Build a Stylized Topographic Landscape in Blender!

how's it going guys so in this tutorial we're going to be creating this animation right here it's almost entirely procedural from the hills which are completely made in Geometry nodes and we're going to be tiling those Hills so that the animation will Loop seamlessly the pattern is completely procedural as well and the Shader editor we'll be creating all those lines as well as the orange hilltops after that we're going to animate those lines in a seamless loop as well as the camera to really finish off this really cool animation now this animation is actually lesson number 10 from a Graphics course I just released it's 7 hours of training 14 lessons where you're going to learn lots of geometry nodes procedural shading looping techniques compositing lighting so much stuff in this I spent several months on this course and I'm super proud of it the course is going to be 25% off until January 15th again 7 hours of content 14 lessons geometry nodes lighting looping shading tons of other things feel free to check that out now let's get into the lesson all right so first let's go ahead and get in a plane as we always do for geometry nodes and hop straight into the geometry nodes workspace I'm going to go ahead and and kill that window so first let's go ahead and create the displacement basically the hills that create this animation so we're going to click new and we're going to hit shift a and get in a uh grid do that now we have our grid we're going to do up here size of 20 going that way and then it's a y of 40 so it's really 10x 20 and then we're going to subdivide it here so right here on the X we'll do 100 and then to make them Square we have to double it so we'll do 200 so now we have square faces and we are ready to displace so we're going to get that gatekeeper set position node and then we need to get our combined XYZ because we need to just displace this direction and we need to be able to access that instead of combine um you know displacing the all three at the same time so we're going to get that c MB combine XYZ and then we'll plug it into the offset and now we have this that we can now use our noise texture and plug that into the Z now we have this I'm going to bring my detail to three and my scale to .15 so now we have just some simple displacement now let's get in that Vector math node plug it there and go from add to multiply and then we'll get that value node to get all these three at one time so we'll plug that there and then we will displace him like so I'm going to go ahead and get in a color ramp and bring this in until the ground it's so it's just touching the Baseline so see how it flatlines there I want it to just touch so that when we go ahead and bring up that value it brings it up of course it's flatlining there so let's bring it up until we go right about there and you could see it more once we add in that procedural material so like here so now we have good displacement and then we are going to displace it by five so here we go we have our Hills set up and now is a good time to demonstrate a problem that we're going to run into once we start to duplicate this to make it a seamless animation so first right over here we're going to get that set shade smooth node and smooth it out and if I were to just say imagine I'm going to hit alt D Here to Make an instance and then I bring it over here so we can duplicate it you'll notice this big gap right here when we duplicate it and that's because this is not a a seamless texture um that we can tile you know that direction it eventually has a stopping point so when we duplicate it now this wouldn't break the loop but it what it what it does show is hey there's a pattern somewhere in this animation that has a stopping point so we kind of know when the animation restarts it won't break it but it will be like this visual cue of where the scene stops how do we prevent that what we can do is hit shift a and we're going to go ahead and get an empty plane axis and then we're going to bring him on the Y to the 20 which is the very edge of this um uh model and then we're going to go ahead and add modifier and get in a mirror modifier now this is the only nonprocedural part of the uh lesson so we're going to go ahead and select our mirror object right here and then uncheck X and click Y and we have now mirrored it so so what happens now is let's just go ahead and hit M new collection create that new collection then I'm hit shift a collection instance click on the loop and then I'm going to hold down control and then snap it to the edge and so now when our camera gets to here he'll just keep going and we won't see a gap right there so now we've created a seamless pattern out of a procedural texture and that's really fun that's a of power there so mirroring things gives you that um the power to basically make something seamless visually now let's go back to Geometry node so you have to click on the modifier here and we are honestly we're ready for materials so I'm going to hit shift a and then get a set material node put it there let's go over here and get an A new material and then we're going to we're going to select it here and you can name it if if you want but we're really only making two materials so the organization doesn't need to really be very Hefty so we'll do that before we go in though he is kind of low poly and you'll see it in the material so before we get in we'll get a subdivision surface and make sure you do subdivision surface not subdivide mesh subdivide mesh will subdivide it but it won't smooth things out the subdivision surface will smooth it out for us and we'll do a level of two which is quite a bit quite dense but um where it's very the the lower poly you get the more obvious it shows in the material um in this special circumstance so let's head into shading and let's create this really cool material now before we do we are going to be rendering an Eevee so we do have to do a little bit of initial setup so we're going to go here to the camera icon switch to Eevee and then we're going to click on the material here and right down here um with Cycles you don't have to do this step trans uh trans transparency Works automatically but with Eevee you have to kind of tell it hey please be trans uh transparent and so here on blend mode we're going to go to Alpha blend now you have clip hashed and blend um and all three do something different and you can kind of play with those and there's a very visual difference in the two I have never seen an instance where these are usable really um but we're going to do alpha blend and that's going to help us blend those together um now let's go ahead and delete the principled we're going to hit shift a and get in a mix Shader because we're going to mix together two things so mix Shader and I don't know if I've covered this yet so let's go ahead and talk about it there's there's a difference between the mixed color and the mixed Shader and here here's the difference a Shader is like an emission or a principled bsdf different things like that and you have that as shaders the these are all shaders right like uh specular bsdf these are shaders so when you are mixing two of those things together you will use this guy to mix them mixed color is when you're mixing textures so you have you know brick texture and noise texture and voronoi and all of this stuff when you are playing with those you will use a mix color you can't interchange these so that is why we're going to use a mix shape because we're mixing two shaders here so let's get him and we're going to get a emission that Shader here and we're going to get a transparent so now we're going to get now make sure you don't click on translucent I make that mistake all the time plug that there and now he is working you can play with this factor to make sure your transparency is working here so I'm going to bring him up and we're going to get in a color ramp so plug the color amp into the factor and we're going to get a wave texture plug him into the color ramp and then we're going to hit contrl T make sure you have the node Wrangler add-on enabled and turn on um use the object coordinate so notice all these little lines these waves uh we're going to bring our scale down a little bit and then you can see they're nice and Faded I mean I mean nice and like gradiented we want a hard Edge so we're going to go from linear to constant and then bring that in and now we have our little lines and then the magic part is right here on the X we're going to switch that over to Z and now we have our Hills and then you can bring that scale up to show that it's pretty cool and you can always edit this more later and then you have your emission color here so you can switch over to whatever color you want which now is a good time to say hey we're going to switch our color management over to filmic and high contrast all right so we have our Hills now and make them nice and blue and the strength is too high but that's okay let's go ahead and uh create the gradient piece on top and we're going to switch right up here to the main render view world icon we're going to bring that to Black so let's create that gradient so what we need to do is get another mix Shader so I hit shift d and then I'm going to hit shift d on the emission and we're going to plug that into Shader and we're going to switch him over to kind of a yellowy orange and we can of course adjust that later as always Now to control this guy we're going to get a color ramp plug that into the the factor and we're going to get a gradient this time to r a d to bring a gradient to the top of our Hills so let's plug that right here and then we're going to get our own uh I mean a new mapping setup because we are going to uh move him around so now we have that on the Y we're going to switch it to 90 and then on the X you can move him up to create these Hills and then if you want to have smoother you know a smoother transition from nothing to gradient you'll go from linear to Beast blind and that's going to create um our smoothest option and so you can really adjust that there and now we have our h pills and you can bring them down a little bit and hey they're too bright all that craziness you can essentially adjust your opacity with your blacks and white black means total opacity completely see through white means you can't see through it at all and so what I'm going to do is bring it down a little bit so that we can still kind of see through the tops of the hills and then you can bring that location up a little bit more of course we can always change that as we go now how do we create that flicker of brightness um animation within the wave texture to give this some really interesting movement and that is going to be with color uh our emission color so we have this wave texture and if we play with the phase offset this guy can move and we have the ability now to use this movement to affect uh the brightness of color and use with masking basically so what we'll do is we're going to get and a color ramp get a color ramp here and then what I'm going to do is I'm going hover over this guy hit contrl C to copy the color I'm going to click on him contrl + V we're going to click on him contrl V and with this guy bring him to a darker color then we're going to go from linear to constant and then just bring it to 0. five well actually this guy to5 to cut it in half so we'll plug that right into the color so now we are going to get a new wave texture and we're going to tell it to basically and here's a cool trick if you have the node Wrangler enabled hit control shift d and that'll keep him connected so we're going to move this here so now what's going to happen is it's the same thing watch it's the same thing here so if I play with my phase offset it'll go on off on off on off because it's quite literally moving this guy is moving right that's what it's doing on off on off because this guy is sitting you can't really see it cuz he's controlling color but here's what's fun if you bring up this scale you can now play with that on and off and if you bring it bigger you have an even more interesting look um and you can go crazy with it if you want looks like honestly I am liking right around 14 or 15 as and then if you bring this you can have less this color ramp is less or more that are allowing you to make this flicker animation and I mean it's just it's so cool it looks so awesome I love it um there we go that's the material now we can go ahead and um animate our camera to fly through here so I'm going to hit the Tilted key to go to the front so that our cameras well it won't even really matter um let's just go ahead and click on our camera and because this guy is 20 um yeah 20 it's really 40 in the geometry noes but 20 here physically so we need to go here on the Y which we are not clicked on our camera click on your camera here and then do negative 20 and then we'll bring him up which I know on the Z he's going to need to be 10 and then we have him looking way up here we're going to bring him 60 a rotation of 60 to look down so 10 on the Z 60 um or whatever you want it to be uh this is just the angle that I am working with now we can go ahead and animate this thing so we'll go to the top til key go to the top you can actually see where I mirrored it because this is normally where you would stop the camera at the -20 because our camera is at -2 but in this case we're doubling it so he is going to here which is the 60 and the way you can figure that out we're going to hover over here on the timeline and go back to the uh frame zero click on that camera click here and then again we can visually see where the mirror happens and then where it stops and we can click on it we go oh okay yeah we could see this is where this um collection ends and we have this nice little things here so we can click on the camera here click to go to the uh frame 250 but in this case because I've already made this I know that is going to be too fast we need to double it 500 frames uh because it's Eevee that's okay um we're going to go to 500 frames and then I'm going to hold down control and I'm going to bring it and I guess we can zoom in a little bit here to make it less difficult so we're starting here we're holding down control and we would normally stop here we can see on the positive 20 but now we want to actually stop here again which is the end of our instance so holding down control boom 60 I mean sorry positive 60 so you can know hey don't want to stop here that's 59 don't want to go here that's 61 we need a whole number which is 60 so that's how we can kind of mentally know all right we're in the right spot stop there so now we're here we can see this in a way if you say all right this all this up around here it's too distracting you can click on the camera go to the green camera icon on viewport display just bring that pass per two up is pass per two French I don't know but that's the word it's kind of cut off here pass prot out all right so now we have this going on we have something really cool let's go ahead and animate the wave texture so we'll go back to shading hit zero and then now we can go ahead and animate the wave so we're going to animate the wave that's connected to the color ramp that has those two colors so we're going to bring that phase offset to zero let's go ahead and bring this timeline up to get a new timeline we are at frame zero that's really important now we're going to hit I go to the very end and remember for the wave texture to Loop you need to do a even number asterisk Pi um and I know that 40 in this case is a really good speed so we're going to do four oops we're at the end of the timeline five 500 yep okay 40 0 sorry four 40 asterisk Pi enter and then we're just going to hit I again and now we can see that phase offset doing what that phase offset wants to do now I really now quickly now that we're still in shading everything's really bright and vibrant and cool what I want to do is add a very subtle effect and that is with that volume here so we right here in the world settings click on volume and then we're going to go to a principled volume and then bring your density to16 and then everything is really dark but it's what it's going to do is create a fading effect out in the distance and that's what we want so we can just focus on this so what we're going to do is just bring this orange a lot brighter bring this blue a lot a lot brighter here and there we go everything is back but now we have a fading effect so now you can see this is slightly darker than this it's very subtle but for me it it makes me happy and I like being happy um so we're going to run with it and there we go now we have this really really nice looking animation I'm going to maybe bring my gradient up a little bit to make it look like bigger islands and I'm really happy with this I'm going to go ahead and maybe make this blue slightly darker to accentuate that that phase animation here of them going up and down now let's create a grid floor to really make this look digital and Mappy and cool this is kind of like a topographic map animation so we're going to go ahead and create a new geometry nodes tree so we're going to hit shift a get a plane and I'm just going to bring that plane up and then we're going to go back to Geometry nodes and then we're going to click new we can see him right there and we're going to get a grid classic grid but now we know hey this guy he is on the y40 so I'm going to go back to my new plane here and I'll just call him grid just to see him I put two r oh well so we know hey this guy is a a y of we're going to go back a y size of 40 but remember that we mirrored it we duplicated it so really it's 80 so let's go back to our grid and do our y size of 80 and then we'll do a size X of 10 actually no he needs to be 20 of 20 and then we can see hey this guy's not long enough we're just going to go ahead and see where does he need to be right there so you can visually see where we can where we need to stop this plane and I'm holding down control to snap it to view but if you want to do exactly what I'm doing he is on the 20 the Y of 20 and then we're going to bring him to right about here but this part isn't super necessary to be exact now we have this we're going to go back to the shading and give him a really cool material so I'm going to click new we're going to delete this guy I'm going to go ahead and uh remove my timeline so we can have some more space of course since since we are in Eevee each material we're going to go over to the material section each material needs to have that Alpha blend turned on so here in the Shader we're going to go ahead and get in a mix uh mix Shader here same exact process we're going to get an emission and we're going to get a transparent transparent bsdf plug it here so now we're going to go ahead and get in a color ramp so we'll just plug him into the factor and we're going to get on our voronoi texture we're going to hit contrl T and then use the object coordinate of course and then plug distance into the color ramp now you'll notice nothing's happening and that's because we need to go back to Geometry nodes and select I mean we'll enable that material so we'll hit set material slightly annoying but we have it right here material 001 we'll go back to shading and there he is and all of his glory now I can see it's not going to work properly because we need to flip the color ramp and then bring our random in and then we can bring in to get our dots and then let's go ahead and go to a constant offset so we can get solid dots and bring that emmission color so I'm going to go ahead and click him hover over here crl + C just steal that color and then we'll click back you can double click just to get that um or you can click on the grid here in the outliner and right here on the um emission control V there we go we have that and then bring up that and then I'm going bring my scale to like three on the dots and then bring them down till they're not super distracting but they you know create this nice style next thing we're going to do is just add one more uh pattern to this so we're going to get a mixed color go here and then I'm going to go ahead again paste in that orange color here bring it up let's get a color ramp now we're going to go ahead to marry a cross like a well in this case it's going to be like a grid Checker type of texture so plug that into the factor we're going to get a brick and this brick texture is how I create my grid uh materials and you guys saw that when we were creating kind of the basics so plug that mapping into the vector right here this guy so you can hit G and kind of bring him to the middle plug Vector into Vector color into color ramp so now we have our bricks so let's go ahead and turn them into what we actually want them to look like so bring that offset over these guys bring them to a pure white and then we're going to flip the color ramp so we can get a wireframe looking row width and row height just click and drag and do a scale of one mortar smoothness to zero and then you can bring your scale to one as well there we go and then your mortar size maybe 05 and then maybe bring that scale to like 0. five something like that keeping it keeping the uh scale here all these numbers this number and this number at whole numbers will keep the grid looking proper and then we'll do like 0.1 there we go that's a really nice subtle grid and then maybe on the voro which is this color ramp here maybe make them a little smaller as well which allows you to make them a little brighter so bring the brightness to zero they disappear you can bring them back to just kind of gauge how you want this whole thing to look and now we're here I would even add more frames like even this is almost too quick but we're going to leave it and we're going to add some quick compile positing effects to kind of wrap this all up um so I'm going to go to a frame that I really think is nice I like this Frame here and then I'm going to go ahead and render the image shouldn't be very long super quick all right then we'll go to compositing use nodes and then I'm going hit shift a get in a viewer plug him here and then shift rightclick slice to com to combine them and then I'm just going to zoom in really quick so you guys can see it I'm going to get in a lens Distortion node and all I want to do is add some noise to this so what I'm going to do is here on the dispersion we're going to first we're going to click on Jitter which adds this noise and then I'm on the dispersion I'm going to do um 05 and that is going to add we're going to go back to fit that's going to add a little dispersion on the outside here and honestly that's too much we'll do 01 just to make it really subtle you can kind of see it here but also most importantly for me we get this noise you can see some green showing up and all of that and I really really like the way that looks so if we go back to layout and we click this drop down we'll click always and now we can see um the noise being introduced see that noise now we'll go ahead and turn it off and then turn it on boom just very subtle but I just love the way that it ties it together preference I guess but we are now finished with our animation and it looks awesome I love it I think it looks cool maybe I'll go back to um the shading Tab and where is we'll click on the Hills here and then the wave I kind of want my lines to be a little thinner so maybe just adjust them like this so we have that maybe make this a little bit more on the yellow end on the color just slight you know slight tweaking just just to make this just to make this look perfect really really cool looking here uh let's say we'll end on this Frame let's render this out just see our final look there we go we created a topographic map style thing um it's really cool 99% procedural here and it's just a really powerful workflow it's a completely seamless material uh I mean animation and there's a a lot to learn here there's a lot to get from it this is something um that you know if I was learning blender I would watch this several times and try to master this concept Master these materials there's so many cool things here for mograph and I love it I'm in love with this design maybe I'm biased um with that being said that's the end of this lesson I will see you in the next one

Channel: Ducky 3D

Views: 27,071

Keywords: blender tutorial, blender, blender tutorial for beginners, blender beginner tutorial, blender 3d, blender guru, tutorial, best blender tutorial, how to use blender, 3d modeling, blender beginner, blender beginners, motion graphics, beginner blender tutorials, blender motion graphics, blender motion graphics tutorial, easy blender tutorials, blender animation, blender for beginners, 3d animation, eevee, blender animation tutorial, how to, rendering, logo animation

Id: UOkrB09xkBY

Length: 27min 49sec (1669 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 06 2024