mode and if you don't know how to get to that menu it's ctrl tab and this will get you your quick menu here or you can change it from here okay so let's go ahead and add in the grass as a particle system so we'll click on new particle system change the type to hair okay click on advanced and we're gonna open up the vertex groups the render tab the physics tab and the velocity Tampa now change this from path to collection and the collection is going to be the grass and I like to scale with the normal other than the actual scale option here I don't know why I just like scaling with the normal doesn't do anything different at all so we'll just go and do that now we're gonna increase the brownian to about a three three or four this really gives a random scale variation as well and as well as scale randomness we're just gonna turn that up as well to about let's just go even at 0.5 okay now one thing we need to do with the grass and you can select any of these if you had the outliner open you can select any of these here and the one thing that we need to turn off which i think is enabled for a reason for the trans solution translucency love everything I'll show you I'll show you what I mean here so if we go into rendered view mode okay the grass is very bright which is good and accurate but technically it for me it's too bright it's too weird looking so I always undo the translucency option from the transmission tab here let's go full mode I always get rid of this one when working with EB now if I'm working with cycles that's a different story but while I will do is take this and plug it into the subsurface color and I'll give this about a point one value that will still enable light to come through and it'll still make it look like fresh good healthy grass okay that's pretty much it I mean the rest of it is too honestly baked the lighting so to bake the lighting and evey if you don't already know you add in in a radiance volume and you basically just cover your scene with these tiny little dots okay all these tiny little dots right here they're basically like little cameras or like little light portals or something you can increase the amount here of how many you want in each direction I'll just increase that just by one on each and what we do here in the render tab is this section right here indirect lighting for this scene we really don't need to change much these are pretty much the settings that I used for the the final one that you saw so let's go in and save it say always save again before you do this and you just click on bake indirect lighting and the progress tab will come up depending on your computer and other stuff depend on the resolution of the scene I think something like that it'll take as long as it needs to but I'll show you what it looks like and I'll come back in a sec okay so it finished baking and I don't think a lot changed in this one the baking more or less helps with indoor scenes it helps with outdoor scenes but it's mainly for indoor type environments but that's pretty much it guys you can take this into Photoshop or whatever render it out make it look probably even cooler than this add some contrast add a little more stuff to it but that is basically how we got to this shot so I hope you enjoyed the tutorial again I'll link everything that you need to get started with mega scans down below in the description I'll also link how to set up bridge and blender and how to merge everything together so that way you can just get all of the mega scans assets that you need straight in bridge and export it right to blender so it's been a while I'm glad to be back I'm expecting to do a lot more videos on YouTube so go ahead and click Subscribe if you haven't already and join me for the next tutorial or video or whatever comes out on the channel because there's going to be a lot of videos coming out on the channel here I can't wait for the future I'm glad to be back and I'll see you in the next one you

Channel: Nick Brunner

Views: 34,466

Keywords: tutorial, blender, blender tutorial, deep sail, 3d, 3d animation, education, 3d education, art, animation, blender 3d, blender 3d tutorial, deep sail tutorial, nick brunner, brunner

Id: CpxFyWKWjvs

Length: 31min 54sec (1914 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 25 2020