Create a Castle in Blender in under 60 minutes!

all right well this might likely be the coolest video I have ever done on this channel why is that you might ask well it's because we're creating some medieval castles and blender actually we're creating this medieval castle [Music] [Music] I'd like to think Raj farm for sponsoring this video garage farm is a large cloud rendering service that makes it super cheap and easy to render any project online we support every popular render engine available including blender 3ds max maiya and much more they offer 24/7 supports also you get $50 free render credit when you sign up so definitely sign up with the link in the description check them out you'll definitely like it and yeah enjoy rendering your next scene fast and secure with garage farm also stay tuned to the end of the video when I show you guys a quick little demo on how to render the final animation using garage farm all right so I hope you enjoyed that a little clip it was a lot of fun to create and we'll be creating that exact same thing in this video - a dragon that was something that I had some fun with and added at the end that Dragon Mile is actually available on the blender market if you want to check it out and do some of that stuff yourself but we're just covering the medieval castle in this tutorial now I'm not gonna be doing this like my standard tutorials on this channel I'm gonna be doing it a little bit more of an overview with a little bit more of a sped up video with me commentating over it - the different steps involved in creating a large-scale scene like this it's really the only possible way to cover something of this scale in a single video so I'll be interested to know how you guys like this new format let me know in the comments section if you like it or not and I'll be really interested to see what your feedback is on it and as always the finished scene here will be available on my patreon page for just $3.00 and all active patreon will get the blend available immediately so thank you very much for your support and enjoy the new file and if you're interested in getting the file yourself like I said it's just $3.00 on the patreon page and you get access to that blend and all the other blends on the channel this video was actually requested by a patreon member Devin King a while back and I finally got around to doing it so I'm really excited for it and thank you so much Devin for supporting me and requesting this tutorial here it is and I hope you like it okay so on a larger project like this I tend to like to start from the ground up and so we're literally starting from the ground up and we're building our little landscape this is just a very low poly triangular shape that I make by extruding the default cube out a bit and the reason for this is I wanted to keep it very simple so it's easy to unwrap so I'm just gonna put a few edge cuts in this then and make it so we have some even geometry across our mesh then I'm gonna put a very simple seam right across the back by ctrl iing and marking a seam this is for unwrapping and after we do that it will be very easy to just grab the top unwrap it the bottom unwrap it and then the edges and unwrap it so here I'm going to show you guys how to quick do the unwrapping because I found that it's easy to unwrap it before we do any sculpting so a create just a basic UV grid here and then I'm going to grab all of the top faces as you can see here and unwrap them do the same thing for the bottom and then for the edges it's really simple all you have to do is alt select the whole edge unwrap it and you're good to go so I do that right here and then the last thing but not least is to scale all of your UV maps up quite a bit as this is an island and not just a rock or something so we need to have some large UV maps as we'll be repeating some textures across that later so that's it for the the ground for now and it's time to do a little bit of sculpting so I'm gonna go ahead and add a multi resolution modifier I did about 4 divisions on it and then I just do some really terrible sculpting I'm gonna be honest with you guys I am not very great at sculpting but luckily for project like this you don't even realize I mean it's its nature and nature is weird sometimes so it could be considered realistic I guess but I basically just use a stroke with a simple curve as you can see here and then I just kind of shaped out some rocky hills basically making it just look like an organic mesh and then I had some rock textures that I was opening up to use for some extra displacement so these are from CG textures and you guys can grab them there should be a link in the description if I remember but just opening up some of these textures so just using the sculpt brush and the smooth brush with a few textures here just to kind of get an organic look I'm not great at this as you can tell but it luckily firstly like this you don't really need to be a master sculptor that's what kind of makes it cool you can just be subpar at best and you can get some decent looking results so I just went around I gave it some bumping a little bit of rocky ground you know where you can have some rock showing and you get something like this basically you just want some rocky ground and that's all you need the micro displacements we'll take it from there and it look great so with that said and done though it's time to create some assets for our castle so for this I start with just a basic circle and I give it about eight vertices and I'm just gonna extrude up a small tower first I'm gonna delete three sides and use a mirror modifier to connect it so all I have to work on is basically a third of it and I can just extrude it up put a few edge cuts scale it in and make kind of a simple little tower basically this is the best way to go about creating something like a castle not just trying to create a castle on itself but by creating little assets breaking it down and creating some assets that you can use across your scene so here I just inset it a little bit of a window and I'm duplicating the bottom face scaling it up and what I'm gonna use then is the spin modifier I'm not the spin modifier but the spin tool I'm sorry so I can extrude it up here put my cursor a dead center in that window and then spin it that's a whole 180 degrees and it goes all around nice sleep give it about nine steps or seven steps or so in the toolbar there and you can see you have a nice sort of low poly medieval window shape out of that so then at the bottom there you can just bridge those two gaps together by ctrl W and bridging em give it a little bit of thickness and you're golden just kind of pull the edges in so you don't see where it lines up to the window and you have a nice little medieval window so that's really quick and easy and yeah just a little tip for you guys if you're creating some medieval assets I'm so I'll go ahead and just add another window here and a little bit of detail so the more kind of details you can pour into these assets the better because you will be like I said duplicating some of these assets across your castle so instead of creating an entire castle from scratch you create a few small assets and then you duplicate those assets across so I'm just doing the same thing here with a spin tool and the cursor right in the center of my window to spin it around give me a little bit of thickness on that bottom window plates and yeah it kind of gives you a nice little medieval like window so you can see there so with that said and done just gonna do a little bit of repositioning and a little bit more details and add a little bit of a top to this some this asset and that will be it for the first asset so this is what I did on a multi of assets I should say and you might have noticed a little bit of repetitive repetitiveness maybe in the scene but all in all you end up really not you know standing out because there's enough details in the scene to kind of hide that there are some repeating assets so here I'm just kind of extruding up the the bricks you see around the top of a castle or a castle wall like you might see on top of a tower and this just gives it that classic sort of medieval castle look that I think looks pretty cool even though it's not necessarily the way most castles are it's pretty cool-looking and a lot of castles do it and I'd also like to point out again how helpful the mirror modifier is here I'm only working on one quarter of the mesh and is doing it for all the other sides so pretty much any time you've realized that you can use the mirror modifier because everything else would be the same definitely do it it's a huge time-saver I'm just duplicating these outs rotating them around and creating a basic little castle tower so there's our first asset just adding in a little bit of details here and there extruding out parts in setting parts and so here I went ahead and created a variety of assets really not that many though about a half a dozen there's pretty much all you need a few different tower tops a few different towers and a few different types of walls and that's really only need to kind of spread them out across your scene and create a castle but here I'm going to go and create a little asset for the village that you see attached to the castle attached my voice so I'm just kind of extruding up a cube here adding a few edge loops where I wanted to put windows and doors in this cube and then you can just grab that face extrude it in and delete the face and you get the result of a little door and a little window so that's all I do is I make a few edge loops where I want to place the window or door and then I can extrude it in and delete that face same thing here as you can see for the ref just extruding up a plane and making it a little bit a little bit more detailed but that's pretty much all you need to do you have a really really basic village building these are gonna be small from a distance and just adding those a little bit of details can that bit of realism but here you can see I finished up with a few variations basically just duplicating it and adding a few little changes to it adding a little bit of dormers on some of them a few extra windows a little bit bigger a little bit smaller but essentially all very basic and these are gonna be used in a particle system to give the effect of a little town village attached to the castle so before I start duplicating these buildings I like to add a texture to them and so you need to texture and for the texture I'm going to use texture Haven texture treatment is actually a new website put out by Rob twirl I'm sorry if I just watched your name but really some awesome resources here this is a really great website he's doing it all for free just going on donations and he has a patreon up if you guys want to support anybody has all kinds of really cool medieval textures so lots of bricks cobblestone everything you need to create some cool castles and this comes with all the normal maps the bump maps diffuse maps so really awesome just go ahead and download whatever textures you think look pretty cool off this site download all of them and I also used CG textures here or now it's textures calm to get some PBR materials this is where I get the rock material for the ground as well as some more medieval textures there's some roofing tiles that are pretty cool for the tops of those little buildings and stuff so go ahead and download all the PBR materials you want or need for your scene get a bit of variation and you'll be ready to go ahead and throw some basic materials on these objects before we start duplicating them into our scene so here I'm going to show you guys how to texture one of our basic assets really quick using these textures so basically just do a smart UV project on your map select a tall and smart UV project that's really all I need for a distant asset like this and then I'm just going to touch it up a little bit later if I see any errors but a now I'm going to add in the principal shader we'll connect that up and then you can okay the textures you download it and you can just drag and drop them right into your node editor Gregg grab the AO the diffuse the roughness all that and then just connect the diffuse to the base color of your principal shader the roughness to the roughness slot and for the AO it's a basic multiply node over the color texture and basically everything that's not the diffuse should be switched to non color data and then you just go ahead and multiply the AO to the diffuse connect the roughness to the roughness speculator the specular and then for the normal map you create a normal map node add it to the color and then add it to your principal shader that's basically it you can see here that our texture is obviously very large so to tweak that I do it in a minute if you give me a second jeanny just don't be selfish a pretty simple stuff connecting the specular to the specular principal shader as well and you can see we have a really nice looking material here I'm just rotating my UV unwrap as sometimes the UV projection doesn't have the right rotation and then you can just kind of correct any little areas like the side breaks here that were a little bit crooked and you can see it looks pretty great especially from distance you won't see any errors so now it's time to start the main sort of Cathedral aspect of our castle so you have your surrounding towers and then you have this sort of center cathedral tower and I'm just using a basic circle extruding it up into a cylinder and then adding a little bit of detail by scaling along the shift is Zed so I'm only scaling inwards and then adding little bits of detail you might see in sort of a tower slash pillar on one of these cathedrals basically just adding a few edge loops extruding them out extruding a man doing some variation coming up with whatever you can think of using some images as reference and it kind of a cool little peak on the top of this and that's basically it doing some by extruding and then I can move it off to the Sun drag what I do here then is I go into edit mode and I move the tower off the origin point keeping the origin point in the center of my scene then I can add a mirror modifier and an array modifier and it adds it to both sides just like I want it so using that same method I'm adding a cube here just extruding it up and doing some of the same details we did on our little tower earlier adding some edge loops and extruding out some tall Cathedral like doors and then using the array modifier to paste it along the wall and then using the mirror modifier to project it on to the other side of our building so as long as your cursor and your origin point are at the center of your scene you'll be able to repeat that over on the side piece cake I'm gonna go ahead and add in a foundation for our little cathedral here I'm gonna add some edge loops and then use the proportional editing tool to kind of pull out a curved edge and do the same thing to mirror it styled like I was talking about and then you can just duplicate that Foundation and basically make it a cathedral cake am i going up and making extra levels to it so up here I'm going to create a new kind of pillar basically using the same process I did to create the other pillars just extruding up and giving it a few edge loops to make it look a little bit more medieval II and medieval II I guess that's not really word but I just made it one so now I just go ahead and grab one of those duplicate it and remove the array modifiers from it and then just duplicate a few by hand to place them in here and there or the array modifier won't work so just to give it kind of that wrapping wrapping look and then we go up into the layer on our Cathedral cake extruding it in and extreme it down giving a little bit of a thickness making it look like there's sort of a inside to this building basically giving some walls and then of course another layer because you can keep going layers and layers and it just keeps looking better and better trust me so at this point we need to put a little bit of a roof on our Cathedral so I'm just gonna add a plain cut it down the middle Meerut on the other side like I've been doing and then this is super simple we're just gonna grab an edge pull it down to give it the angle and then we can go ahead and pull it out on either end making it reach as far as we need to and then for the corners I just extruded it one more time and then you pull that versity back extruded versity over and make a triangular face for another little angle to our F and that's basically at a really simple Cathedral I'm gonna grab one of these towers here and give it a little bit more detail by putting a few more of those in front just like I did the pillars and then I'm gonna go ahead and create just a very simple door shape in the middle here by adding a face extruding it up and around and using them your modifier so really basic stuff just like the little Tower I created earlier just creating a simple little doorway in a plane something that you might see from a distance but doesn't have to hold up to a close shot at all so something like that is really all you need and that's pretty much it for a cathedral just any a few more pillars this is where you guys can be creative and create anything you want alright and that's it now it's time to make our island floating but what I mean by that is by adding some water around the island I didn't do that earlier so we do it now just adding a basic cube scaling it up and placing it right about the right point where it looks like it's a good height for the island making it very large because this is gonna be an ocean extending for quite a ways and then I'm gonna go ahead and add a few little rocks in our landscape because what I'm gonna do in a second is I'm gonna use some dynamic paint and I'm gonna make these rocks paint our ocean a little bit to give it some of that Whitecap effect that you might have noticed in the finished render and adds a lot of realism to the scene though and it's really easy so I went ahead and did this you basically scalped a few basic rocks using the same techniques that I did on the landscape and then we'll go ahead and add that dynamic paint so we first grabbed our landscape and we give it a dynamic paint option right there we're going to give it a brush and we're going to make that brush be completely white when a paint source from the mesh volume and proximity proximity and the paint distance I set to eight that's all you have to do now we go on to our ocean scene and we have to give that a quick unwrap for the dynamic paint to work and then I just choose dynamic paints make it an image sequence start and end at one because it's not gonna be animated give it a high resolution of about 1024 give it an initial color of black and then all we have to do is basically choose an output where we want our image to be saved and name it whatever you want give it that UV map and bake it after baking you'll see we have this and this gives us a nice basically a white stroke around our island to work as a mask essentially in our materials to give ourselves some of that white cap effect where the water is hitting the island it looks really cool so now for our ocean material I'm actually gonna grab the ocean material that I created in my beach waves tutorial part 2 of 2 right around ten and a half minutes is where I create this material if you guys want to follow along exactly there might be a annotation on the screen if I remember but otherwise if you created that material already you can just go append like I am here grabbing that same tutorial file and then you go to the materials and then just select the ocean shader that you created and you'll have all your work already there for you now if you didn't create it like I said the tutorials there for you and you can go ahead and create it otherwise just select the ocean material and you're good to go so let's go ahead and add that beach splashing Whitecap wave to our ocean material so here I have our basic ocean material I'm just going to give myself a little bit of room to play with here and I'm going to add in that image texture that we just write it out of blender the paint map let me connect this to a color ramp node to give ourselves a little bit more control over it and then if I take a look at what we're looking at here you should be able to see that it's looking pretty much like this so now to add detail to that white map we're just gonna go ahead and add a noise texture duplicate that color ramp and give it a scale of about 500 so we have a whole bunch of really little detail wrinkles and we use that for those waves I'm just going to take that I'm gonna multiply it over our white wave texture and you can see we have the texture over our white wave now I'm gonna do is I'm going to add another color ramp using that same sort of wave and we're gonna make it much smaller I'm going to condense the plaques so we kind of scale back the white and then use a screen node to add it back over and now you can see that we kind of have the white foam and then the ripples leading up to it very basic but from a distance this gives a really nice look of water so you can see a few color ramp nodes and now I'm just gonna go ahead and add a add node put it right over our color right before the glass shader and the transparent shader and you can see it looks like this so now I'm just to go ahead and make a few tweaks to make our ocean material look a little bit deeper and to do that I'm going to just adjust a few of the nodes that have already set up here I'm going to take the power node up to about a 1.2 or down in case depending on what you had it set to and then the multiplier value to about a negative 0.9 this will just make it look a little bit deeper and same thing with the minimum note I changed that to 2.2 so this just gives it a little bit of a deeper look and you can see that our ocean shader is looking pretty nice now we have that whitewater kind of showing up nicely so now it's time to add some more displacement to our water so I already have a noise texture here I'm just going to take it and I'm gonna give it a hundred in twenty or twelve thousand I should say scale five detail and a little bit of distortion I found gives a little bit more of a wave look and then you can connect a color ramp to adjust it duplicate it and now we'll create a little bit of a larger wave this will only be two fifty and it'll be another color ramp node and a little bit less detail but a little bit more Distortion for even more of that wave effect we can kind of tighten up the black on that color ramp node as well then I like to just add some math multiply nodes to the end of those color ramps to kind of control the intensity and then a mix screen node to connect two of them together and you can see that when we screen the bigger waves over the smaller waves we get some nice details between the waves with some smaller ripples now I'm just gonna create one very large noise texture I'm giving this just a scale of like ten or twelve and a little bit of distortion but not much detail and a color ramp node to kind of crush the blacks a little bit and then if you multiply this over your node you can see that you give only areas of your ocean waves and this is what I want to do because I don't want everything to be waves you want to kind of have some calmer sections and some more detailed wavy sections of your ocean and this is how you do it with a very large noise texture but the last thing to do to kind of make those ripples look a little bit better is I'm gonna go ahead and duplicate the multiply node once here and multiply the small ripples on top of it again actually the small ripples go on top the big ones on bottom and you get an effect like this where it gives you a much nicer finer looking wave texture one more multiply node to control the intensity you can see you can make it really intense if you want but that's essentially it you have a nice ocean shader with a ton of control and you can tweak it however you like so now I'm going to add a screen node and what I'm gonna do is I actually take the Whitewater texture and connect it in the bottom and you can see that that gives it a ton of bump which is way too much but just a very little bit of this gives those white waves a little bit of a raised effect which I thought just gave it just a little bit more realism alright and now that we have a cool-looking ocean material it's time for a cool-looking Rock ground material for our island so to do this it's time for some micro displacements first drop in a principal shader for this material and then we need to do a few settings for the micro displacements one we need to add a subdivision surface modifier and make sure adaptive sampling is on the icing rate of one will work for now and then you need to go to your material settings and under the displacement choose both this is for 2.79 right now and that is what you have to do and then we get our rocket textures now this is a rock texture of textures calm this should be a link in the description otherwise you can probably find it it's just a basic rock texture but it has a really cool height map so that is what I'm gonna do for this I'm gonna use the height map to control displacement so here's just the basic material with the AO applied now I'm gonna open the height map and if I connect it to the displacement you should see give it a second or a few that we have some micro displacements showing up we have the rock texture repeated across our whole scene giving it some some cool bump that's cool but I would like it to be only in the corners where there's a sharper edges of our scene and that's what I'm going to use the pointyness material for you can see here I just added the geometry node I'm connecting it to a color ramp to kind of narrow it down to just the corners of the mesh using the poisonous option like I said and then we're gonna use that multiplied over our color to make it so it's only putting the bump in the corners this kind of gives yourself some smoother areas and some sharper rock areas and this is really cool to kind of control the micro displacement I've really been using the pointyness geometry node quite a bit and it's really helped so now you can use a multiply math node again to control the intensity of this and if we take a look we have our rock shader looking pretty good already right off the bat with just a little bit of a node so now it's time to add a little bit of grass in between those rocks so again just a few textures from textures calm I'm gonna grab some grassy textures and some rocky textures I'm gonna use a mix node and then we're gonna add in let me quick grab the rock here there we go then I'm going to add a noise texture to combine these two textures together basically to give it a little bit of variation and I also like to use some hue/saturation values just to kind of tweak the color of these textures but a noise texture of course the color ramp do it the noise texture as well give it a scale of like 50 or so connected to a UV coordinate node so we're using the UV coordinates and then yeah just kind of tweak it down to about what you want I actually I'm leaving that as a five scale and then yeah if it's the factor of the mixed node you get a nice little grassy / rocky texture and we're gonna use this in between our rocks so basically I'm going to use that same pointyness factor coming off our geometry node to control which areas are grassy in which were areas are rocky so using that as a factor of an ick mix node we just have to flip those inputs real quick and we can see that if we multiply it to make it more intense we have the rock on the edges and the grass on the inside again an easy way to create kind of a procedural a procedural texture node ground for our island and you can see that it it gives yourself or yourself or myself anyone self some good looking results so now you can see the bump is a little weak and I just need to crank up the multiply node a little bit so numbers going through and kind of tweaking the color ramp adding a little bit more detail to our color ramp to kind of control how much rock I want to see and how much grass don't want to see once you do that and you're satisfied with the amount you can add a bump node and then with this bump node we're going to take a little bit of the texture of the grass and rock that we used and plug that into a color ramp and then plug that into the strength of the bump node so as well as getting the displacement from the rocks our grass is also giving our scene a little bit of displacement so pretty simple just connecting that with a color ramp here into the bump node height and then turning the strength up to about 1 and you can see that if we crank the blacks up a little bit we get a little bit of that detail in the grass it just adds another little layer of realism to your scene so you might as well do it and that's looking pretty not bad if you ask me all right now I just go ahead and add in one more texture and that is the roughness texture to our rocks and have that control the roughness of our principal shader may give us just a little bit more realism to the specular highlights and then I'm gonna go ahead and I believe I tweaked the colors a little bit for the grass here so I just go ahead here and tweak the human saturation values a little bit to kind of find something that I think matches the rest of the colors of the rock nicely alright so now it's time to bird and the walls to our island so we're going to do is I'm going to take my little wall mesh here and make sure the origin point is in the bottom left corner of the mesh as you can see right there I'm gonna go ahead and put the cursor there as well and then add a curved path this is gonna allow me to add a modifier now to our wall in a ray modifier that is and then a curve modifier as well so now in your curve settings you're just gonna grab that new curve that you just added and then in your erase settings we're gonna change the fit type to fit curve choose that curve that you just edit as well and now if you grab the curve you'll see when you go ahead and move the curve around or extrude it that the castle wall will follow it exactly so this is really easy for adding all kinds of walls to your scene you can kind of make it go up and down valleys and around hills and stuff it's really cool and it saves a whole bunch of time on modeling the walls so this is where modifiers can be super super powerful I go ahead and add a subdivision surface modifier on simple as well and that's more for the materials later on but you can go ahead and do that as well and are you ready to start adding curves to your island so here we're going to take the island put the curve on it and then just start extruding the the curve around adding walls everywhere we extrude that curve so it's really easy and I just like to kind of have fun with this and make the walls go wherever you want I don't know what to say you just it's kind of fun to watch though you can you can extrude the path of the curve around I guess you don't have to you can if you want to I'm not mad I'm not making you do anything but that's what I did pretty cool just saying okay I've been doing this too long I need to break but isn't this cool isn't this path that I'm making cool aren't you having fun watching this and yeah it's really easy to get an organic looking sort of flowing wall like the Great Wall of China for example around your scene trust me it's cool and it was fun it was fun you should try it yourself and now it's time for the most exciting part it's ending the assets to our landscape and environment so I first start by putting that Cathedral that we created that we had some fun with and I just drop that in to basically what you want the heart of your castle to be so this is kind of the center of the castle the walls then we'll go around it so if I turn on the walls here and you can see that we have our walls alright so now it's time with the walls and the cathedral in our scene to start adding some of those towers that we created earlier and some of those other assets so I'm going to go ahead and grab the tower that I created and instead of duplicating it I'm going to alt D it this creates an instance and it means that when they when have you changed the geometry later on it will change them for all of them so I'm just gonna go ahead and use this with an array modifier to make it a little bit taller and scale it and basically place it wherever I want or if they like a tower might look kind of cool just kind of picking cool locations now to drop in a new tower giving them different heights different scales different widths and different rotations and now that we have a few towers like this I'm gonna go ahead and grab that little castle top tower that I created earlier ldiots move it into our main scene and then grab the tower put the cursor at the top grab our little castle top tower thing and he'll shift s selection to cursor and I just kind of fix the rotation and you can see it looks pretty cool so here's the scene now with many little towers edit both the different variations I had and yeah it looks pretty cool and this is basically using five or four or five I would say different assets basically using towers and the little tower tops and I made two different variations of the tower tops the kind of the brick one and then that roof kind of peak ceiling as you can see there and now I'm just duplicating them putting them on top of the towers that I duplicated earlier and giving them some variation in the scale and rotation really really simple stuff but adding a lot of them and kind of mixing up the rotation stuff and you really don't see the repetitiveness of what it actually is and it saves a ton of time I'm building a massive project like this and now that we have the assets sort of distributed across our scene I'm gonna enable node regular in add-ons and start adding in some more details to our materials so to do this I'm basically starting with the basic rock texture or brick texture that you saw me put together earlier and just kind of tweaking the texture to color a little bit with the huge contribution of value node and I what I'm end up doing is basically create two materials identical to each other with different textures as you can see down here I have a texture the exact same just using a green brick and I'm going to mix these together using a mixer so we have two principle shaders with the corresponding textures connected and we'll be mixing these together using the geometry node as a factor again with the pointyness value and then adding a simple subdivision surface modifier and changing it to simple giving about two levels can give you even more control over the pointyness node and the options here so I'm gonna go ahead and add in a noise texture another color ramp and then and crush the blacks and whites a little bit and then I can take whoops I'm like that I can take the pointyness value and kind of screen it over this noise texture to give ourselves a nice sort of mask to combine both of those materials together so by screening that into the bottom changing the value to one of course and messing around with the color a little bit you can see we have a nice mask and if I use a mix shader' now I can have that mix the bottom material with the top material using that as a factor so once I do that and if I throw a multiply node in there to control the intensity again if I just take a look at it here you can see that we have the green texture coming through on top of our brick texture so it's really cool and you can kind of tweak the color ramps a little bit to get just the right amount of green texture showing through but again it's a procedural way to kind of add realistic variation variations I should say to your material and the material node editor I'm just using that multiply node as the intensity and it looks very nice so the last bit of detail now that I wanted to add to my little tower top here is some streaks usually you have some dirty streaks leaking from bricks or whatever so for what I did is it got some leaking textures from textures calm I threw it in with a mapping node in a texture coordinate so I can control exactly where I place this leaking texture over my object so I can use the mapping node now to get the texture lined up exactly where I want it underneath the windows and then it's just simply putting in a math node changing it to multiply again so I can control the intensity of it and then duplicating our RGB mix node changing it to multiply and then multiplying black with this being the factor so if this is the factor you can just change your multiply node now and make it more or less dark streaks and you can see here combined with the original you get that really cool streaking effect this is pretty much exactly the same material I also used on the walls around the perimeter of the castle to give us sort of that realistic sort of warning looking material and now it's time to start lighting and rendering our scene so I haven't showed it yet so I'll short now I'm gonna do a quick open up an HDR image from HDR Haven a pretty cool looking kind of rocky cliff looking HDR that I found looked very nice I'll link to it in the description if I remember and then I'm gonna add the typical texture coordinate and mapping node and spin it around on the Zed rotation until I get some nice clouds in the background of my scene for me it was one one five seven and that worked actually that is a lot more complicated that it has to be but that's what it was then just tweaking the location a little bit to get the clouds exactly where I wanted them in the background of my scene and that's it for the positioning I cranked the strength up to two on our background scene and then I added in RGB curves node to kind of control the colors of our environment a little bit I wanted to give this guy a little bit more of an evening reddish hue so just by messing around with the red blue and green channels on our RGB curves I got a pretty nice-looking red hue to our environment which kind of changes the overall lighting a bit too and it just makes it look a little bit more like an evening red sky and that was what I was looking for so you can see that looks pretty good and then it was time to drop a camera in my scene so I just added a camera of course everything is really large now though so I have to get the rotation right and then adjust the clipping so I can actually see my island so change the clipping to about 2000 and then it works beautifully and I changed the focal length to about 32 millimeters enabled limits and set the distance to be focused right on the center of our island by changing the distance in the depth of field settings you want to enable the mist display and then over in our render layers we're gonna go ahead and we're gonna enable mist when enable AO and then I'm gonna enable the environment and the colossi passes so these passes are going to be really handy to add a little bit of extra realism in the compositor later so go ahead and do that and then you can jump over to your world settings and adjust the mist values to go from the start of your scene basically to the end the last object of your scene and this will give us a lot of control over the mist again in the compositor so now I added some little detail so I just use some of the simple fern assets that are created for the realistic nature asset pack put those into a particle system as you can see here just using about 1,500 of them and using a weight paint to put them in the right location some simple settings emitting them along the Z location and giving a little bit of random scale and that's about it so um you guys can go ahead and create these assets yourself if you'd like I have some tutorials on CG geek for how to do this otherwise you could also buy them with the realistic nature asset pack and get them for just 10 bucks here I also have some trees added into the scene and again you can either buy the asset pack and get them for 10 bucks or you can cream yourself using the tutorial I have here on how to create trees so it's your option I don't like to force anyone to buy anything so I like to give the training for it and then also the option to purchase it if you want to support me and get the asset just a little bit quicker so now it's time to add our little village so I'm going to grab those assets that you just saw and I'm gonna add a plane on to our landscape let's scale it up and then I'm going to subdivide it a few times the reason I'm subdividing it is because everywhere there's a vertice I'm gonna be adding a building so just using the proportional editing tool here to kind of match the terrain of the ground I add a particle system I give it just as many particles as there are vertices you can see if I tab into edit mode while I'm on there I have 81 Versys so I give it 81 particles and there'll be a particle for every vertice so then to emit a building everywhere we have a vertice on our particle system you don't want to change the emission type first you choose advanced then you choose emit from vertices and then disable any randomizing options if you do that you'll have a hair strand for every single vertice and then you can go ahead and open up your group and put those buildings in there so make sure that you group together all of your buildings just grab them all alt G and even houses you can misspelled it if you want and then go ahead and grab the group grab that group that you just made and you see we have a building on every little house if you choose rotation they'll be at the right rotation and then you can go ahead and change the size change the scale and then if you grab the rotation setting there as well you can change the rotation very simple stuff but yeah this is a way to create an elaborate looking city with just a few particles and a few simple structures so now you can go ahead and extrude this mesh out wherever you want and every time you tap it on edit mode the particle system will update with more buildings everywhere you put new vertices so it's really cool it's kind of a way to build your little village out and extend it however you feel looks creatively cool and yeah it worked really well for me especially since it's a distance shot and you don't have to worry about anything to close up and you can see we have a nice little village here if I switch to rendered view for you guys you can see that it looks very cool you just want to uncheck the emitter in the particle settings there to make it so the buildings are sitting on the ground so now for the final bit of detail I added some vines to our towers and to our walls this is done with just a simple particle system with a weight paint group and the particle system you can check the use modifier stack if you're using array modifiers on these towers to add the particles all the way up the tower and then just a simple leaf all I use - you can see it's a very simple mesh rendered with just a very basic leaf texture and the material is ultra simple principal shader with the texture connected to it but as little details like this that really added a lot to this finished scene something that you don't notice right off the bat but when you look for it you start to see more of the details so you can go ahead and add this particle system to any of the objects in your scene that you like and it just adds that little bit of extra realism just keep in mind that the more particles you render the slower the render will be by a little bit and then the last detail to add before we finished our scene is some distant landscape so for this I just used to landscape add-on you can go ahead and enable the ant the landscape add-on in the add-ons and then go shift a add in a landscape pull up your toolbar and your settings and then you just want to change the mesh X&Y to be very large and along with that you're gonna have to make the noise scale quite a bit bigger and that is also including the height and the minimum height in the settings so I'm not gonna go through all of these settings but basically I just created a very large mesh using the landscape generator add-on and I found that using the noise pattern of slick rock looked really cool for this and really basic though just kind of experiment with the depth the noise size and the height and that's pretty much all you have to do um I also just took the subdivisions down to 64 as this doesn't have to be super high quality and yeah just make the noise size about as tall as you want your distant mountains to be and making sure the minimum is set to allow the noise to go that high essentially so after I was happy with my noise pattern after playing around with the settings a little bit I went ahead and increase the scale along the x-axis so I have a long and narrow sort of mountain range landscape that you could say and then you can play around settings a little bit more take the resolution down to about 64 is what I did I think cuz it doesn't have to be high quality at all it's gonna be very distant now and then just kind of play around with the settings until you find something that you're happy with there's lots of little settings that you can mess around with but it overall it's really straightforward just kind of messing around with the height and the depth and the displacement of your texture basically I also like to change the fall-off to be y so the mountains continue all the way to the edge a mesh instead of sort of cutting off to a flat edge as you can see here so that that's basically what I did and then this mountain gets pretty much the exact same material that you're a closed island material got except even more basic just a simple pointyness shader with some rock and some grass and then as you can see here I'm just duplicating it and kind of throwing it in the background there too and to the scene make it seem a little bit larger scale show that there's more ground around than just plain ocean first for RC I can see adding some distant mountains like this will add just a lot of depth to your scene it will look really great especially when you add the mist in the compositor in a second here so go ahead and do that put some in the background as many as you want wherever you want and it's time to render after all that it is time for a render drumroll please boom boom for the scene I found about 500 samples look good and once you have that set f12 and here we go we have a pretty cool looking landscape it really doesn't need too much compositing because it looks pretty cool right off the bat but I always like to do a little bit of compositing starting with the AO that we rendered out we're gonna go ahead and add a multiply node put the AO in the bottom socket of the multiply node and you can control the amount of ambient occlusion you want in your scene you can see here that because the AO doesn't block out the background what I'm gonna do real quick is add in a color ramp node so just creating a basic mask with the color ramp and the environment output that we selected connecting that in to the screen node and we can get rid of the the black sky so now with the AO just controls the landscape and our building so I usually go about 0.5 or 0.6 with the amount of AO and a scene I don't like to go a hundred percent and then I'm gonna go ahead and work on the mist so you connect the mist to a color ramp so you can have that little bit of extra control if you need it so now I'm also going to use that environment mask to basically invert it and take out the the mist put into the sky essentially because I don't want to add any mist to the background only to our objects that we've add and blender so now I'm going to go ahead and mix that over our scene with a mix node and what I found look pretty cool is if I actually take the environment and blur it a whole bunch and then use that as the color for our mist overlay the reason I do this is because it gives a little bit of variation to the color of your mist over light instead of just leaving a light blue color from the mist taking your environment blurring it a bunch and then adding a color balance node like I did here giving it a little bit of variation making it very bright but giving it a little bit of variation you can kind of change it to the hue that you want and that just kind of adds a more realistic environment mist I think because environment mist is usually sort of reflective to your actual scene so being able to use the scene to color it like that I think just adds a bit of realism so you can see it's looking pretty cool after all that mist was added so now the last step is to add a few clouds and for this I did the Chiti method I just grabbed some cloud images that had an alpha mask already applied to him found him off Google Images I'll put a link to them and then just import them on a plane and put that plane duplicated in multiple times across my scene you can see it's a very simple material here just the texture with an emission texture and a mixed shader and a transparent shader using the color to mix the two of them you can even drop a hue/saturation value we can note in here and kind of change the colors to make them a little bit more blue a little bit more red but for the clouds I then gave it its own render layer so I could kind of overlap these and control the amount of clouds in the scene in the compositor so just a new render layer just disable all everything even the environment just leaving the clouds in that scene and you can see that this is the pass you get when you render that because we have no environment it looks black and white and then we can just go ahead and mix add them over our scene using the factor to control the amount of clouds it just kind of gives it a bit more depth on top of the mist and again you can throw a color balance node than in there to kind of change the color of these clouds so it's kind of a cheating method I'm not doing any crazy volumetric rendering or anything but it's a whole lot faster and if you just want that little touch of loud it's an easy way to get that sort of realism in your scene so then the last thing I did is add a little bit of extra glossy using those glossy passes that we rendered out in the compositor so I'm just going to add the indirect and direct glossy passes together duplicate that node change it to multiply and multiply the color output underneath this comes out a little bit noisy though so I like to throw a D speckle node over it and just crank the threshold down to about a point one then you're just gonna go ahead and add in a mix node change to add and then you can add some of that glossiness in the bottom sockets using the factor to control how much glossiness you add do you see so this is just something I've been doing recently that I'm really liking I'm actually learned it from Lucas Bieber when I did my beach waves tutorial just kind of a way to control the overall glossiness of the scene and the compositor now I'm gonna go ahead and just throw in a glare node I change it to fog glow and I just crank it really low give about a threshold of 0.5 make the size very small and just a little bit of an extra glow to the scene kind of make some of those shiny materials shine a little bit better but that's it guys there is our finished castle alright and like I mentioned at the beginning of the video I wanted to show you guys now how to render your finished animation out using garage farm so it's really easy to create an account on garage farm it doesn't require any credit card information or anything you can get started with your $50 free render credit and I'm just going to go ahead and log in here and if you're using it for the first time you don't want to go ahead and download the little desktop app and add-on for blender to allow you to use Garage farm really easy right from your blender application just scroll down through the add-ons until you find the blender add-on application go ahead and download it for Windows in this case if you use your Mac you'll obviously want to go ahead and download it for Mac and then once your download is finished it's a very simple install setup you just want to run through that and once the install is finished it'll be added to blender you'll just want to go ahead and reopen blender and then once that's done you can jump over to blender go to your user preferences switch to add-ons and just start searching for render beamer the add-on will already be added to your add-ons list you'll just want to check the checkmark to enable it and once that's done you'll be ready to send your project over the garage farm to have it rendered they'll want to check for any minute changes you might want to make to your render settings or anything make sure you have all the layers you want rendered enabled and then you just go to the file render and down to render Beamer and choose beam it up so you send it over to the garage farm then you can use the little desktop app to see the upload progress of when your scene will be arranged and garage form basically takes care of everything else once the upload is finished you'll be able to jump over to your web manager again and if you jump over to your projects tab you'll now have the project added there you can go ahead and click on your project locate the blend file and if you click on the blend file you'll see you have a few last minute changes here that you can make to your scene before you render it so if you want to change the resolution the number of samples there's start and end frame range the output path or the file name you can do that now you can also even choose what version of blender you want to render on so for example I chose to render with the filmic preset already enabled and 2.79 and you also contain to the priority of your render if you set it to a high priority it will be given top priority and be rendered as fast as possible and if you set to a lower priority you'll be using a little bit of slower hardware and it'll take a little bit longer but you'll get to save some money so do whatever you want for that and go ahead and click Submit and your project will begin rendering again you'll get a little desktop notification when your project is finished rendering and then you can just jump back to your little desktop app and download all of your finished images right there from the little render beamer app if you've download the images you'll get a folder looking something like this with all of you have finished frames in your animation all ready to be stitched together and put together in a video that will look amazing so thanks a whole lot to garage Farm for sponsoring this video and that's gonna do it for me guys so I'll kitchen the next one bye bye

Channel: CG Geek

Views: 1,052,391

Keywords: Castle, Blender, Game of thrones, Tutorial, how to, learn, realistic, animated, dragon, GOT, render, cycles, 2.8, eevee, new, medieval

Id: QbSmoZCrP8I

Length: 51min 8sec (3068 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 14 2018