Christmas Tree 🎄 Part 1 (Blender Tutorial)

hello everyone this is ryan king and welcome to this blender tutorial series where i'm going to show you how to create this christmas tree in blender i thought i would break up this tutorial into three parts so it's going to be a three-part tutorial series and that way each part will be a little bit shorter and a little bit easier to follow so as i'm recording this video it's about a month till christmas of 2021 so i thought this would be a really fun tutorial to make and over the next month i do plan on making more christmas tutorials so if you have any requests for some christmas themed tutorial ideas definitely let me know in the comments so here is the finished result and what's so cool about this tutorial is that it works really well in both the cycles render engine and the ev render engine so this is it in cycles and here it is in eevee so as you can see it actually looks really quite nice in blender eevee as well now i will be using cycles in this tutorial just because cycles is a little bit more realistic but as you can see this tutorial also looks really nice and easy so if you'd rather do it in blender evie you could do that now if you'd like to purchase the finished tutorial files then you can do that over on my gumroad store and my patreon page and that is also a really great way to help support this youtube channel now we will be using a few different textures to get the final result so over here on ambient cg i'm gonna be using this bark zero zero one and i'll have the link in the video description it's a free texture and i will be downloading the 2k jpeg and then also over here on ambient cg i'm gonna be downloading this fabric zero five four and we will be using this as the cloth that goes around the christmas tree and then again i will be downloading the 2k jpeg and then also to get some very nice lighting i'm going to be using this artist workshop hdri and this is from polyhaven.com so it's a free hdri and i'm going to be downloading the 1k version and the hdr version and then i will just download this and then we're also going to be creating some christmas presents and putting them around the christmas tree so over here on pixabay if you just type in christmas wallpaper then all these awesome wallpapers will come up so over here on pixabay there's a bunch of different wrapping paper textures to choose from so you can just go over here and download whichever one you want now specifically the textures that i will be using is this one right here with the red and the trees and the snowflakes and i'll also be using this one right here this is a pretty nice one as well and this one as well with the candy canes and the berries i think this is very nice too and the last one that i'll be using is this one here with the flowers and the presents and the candles alright so here i am in a new scene in blender and let's get started so if you want to see the screencast keys my screencast keys will be right down here in the corner so you can see what buttons i'm pressing so i'm first just going to double tap the a key to select everything and then i'll press x and delete it now i'm going to be enabling three different blender add-ons for this tutorial and they're all built into blender so you don't have to install anything so to enable these add-ons just click on edit and then open up the preferences and then right over here under the add-ons tab right up here in the search we're first gonna start to type in sapling so you can just start to type in sapling and we're gonna be turning on the add curve sapling tree generator so this is an amazing add-on that's built into blender and it will help us to create the base of the tree so that is the first one now the second one is the extra objects so if you start to type an extra right up here on the search you can turn on just check mark the add mesh extra objects and this will help us to create the star on top of the tree and then the last thing that we'll be turning on right over here on the search is the node wrangler so you can just check mark the node wrangler add-on right there and i'll show you how to use it in the video and we'll be using this when we're doing the node setup to preview different nodes so we can now just close the user preferences so to start off i'm going to press shift a and to get to the sapling tree generator you're going to go to curve and then you're going to go all the way down here and you can see it says sapling tree gen so i'm going to click on that to turn it on and you can see it's added a tree right here now if you click on the tree these settings right down here are going to go away so just make sure you don't select the tree or move it around at all so i just need to press x to delete it and then i'll press shift a and go to curve and then again click on the sapling tree gen so just don't click on the tree at all you can kind of look around your view but if you select anything then these settings right here are going to go away so i'm going to click on these settings to open it up and we can now use these settings to create the tree now right down here you can see that there are some load presets so if i click on this we actually want to change this to small pine and already this is looking a lot more like a christmas tree now you can see that all of these branches they're coming out at the exact same spot you can see they're all coming out here and here and i want to make them much more random and organic so to change that i'm going to change the branch rings so i'm going to start to turn the branch rings up and you can now see that each branch is kind of at a different place now you can turn it up to kind of whatever you want if you kind of start to turn it up pretty high it starts to just kind of get random so i'm going to turn the branch rings to 100 and that way they're all just kind of random and then i also want to make a custom shape so i'm going to use these values here to make a custom shape so you can see if i start to change these values this value right here is kind of changing the size of these branches so i'm going to make this value a 1 and that way it'll be pretty big and then this one right here i can change it and it's going to change the size of a lot of the branches kind of in the middle so i'm going to change this right here to a 0.64 and that way these branches are a little bit smaller and then at the top here i want the branches to be much smaller and that way they're going to be bigger down here and then when you go up they're going to get smaller and smaller so these values right here i'm gonna change this to a point zero one and then this value right here i'm also gonna change to a point zero one and you can see that now the branches right up here are really small and they slowly get bigger and bigger so now i want to add more branches because there are not very many branches so right up here on the settings if you click on this we have different tabs and then those different things can change the tree so right now we're on geometry but i want to click over on the branch splitting so that we can add more branches now right now the branch splitting only has a level of two and if you turn it down to one you can see now there's no branches there's only the trunk so if i turn it up to two now there's more branches but then if i turn up to three there's going to be branches on those branches and you can actually turn up even more to like four and now there's going to be small branches on the branches which are on the bigger branches but i don't really want that i'm just going to do three levels and that way there are the branches and then there's a second layer of branches now if you go right down here to the branches this second value right here you can change this and it'll change the amount of branches so i'm going to change this to 200 and then hit enter and you can see now that it's starting to look much more like a christmas tree and then i also want there to be more of the secondary branches so this 200 that just added more of the first branches but on this value right here underneath the 200 i'm going to change this to 20 and that's going to add more secondary branches so now we have a lot of branches and that looks very detailed now right down here you can see that the trunk is very small and i do want to make the trunk a bit bigger so right over here on this trunk height i want to change this to a 0.1 and that way now you can see that the trunk is a bit bigger and there aren't any branches right down there and that way we'll have a little bit of room for the presents and the cloth around the christmas tree now you can see that the branches are kind of rotating up and i want them to be kind of rotating down more so right down here on this rotation angle i'm gonna go right down here to the third value and i'm going to make this a negative 20. so you can just type in negative 20 and enter and you can see that now all the branches are a little bit more relaxed and they're just kind of going down a little bit all right so that is looking pretty cool but this doesn't have any pine needles so we want to add pine needles to our christmas tree so to add the needles i'm going to click right here on the branch splitting and i'm going to go right over here to leaves so we can actually add leaves and it's going to add the pine needles so on the leaf shape here just make sure this is set to rectangle because if it's set to these other ones it's going to actually look like leaves but if it's set to rectangle it's going to actually look like the pine needles now i can click on show leaves but if i do that it's going to be a bit laggy for a little while um because you can see that the leaves here is at 500 and that's pretty high so i'm gonna just take this value down to like a 20 so that there are not very many leaves and then i can click on show leaves so it might just take a moment to load up but now you can just kind of zoom over here and remember don't click on anything or don't move the tree because if you move the tree you're going to have to redo these settings but you can see right here on the edges there are some pine needles now coming out of the branches now on the leaf scale right here i do want the leaves to be smaller so i'm going to click on the leaf scale and i'm going to change that to a .085 and if you wait for that to load up now you can see that those needles are much smaller and then right down here you can see that there is this leaf scale taper and i want to change this as well so i'm going to change this value to a 0.8.8 let's wait for that to load up and now you can see that they're even smaller and then right over here on the leaf scale x i want to change this value to a .05 and now you can see that they're a bit thicker and then right here on the leaf scale variation i also want to change this to a 0.05 and that way there will just be a little bit more variation all right so those pine needles look much better now but there are not very many of them so the number that i found to work best is 350. so i'm going to change this to 350 and hit enter and then it will take a moment to load up now if this is too laggy if this is too many needles you could turn it down now each time i've created the christmas tree the branches are just a little bit different and so every time it seems like the needles are just a little bit different so i found that usually around 350 looks pretty good but you could also turn them up a little bit to maybe 400 or maybe down a little bit to 300 really just play around with the amount of needles until it looks nice now i found that this result right here this looks to be about the best now this was about 350 um so if you want to just play around with the amount of needles and kind of get it to how you like i don't like it to be too bare because then it just doesn't look very good but also if i add too many needles that it can start to look kind of puffy and i can't really see the trunk of the tree so this is what i found to work best so if you just want to play around with your tree and try to get it to look something like this with the pine needles all right and that is it that is it for our christmas tree model so i'm now just going to minimize this to hide it and now i want to press ctrl s to save the blender file or you can also click right up here and go file and click on save as and i'm just going to save this on my computer in a folder i'm just going to save it as christmastree dot blend and i'll click on save as so there's actually two different objects in this tree there is a needle object you can see here all the needles if i tab in edit mode this is a mesh object and then if i press h to hide this we also have this object right here and this is just the bare tree and this is actually not a mesh object if i tap into edit mode you can see that this object is actually curves so i'll just press alt h to unhide this so we have two different objects all right so now i want to set up the lighting and that way we'll have some nice lighting so we can actually preview the tree and then we can do the materials so to set up the lighting i'm going to click right over here on the world properties and we can add in the hdri so on this color i'm going to click on this right here and then i want to change this to environment texture and then i'll click on open to open up the hdri and here is the hdri that i'll be using so it's the artist workshop 1k hdr so i'll just click on this and then click on open image so now if you press z and move up to go into rendered mode you can see we have some nice lighting for our christmas tree let's just press ctrl s again to save alright so now let's add a camera and just point the camera at the christmas tree and then we can add the materials so i'm going to press shift a and i'm going to go right down here and just add a camera and then i can just kind of move the camera to where i want it to be maybe right about here and then i can press ctrl alt numpad 0 and ctrl alt numpad 0 will hop the camera to where we are and then also this image is a horizontal one but i want to have a vertical image so i'm going to click right over here on the output properties and we can change the resolution so i have this set to a 2k image but i want to switch these two values so what you can do is you can click on this value and then you can press ctrl c and that will copy the value and then i also know that this is one four four zero so i'm going to click on this and then press ctrl v to paste that value in there and now it's a square image but then on this top one here i want to type in one four four zero and just hit enter but if this is at 1080p 1920x1080 you can just flip those values really just change this to whatever you want you can also just click and drag here to change the resolution and then you can press g to grab with the camera selected and that is going to move the camera and then if you want to move the camera in and out you can press g and then double tap the z key so tap the z key twice and that's going to move in and out so you can just really place this wherever you want something like that i want enough room for the star and then i also want some room for the presence so i'm going to leave a little bit extra room on the side there so just something like that and then in the camera view i can press ctrl b and i can click and drag and i can drag a box around the camera view and that way when we go into rendered mode you can see that it's only going to render what's in the camera's view of course if you're in the eevee render engine then this won't work but in cycles this will be nice and speed up the render times because it's only going to render what the camera can see so now let's create the needle material so i'm going to click on the needle object right here just make sure you have the needle selected and then i'm going to click right over here on the shading tab and then right here i'm going to click on new to add a new material and i can just rename this material to needles so for this needle material i'm going to click on the base color and i'm going to make that a green color but then i'm going to make it much darker so it's a dark needle color and then i'll leave everything else at the default so now if we go into rendered mode we can see that that's a very nice color for our needles so now let's do the bark material so i'm going to click on the trunk right here to select the tree let me just make sure it's selected and also if you move the tree you can see that the needles are moving along with the tree and that is because on default the needles are parent to the tree so just select the tree and then i'm going to click on new and i can just call this bark now earlier on in this tutorial we did turn on the node wrangler add-on so what i'm going to do is just click on the principled bsdf and then i can press ctrl shift t and when you press ctrl shift t that's going to bring up blender's file browser and you can now just select all of the textures and it'll automatically set it up for us so again link will be in the video description if you'd like to download the same texture that i'm using so i'm going to be using the barco001 so what i did is i just extracted the zip file and then went into the folder so i'm going to click on the color and then hold down the ctrl key and click on the normal gl and then hold down the ctrl key and click on the roughness so i just want to select the color normal and roughness we aren't going to be using any of the other ones and then i'm going to click on principle texture setup and now that we did that you can see that blender has automatically set up all the textures for us because we use the node wrangler feature with ctrl shift t so it set up all the textures for us and so we have the base color roughness and normal so let's just go down into the material preview so i'm going to press z and move my mouse down to go and do the material preview now if you zoom up here close to the tree you can see that the bark is not placed on the tree very well and so i'm going to be using a easy texturing method which will allow us to not use uvs so to set this up i'm going to take the object and i'm going to plug that into the vector on the mapping and then what i'm going to do on all of these image textures is i'm going to change this flat to box so let's just go do that flat to box and flat to box and they all need to be exactly the same so change all of them to box and then the blend value right here i'm going to change that to 0.2 and that is going to blend the edges where the seams are so i'll change the blend value to point two on all of these change it to point two and now if you look around on the tree you can see that it's very nicely placed the bark all around the tree now it is a little bit big and i wanna make it a little bit smaller so i want to change the scale value right here on the mapping so i can actually click and then drag down and then i can let go and that way we can change all of the values at the same time so i want to change the value to 2 and then hit enter and now you can see that it's double the size so if you look around here you can see that's now very nice and if we go into rendered mode it looks quite nice on our tree so that is looking very good alright so we are almost done with the first part of the tutorial series but i do just want to add a light right up here and kind of shine it down on the tree so i'm going to go right back over here to the layout so we are back in the layout and then i want to press shift a and i'm going to go right over here to light and i'm going to add the area light so we're going to use the area light to light up our tree so i can just press g to grab bring that over and i'll press r to rotate and we want to point the area light right at our tree just like that and maybe rotate that over a little bit just like that alright so now if i click right over here we can go to the object data properties and we can change the brightness of the light so i'm just going to go up into rendered mode just so we can see how that's looking and then on the power here i'm going to make that pretty high to like a 300 let's see how that's looking let's actually try a thousand because i do want it to be pretty bright and that is looking much better so now you can see that that light is nicely lighting up the tree and then i do want to change the shape of it because right now it's just a square so right over here i want to change the shape from square to rectangle and then what i can do is on the y value i can click and drag and i can make that much longer and that way it's going to light up more of the tree so i can now just go into rendered mode see how that's looking maybe move it a little bit closer and also if you wanted to you could kind of rotate it more on the side so that there's a little bit more contrast so some of the tree is in the light and a little bit of the tree is more in shadow all right there we go that is looking very good so i'm just going to press ctrl s to save and this is going to wrap it up for part one of the tutorial series so in part two we're going to be adding the background and we're also going to be creating some christmas lights and then we'll be wrapping the christmas lights around the tree and then we're also going to be creating the star and putting the star on top of the christmas tree so thank you for watching and i hope you've been enjoying this so far and if you want to go ahead and watch part two i will throw part two right up there on the end screen and the link will also be in the video description so i'll be uploading one part each day of the tutorial series so once it's uploaded you'll see it right there on the end screen so thank you for watching and i hope to see you in part two [Music]

Channel: Ryan King Art

Views: 7,242

Keywords: Ryan King Art, Blender Tutorial, Blender, Ryan King, Tutorial, christmas, christmas tree, tree, holidays, blender tutorial series

Id: 9fCWQe9MkYs

Length: 18min 36sec (1116 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 27 2021