CG Environments in Blender using Addons (Scatter, Botaniq)

hey there guys martin here and welcome to this new tutorial where i will break down how i made this scene i made it for my master 3d environments in blender course for a chapter where i focus on using add-ons for making landscapes and here's the thing many of you wrote to me that i should break down these environments in the video and also in the posts i mentioned that this is almost solely the work of add-ons that i started using recently some of you reacted that i should not take credit away from myself well to show you i'm not exaggerating i made this video one note the add-ons i used for this artwork namely the sketcher 4.0 and botanic are not free so there you've been warned you can of course check the links to where to get them in the description of this video so the base of this scene is just this three pieces of geometry a foreground a mountain mid-ground and a photo sky background the foreground uses just this pbr texture setup using images from cc0 textures that's been apparently newly renamed to ambient cg nevertheless you can get this texture from there for free and i myself use just the base color roughness and normal for my terrain speaking of terrain i created it using the good old ant landscape let me show you you can create it here and then i use the large terrain preset i didn't change a thing otherwise that's how lazy i am though of course i went to the edit mode and made a simple uv unwrap next i had some displacement normal and a diffuse map for this sort of terrain that i generated in world creator there is an older tutorial available here on my channel on how i use it well in this case i just used a subdivided plane i added a subdemodifier on it to be able to control the amount of detail i will displace and then i added a displaced modifier i loaded the displacement texture from world creator in here set it to linear mode to source the 32-bit data the image contains and then i displaced it using this uv mapping method with a reasonable strength like this the shader for the mountain was pretty simple as well i just used the base color from world creator plugging in some rgb curves and a hue saturation note to play with the colors and i plugged it into a specular as well just to give the surface some variety of course i used a normal map from world creator and plugged it in here and finally i had this beautiful photo my friend made on a trip to croatia so i put it on a plane made it very large and placed it in the background of my scene the only thing i changed in the shader was i plugged the base color to the emission to give the image a bit of light of its own driven by the image itself though i brought the emissiveness down a little with this rgb curves it was too intense i then eliminated specularity from the image and also raised the roughness you don't really want any glints on this image and then it was just the work of the add-ons first i jumped into this polygonic menu which is company behind several wonderful add-ons one of them is this botanic an amazing vegetation and tree library those guys are by the way from my own country the czech republic so hey awesome plugin guys anyways as you can see there are much more categories than just trees and vegetation and the add-on itself handles biomes scattering and tree animation too in case of this scene i in fact added just this pine here and put it on the top of my hill and then it was scatter stern scatter is a big one offering you really amazing options when it comes to an advanced scattering of vegetation of course just as in case of botanic it doesn't provide just that there are rocks leaves flowers and more in my case though i was interested in this tab here you can see there are numerous presets that can fill your 3d surfaces with amazing biomes and there are even more of them in the pro version that i was using i just basically scrolled through the list and then picked one which i thought would work best one click and that's it okay not exactly there were some problems here with the amount of particles but i will show you how to fix that at the end of the video here in this tab you can see the layers of various assets the add-on distributed for you you can turn them on and off just as you would in any particle setup in blender here of course you can control the particles changing the seat for each setup you select here or any of the other options you probably know from particle settings more importantly down here you can add some intelligent masks to use for distribution of your particles to cut all these areas outside of the bounds of my camera i just added a new mask use this clipping option and nothing happens yet because i also needed to select all of my particle slots here and add influence over them once that was done the particles only appeared where my camera can see them it wasn't perfect so i hit this expand here to grow the mask and use the value of 1 and then updated the system by the way i use scatter version 4 but these days you can access scatter version 5 in its beta access and there you can try out some new tools it provides and also it's now using geometry nodes which makes the add-on even more powerful here you can see me just selecting the flowers and making them a little smaller not to cover so much of the view and also i made the rock smaller and if you're wondering what lighting i used well it was just nishita sky plugged into the world shader with these settings here i then rendered everything with this resolution 512 samples gpu rendering adaptive sampling checked and this nlm denoising active i usually bring down the amount of total bounces to speed up the render and also since i am using gpu i used 512 in the tiles so i hope you believe me now how ridiculously easy these shots are with add-ons like this to be honest it's almost unfair but yeah i certainly don't want to spend a bigger part of my career on modelling vegetation and tree assets especially when there are amazing tools to do this for me oh and by the way as mentioned this was an environment that i made for my cg boost environment course which is almost in its complete form now so the early access discount will end soon therefore if you are considering buying it now is probably the best time and with that i bid you farewell and see you next time my friends martin out

Channel: Martin Klekner

Views: 11,341

Rating: 4.959712 out of 5

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Id: iuaCNCfmBSk

Length: 7min 33sec (453 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 13 2021