Create a Forest in Blender in 1 Hour

hey guys it's Steve here from CG geek with another blender tutorial this is gonna be a tutorial on how to create a realistic nature scene all within one hour so we're gonna be creating a forest now and I know I've done a few nature scenes already in the past on this channel but I keep coming back to them because they're just super fun and they always keep getting better I find so it's getting easier and easier in blender and things just start looking nicer nicer so it's a good sort of exercise I think to see how much you can create in blender and also limit yourself to just one hour to do it so this tutorial would be covering the modeling texturing materials and lighting and rendering but I will be using the realistic nature asset packs that I've created I actually just recently updated them there on the blender market for just 10 bucks and you can see the links in the description if you look down there but they're recently updated with less vertices faster rendering and improved materials if you guys are interested in that otherwise you can create the assets yourself by following the tutorial playlist that I have down there I've covered how to create all these different assets in different tutorials already so you can do that yourself if you want to jump in and follow along but I have the finished scene here as you can see and it looks pretty nice with all the assets in it and it's just a lot of trees some randomly natured scattered nature items here and yeah it's a lot of fun and we'll be covering how to do the lighting setting up the materials setting up the environment all that within one hour so if that interests you guys stick around and let's jump into it alright so when a new blank scene here in blender I'm using blutter 2.79 a anything from this version onward will work great you can go ahead and fire it up and jump right in the one thing I'll be doing is they'll be kind of breaking it down into four different categories will have the first modeling and placing of the assets part then we'll have the rendering and materials part and then I'll go on to do the lighting and rendering and then the compositing so about four different parts and I should have timestamps in the description if I were moving to do that for you guys to jump to a certain part if only one part interests you but otherwise let's jump on right in and get started so I'm gonna go ahead and delete our default cube and add in a plane for a forest floor you'll shift a add plane and I'm going to scale it up to about twelve so it's a bit bigger than our grid floor but not too much just a little bit bigger than our grid floor there will be perfect and now we're gonna do is I'm actually just going to switch right to sculpt mode and I'm going to change it to Dino topology here if we give ourselves a little more room I'm gonna drop this down I want to turn off this symmetry lock so it's not mirroring it and then I want to drop our settings feel a little bit I want to choose a constant detail and I'm gonna give ourselves well let's just kind of play around with this a little bit if I hit Z we can see how much detail we're getting I want to come up with a resolution that isn't too crazy but gives me enough control to kind of sculpt some of the the details that I want so maybe it's something like an 8 4 zoom in here there's maybe a little more than 8 over 12 and we can choose smooth shading as well now I'm gonna go ahead and quickly sculpt out sort of a forest floor here just using the sculptor our brush and using ctrl to kind of take away mesh and normal clicking on the left clicking just to add mesh I'm gonna hit F to make my brush bigger and we'll start off by just doing some hills and stuff little bumps that you might find in a forest floor maybe this is kind of like a animal track a path or something where deer have kind of treaded down so it'll be a little bit worn down and then you'll have your little random bumps and stuff distributed around around on your mesh so instead of using a displacement modifier I like to do this just to give myself a bit more control over how my final result looks like so I'm gonna go ahead and kind of do that and switch to smooth to kind of erase things and just take away some of what I did and then hit X twice to jump back to your sculpture brush now this doesn't have to be anything too fancy I'm just gonna do a quick outline if I kind of place my camera now as well it will help to see what we're getting I want my camera to be right about at the corner here of our mesh so I'm just going to grab our camera kind of position my view right there at the corner and then go all to control zero and I'll snap my camera right to that view now I'm just kind of pull it back a little bit I hit my middle mouse wheel and rotating it so the path kind of centers the scene I also want to kind of rotate it so the horizon here is in the upper third so we have about a third of sky and two thirds of floor and just look better on the eye if you can kind of keep that as your your layout and then I'm gonna go ahead and just tweak the sculpting a little bit more here and I can see what I want maybe taking away a little bit more mesh here a little bit of a hill there nothing too fancy and they just add some little extra details there and that looks like it'll be good enough maybe just fix that back there a little bit smooth it out just so we have a nice even horizon line there sort of doesn't have to be perfect as we'll be doing more to fix this later that looks pretty good and let's move on so with that done I can work getting the assets kind of distributed that distributed that's the word I'm looking for across the scene here and Eisley and to do that I'm gonna open up one of my nature asset packs so I'm gonna start with the trees as those kind of set the layout and the framing of the shot so I'm gonna switch to a separate layer here we'll just go to layer two and I'm gonna go file append and you're going to want to locate your asset pack I'm just going to grab mine off the desktop here and the asset pack like I said as recently updated so it's one point one right now with some more control better materials and less vertices so I'm just going to go to a group and then we're going to choose the realistic trees with rigs or without rigs this is going to depend and if you're going to want to animate your scene or not this is gonna be a still shot me so I'm gonna choose no rigs but if you wanted to animate it you grab the version with rigs and you can see here we have all of our nature assets and this is just the extra trees or the controllers that come with the the animated versions but we don't need these so I can just remove them now and I'm gonna start with our maple tree here so I'm gonna take this I'm gonna hit shift D and then move it to layer one where we're gonna have it laid out and instead of using a particle system I found it easiest to just move these around by hand so I can get through the out exactly the way I want it so I'm gonna hit G and shift Z just to move it along the surface without going up or down along with Zed and kind of position it up close to the camera this one's going to be over to our left here kind of frame in the corner of our shot so I'm just gonna kind of pull it back pull it over maybe scale it down along this edge just a little bit and then just pull it down into the floor a little bit and here you might want to tweak your floor a little bit if you see that it's like maybe not high enough you want to build up the dirt around your tree you just do that a little bit of sculpting and make it fit real nice in with your tree so that's looking pretty good I'm gonna double tap are to kind of get a better rotation here on our tree but I'm pretty much liking that and I'll scale it up a little bit more as well I might want to go for a little bit of a lower camera angle by pulling that down protein up a little bit and that's looking very fine like a skillet one was that a little bit maybe to get some more of those leaves in there and we can play around with a rotation later but let's go ahead and bring in another tree so this time I'm going to go over and I'm gonna grab our spruce tree or a pine tree I guess either it could be considered either I'm just gonna hit shift D and then move it over to layer one here I'm gonna place it just like it did the other one by grabbing one the shift said scaling it down quite a bit maybe even scaling it along with that a little bit just to squish it down a little bit more and then I'm gonna rotate it along the side to find a rotation that I kind of like the frames the scene nicely I think that will work well and then kind of grab it just pull it back a little bit so it doesn't take up too much of the scene there and that's looking that's looking pretty good as well maybe I'll move it just a little bit closer to the camera and now I can go ahead and add a few more trees I'm just going to start off by duplicating the big trees as these are gonna be more the framing trees in our scene let me go ahead and duplicate this one pull it back around here or so rotate is so we get a different angle we're just seeing different parts of the tree then and scaling it so we see another maybe more of the leaves or something the trees further then the camera can also be a little bit smaller just to make the perspective seem even larger and I'm just kind of setting it back there and nicely on the edge I might also want to tweak my camera perspective at this point as we're framing our scene and if you're gonna change your resolution or your your zoom I should say antenna camera you don't want to do it at this stage let me grab the camera and yeah I'm just gonna pull it in to be a little bit wider of a shot maybe a thirty two millimeter zoom would be good pull the camera in a little bit to compensate for that drop it down a little bit and that's looking pretty good we can grab this a little bit closer to just to kind of make it so it reaches just the edges holding shift to make smaller changes and that's looking very nice so I'm gonna go ahead and duplicate our pine tree again shifting it grabbing it along the shift-z so we don't go up and down but just along the floor axes there and rotating it around scaling it a bit and finding what looks nice if you want to duplicate your window here by pulling it up you can kind of keep this view in camera view and then just move around up here to see what looks nice in camera view this is something like to do to kind of frame my shot so I know exactly what it's looking like as I move objects around so that looks okay let's go ahead and put some more over here grab a long shift said rotate this one along the Zed to get a different angle of it scale it down a little bit and yeah just repeating this process wherever you might want a tree wherever you think it might look cool go ahead and put one there just kind of filling out our scene this can go very quickly if you move efficiently maybe I want one over here as well kind of framing the edge of the scene back there I hope to eat that one along the Zed it gets kind of a different angle and that looks to be pretty good and maybe one or two more trees but we're looking pretty good so I'm going to go ahead and copy over some of the poplar trees now so just grab that tree shifty move it over to this scene now if you want to be able to adjust all of the objects at the same time you could be alt doing these and it would make them linked basically so if you made any adjustments to one of them it would make it to all of them so if you want to do that if you're sure you don't want to change them you would want to alt do these I'm shifting them so I can make mess changes if I care to later on but yeah that's just an option you could do if you wanted to and I'm just gonna go ahead and finish just distributing these trees about the scene just going in top view really rotating them finding a different place for them and scaling them a little bit here and there that one's a little bit too much in our in our way isn't it let's put one back there rotate it around and yeah if you just rotate and scale bit you'll never be able to tell that these are all all duplicates of one another but one over here rotate around the set a little bit making sure just to keep any sort of repetitiveness knots not visible you're gonna duplicate that one over there in top view here number seven we can go ahead and move it and this is looking at looking pretty good I think we're I think we're almost there some italics pretty good yeah we'll rotate it at that angle looks great maybe lift this one up as you can see it's kind of falling into the floor a bit there and maybe one more back here but we can always make these changes now later on if we decide that hey you know we need a little bit more trees it's looking a little sparse you can always add more trees later maybe I'll make one more big maple tree here just kind of sitting back there to kind of fill out the back there and then same thing over here just to kind of fill out everything in the background there kind of make it blend nicer back there okay now what kind of want to get the overhanging tree eat that is going over hanging our camera a bit there to kind of frame our scene I'm going to duplicate this maple tree pull it up over by our camera here and not only is this going to frame our scene nicely but it's kind of sticking the camera into the forest so when we use our HDR for lighting it will kind of give it realistic bounces by having these trees behind the camera as well as in trees in front of the camera so it will give us even better looking results as well as working to frame our scene for us so I'm just going to kind of move this around until I get it lined up just right with the camera here picking a branch that I kind of like here and then rotating it down into view just a bits it's not like that's looking uh looking not too bad again we can tweak it if you want it later but I'm thinking I think I'm like the way this looks I might also want to week my camera view just a little bit now but uh oh no I think our placement is pretty good and I'm gonna move on to materials and well actually we have some nature assets to distribute as well so I'll do that now and then I'll come back and do the materials let me quick save our our forest scene here and we'll move on alright so now that we have our trees placed about approximately where we want them we might like I said make some adjustments to them eventually but we're pretty happy with the overall placement we can go ahead and bring in the next assets to our scene which is gonna be like the grass the rocks all those fine little details that I'll add a whole bunch to the scene especially closer to the camera so let's do that right now I'm gonna jump to another layer just like I did for the trees and I put my cursor in the center by going shift s cursor at your Center and then I'm going to append and this time instead of going to my tree asset pack I'm going to go to the realistic nature asset pack here just click on the blend file group and just grab the whole nature asset pack right there pen from library and you can see here that we have all of our nature assets and if you're wondering whether rotate it is because that's how they need to be orientated to work in a particle system so they're all set up to ready to be ready to use in a particle system and let's start by having our grass so what we can do is we can just grab all of these graphs models and go ctrl-g and the name it grass so we can use all those in a grass particle system same thing with like our ferns grab both those ctrl-g and name it ferns I think you get the idea right now but I can go ahead and do that for the rocks as well ctrl G and name it rocks now that we have that sort of setup I might do it for the leaves here as well real quick so ctrl G leaves and maybe some weeds so I'll grab these three weeds here ctrl G we'll name is weeds with that set though we need to create a few vertex groups to distribute these on our forest floor so I'm gonna jump back to our layer one here and what I want to do is I want to grab all of our trees but not the camera and not the floor here so I'm shift right clicking to unselect those I want to move the trees to the bottom layer so I don't have them in my way as I'm working on our floor so right now I'm just going to go ahead and create a few vertex groups going over to our vertex group settings here click on that plus button only in the first one grass jump into weight paint here and we can kind of move this window out of the way here so we have a little bit more room to work now and I'm just gonna paint out real quick where I want my grass to be distributed now you might occasionally want to turn on the bottom layer here just so you can see where a tree is if you want to say paint around it like that but otherwise you can leave the bottom layer off so we don't have those in our way I'm gonna turn the strength down a bit and I'm gonna subtract some of that because it's a little stronger than I want but now I'm just gonna go ahead and jump into the camera view because that's only what we want to paint we don't need to paint things that we can't see it's just gonna slow down our viewport I'm just gonna kind of paint in where I want the grass to be on my forest floor I don't want it everywhere but you want it maybe look a little bit keep it out into the path of the most part the path would probably not have too much grass growing on it and I'm just gonna kind of distribute it about like so a little bit closer to the camera too so we have a few shooting up in front of the camera there but I think that looks pretty good maybe just a little bit out on the field there and we can always go to subtract and kind of pull it back if we think we went too but all in all I'm thinking that's gonna be about rights and you can go to top view now kind of make it a little bit more random by not making it look like straight lines but kind of patchy grass here and there so that looks pretty good and that will work for our grass so at this point I just kind of time-lapse it because it's the exact same process for the rest of the leaves the ferns and the rocks just kind of randomly spreading out your weight paint over where you want you know your different assets to be placed and when you start creating some particle systems so for these particle systems I'm gonna go new I'm gonna change it to hair I want to Advanced Settings now I'm going to scroll down here and I'm gonna choose group and we'll start by doing the grass so I grab the grass there and you can see that it's all pointing to the side and not up the way I want it so we checked rotation another all pointing on the correct axes if I drop down to vertex groups I can grab the grass vertex group right there that we created and they also want to grab the length so doing this is gonna create the length to kind of get smaller as the grass gets away from its patchy spot and it will give it a more realistic look I found so go ahead and do that then next we can move up and grab our emitter volume here the emitter geometry to make this larger grass we're just gonna scroll this up until we get a proper size for our grass blades whatever we want don't in the camera view to kind of help judge what a good size of grass would be somebody that's looking pretty good and you can see now that the size here is working to give ourselves smaller grass particles and larger progress particles just makes it look quite a bit more realistic when the other side is kind of feeding off as it gets smaller away from the bushes of grass and then we must scrub down here and I'm going to choose children let me go it here we'll make it simple let me give us some random size here just a little bit okay and what we're gonna render about eight of these so choose the display to be maybe four and the render to be 8 so we're renders about four more times then we can see just so it keeps our viewport fast here and I'm gonna change a few of these settings here as well to give ourselves a little bit of a random look increasing the random here you can you can change the threshold a little bit some of these things will do some kind of interesting results but basically just changing the randomness of them a little bit here the roundness is gonna kind of choose how far out they are from the the main particle because basically a children protocol will emit multiple particles around it so this is to choose how far it is from each other and the roundness is kind of how far spread out so you can spread them out a little bit more now using the roundness crank it up to about 0.3 0.35 is good and then I want to take the length down a little bit as well here just to bring that down somewhere around there and that's looking pretty good the clump in the shape don't really do too much for us in this case but something like that is looking very nice I can go up here now give ourselves some more particles on top of that make it maybe 5 times that might be a little bit more than we want again you can play around with what you think looks good then I'm going to go to the rotation here and I'm going to give it a phase and then a random phase so we have a lot of these randomizing here and then a little bit in the random here as well and a little bit of a random here as well just to give ourselves some grass that looks like it's going all over the place and that will render and look very nice but we have to do one thing real quick before we forget in the render settings here this is important if you don't want to get some black outlines around these particles you need to go to your performance let me see first we have to change its cycles render of course you need to go to your light paths and you need to give it much more transparent bounces so I'm gonna go ahead and give it a T for transparent bounces just so we make sure that there's enough transparent passes to go through all those alphas of these materials but that will do it and that looks pretty good for our grass so you can go ahead and turn that system off so it's not in our way hit plus to make a new one and this time we're just gonna grab the same settings from that previous one so you can see the settings here are just particle settings so here we'll grab the same settings we'll get the grass all over the place that's fine we hit the 2 there to make it separate so we're not changing both settings at the same time and now I'm just going to give it less particles because this will probably be like our ferns so less particles and then we're just going to choose our fern group so where do we have it right there ferns you see your ferns all over the place and I want to choose the density to be ferns that places the ferns right where we want them and if you ever change your mind like maybe we want more ferns a little closer to the camera we just grab our ferns layer there and we paints them in and you can see the ferns immediately update right where we put them really cool so that's looking looking pretty good and we can leave that as it is except I don't want as many children for the ferns so this only I mean maybe three or two for these maybe two is better and that gives us a nice sort of fern look to our scene it looks nice and ferny now so again here is just another time-lapse where we go through and add the exact same particle settings and just customizing the amount a little bit and changing the vertex groups for the different placements but the same process we used for the grass and the ferns so you guys can go ahead and make it through this on your Elmer I think also just remember you need to rotate the leaves here in the acid packs so it lands flat just like all of the other models do and then you should be good to go okay so now it's on to materials but before we can really add materials to our series and lighting to see how these materials will really behave properly so do that I'm going to set up our environment lighting right now to light our entire forest and to do this you may have guessed already but it's gonna be lit by an HDR because that's gonna give you the absolute best looking results in blender cycles right now unless you want to get really crazy and tweak some other things but really really all you need is a great-looking HDR and I recommend getting it from HDR Haven pretty much depending on the HDR it's gonna completely change the way your scene looks so you don't want to experiment with some different aged ers depend what kind of look you're going for I have the one I'm using linked in the description so you guys can check that out but I'm just going to go ahead and switch to our world settings here choose use nodes I'm gonna shift a add in a texture and environment texture just connect that right up then I need to quick add in a texture coordinate and a vector mapping node once we have those we can just connect the generated to the vector right there and then the vector to the vector here there we go and I'm going to open up our texture let me jump back here this is if I jump here you can see right here it spawned 4k it will be linked in the description and you can also grab a higher quality if you want it's completely free and definitely check out some the other HDR is there if you want to experiment with the way your scene looks but with that said and done and let's switch to a rendered view now so we can see our HDR in the background and how it's going to light our scene and I'm gonna rotate our HDR along with Zed access to get the proper rotation for the lighting now I found with this HDR giving it about 240 put it in the right spot for the lighting and if you want to see exactly how it's gonna look I found adding in something like a quick cube to see how shadows are casted makes it helpful so if you can do that real now right now you can see that it's gonna be casting shadows pretty much directly from the back and that's good but not exactly great because it kind of wanted to be a little bit more from the side so I'm just gonna pull it over here and then you can see we get the shadows kind of casting on the side just like I want so I'm gonna leave it around 200 maybe 250 perfect so with that said and done we can delete our cube there we can switch this back to our material nodes down here grab our environment floor click new material and we can start constructing our floor material for our forests so what I found a little cool for this material is actually combining two different textures one being grass I want being rock and then using a geometry node to separate what parts of the mesh a rock and what parts the mesh our grass so it's kind of a cool material that I'll show you how to set up now I'm gonna start by deleting our diffuse and adding in a principled shader some shooter principle the shader will just connect it up right there and now I'm going to add some image textures to this and these image textures are from CG textures well it's actually textures calm now it used to be CG textures and I'll link in the description to the website where you can find this exact texture but let me go ahead and open this up and open up that texture now these are just some ground textures now I have the height map the normal map the roughness you can go ahead and download all of the right now and open the elbe no texture which is a fancy word for the color basically with no shadows or anything on it so go ahead and do that and now I'm going to add in a vector mapping just like before let's go just converter nope vector mapping and input texture coordinates well connect the UV to the vector and the vector to the vector so the reason I connect the UV this time is because I'm gonna go ahead and unwrap this and you go to tab select everything you unwrap that's all we have to do for the floor and we'll get a decent unwrap so with that done I'm going to go ahead and go render it so we can see how our texture is being laid out here and you can see that it's working but it's too big at the moment so I'm gonna increase the scale to be 4 & 4 so it repeats it four times essentially and that looks like it will work better so I can go ahead and go solid view now and let's add in more if our textures so I'll duplicate this texture here open up a different one this one will be the now let's go to roughness this is going to control what parts are shiny and what parts aren't so drop it into the roughness and we also want the vector connected to it and this is how you set up a basic material when you have the height maps and the roughness maps and stuff you get great results just by plugging them right into the printable shader here in blender and let's go ahead and open up our normal map now with our normal map you want to set it to be non color data and we want to plug this into a normal map node so I'm going to go converter color vector right there a normal map go ahead and plug it right into that this is going to be not the strength but the color and then I'm gonna choose the UV map there and then I'm going to plug this in to a bump node this is going to be the height for the normal and then the bump node will go straight into the normal of our principal shader here we'll need one more texture so I'm going to pull these down we can connect the vector up to this one as well and just make room for one more this one's gonna be the height map let me grab the height map there and this will be the height of our bump so dropping that into there connecting this up right here and if we go rendered we should have an excellent looking rock textured floor here and as you can see it does look pretty cool doesn't it so that's fine and dandy but it's not I suffer a realistic as you can tell so let's go ahead and make some adjustments to that so first off if you want to tweak say the amount of glossy I like to drop just a vector math note in there or converter math node set it to something like multiply and now I might change this I can change just how reflective and glossy it really is leaving out like a point three gives me a pretty good idea of what I want maybe even less as it looks a little bit overly reflective right now actually more that's what I'm looking for Oh point seven so what's interesting with the roughness is the black values is what's going to be the shiny reflective and the white values are going to be what's pretty much not reflective at all just a very barely glossy look so the brighter it is the less reflective essentially okay so with that set up let's go ahead and duplicate our principal shader as I'm gonna have one more material like I said earlier mixing in with this so I'm gonna also duplicate our mech or mapping and texture node here and let's duplicate a texture up here as well to be our node for our grass so now I'm gonna go ahead and open up this grass texture again I'll link it in the description from texture comm connect it to the color and before I do anything else I'm just going to connect it to a mix shader' so shader mix shader' and we'll get this set up so it's working with our ground shader so if I drop it right there you can see right now it's just a blend of both of them if I go one we have just our grass if we go zero we have just our rack now I want this factor to be determined by a different node that is going to tell us what the ups and downs of our mesh is and to do that it's going to be the geometry node so input geometry I need to just drop this into a converter color ramp so we can extract the data from it and use it to do exactly what we want so when I'm working with nodes it's helpful to enable the node regular add-on in blender so I'm gonna go to add-ons here search for node regular go ahead and hit that checkbox and now if we go control shift it will automatically jump to that and give me a preview of what it's looking like so this makes a lot easier to jump between materials and stuff and kind of tell what I'm seeing so what I'm going to do is I'm going to pull the blacks way in and as you might see already we're getting a black area in the bottom and a white area on the tips of our objects and this is what I want to blend between Iraq and our grass textures so I'm going to kind of find a middle ground here something like that is looking looking pretty good but I want to make it pretty harsh so we don't have too much blending of the textures in just one color and then the next so tightening them up like that will work pretty well now I'm just gonna drop this into the factor of our mix shader' and if I go ctrl shift under that we can see the grass on the higher ground and the rocks on the lower ground and it's looking very cool the one thing is I want a little bit more grass so I'm gonna pull the black value back here a bit and I'm gonna pull the grass around in a bit and then maybe tighten them up a little bit there something like that so check it now you can see it's more grass and less rock and it's looking very decent so now what I'm going to do is because I don't have all of the data that came with this texture the roughness the map the page and all that you could create these with a program like crazy bump but there's also some just online sites that will create those versions of the textures for you but also what you can do is you can kind of create them right in the blender note editor here and that's what I'm gonna do for this to show you guys both ways of doing it so for example I'm gonna start with the bump I'm gonna drop in a color ramp and then I'm gonna drop in the bump node just like before vector bump and we connect the color to the height and then this image is going to be right into the color ramp and this is going into the normal so right off the bat you can see that's a really harsh sort of bump but if I go just to this bump texture here and have a zoom in a little bit I can kind of control how much black and how much white and this is gonna be the white areas that are higher in the black areas that are not something like that is looking pretty decent but you can see that it's still way too strong so I'm going to take the strength and reduce it down to about a point one maybe a point two just something that will look look good without being over-the-top 0.25 and that's looking looking pretty decent I think so that's gonna work for the bump as you can see now with the rock texture is looking pretty decent together maybe 0.3 would be actually ideal and then I'm going to create by duplicating this again a material for a roughness input here so for the roughness we don't want anything that harsh of black as it will be way too reflective so I'm just going to take this and make it a bright gray color and like I said before if you remember the white areas are going to be non reflective but I kind of want the white areas in this image here to be reflective so to make it that way so I'm gonna hit that box to flipped around and now you can see that the black area is which will be the reflective ones alright the tips and the white areas are kind of in the crevices where it won't be reflective kind of what I'm looking for so I'm gonna drop that into the roughness now and we can check to see how that's looking and you can see we get a little bit of shine but not too much because we made this not very black and it's looking like a pretty decent material so with that setup we we have a pretty nice-looking material set up here you can make some tweaks to this now if you wanted to say for example darken your texture I would add a color with a mix and we just multiply a little bit of a darker color on top of it so for the rock so you could do that and then control how dark it is by changing this texture here and I'm gonna do some of that because this is a little bright right now so to kind of darken that and do that and I could duplicate this node up here and do a little bit of the same for not our roughness but our color right here just kind of finding a green that looks decent and there we have it so we might have to tweak this material further on if we find it's too reflective or something but um for now I'm gonna leave it as it is and maybe just make it a little less reflective and making it brighter right here and that looks pretty decent so let's go ahead to the next material and set it up all right so with the floor materials set up the materials are already there on all of our assets because we use the asset packs of course if we were creating anything from scratch we'd want to go ahead and the materials to that now also if you want to add any sort of extra details or something to your scene now would be a good time to do it one thing I like to do is the trees closer to the camera I like to tab me to edit mode grab just the base of the tree by hitting L so it selects just the base of the tree right here I'm hit L there we go and we can hit P and separate my selection with that down on a tab out of edit mode and I'm going to take this bottom sort of trunk now and I'm going to hold go control to just to add a subdivision surface so we get more detail on the trees closer now if you want the leaves to still follow the tree we should grab the leaves then grab the trunk and go ctrl P and keep the offsets so just parents and now when we move the trunk the leaves are still move but the trunk is higher resolution so you could do that for any of the trees right next to the camera to give them a little bit more detail you could also go ahead and do things like I did with adding mushrooms and stuff using the same particle system settings that I was showing you guys earlier just using it for something like a mushroom now to add to your scene there I did go ahead and add in a few more particle systems as you guys can see here when we had our leaves already but I added some weeds and I added some sticks so the sticks are added just like the leaves but um yeah I just used a little stick model actually grab a twig right off the realistic tree so easy stuff to do just a little bit time-consuming so if you guys want to do that go ahead and do that now now I'm kind of thinking and I want to pull out some of these trees to be a little bit more visible here in my scene grab them on the ships edge just we have a little bit more framing going on here that's looking better raise it up a little bit but yeah now we're getting close to the rendering stage so before I go too much further I'm gonna show you guys how to set up the render settings here letmego duplicate that tree pull it back here just give ourselves a little more trees in the distance there looks nice so I'm gonna show you guys how to set up the render settings now so first we can grab our camera and go to our camera settings and we already set up our focal view a little bit earlier when we were setting up our composition at all but I'm gonna choose the focus now so if you choose limits you can then choose the distance to be what you want the focus of your camera to be now I want to be focused right around this main tree that's on the side here so I'm going to move the distance until our little crosshairs and lined up to what we want to be focused I'm going to change the aperture type here to be f-stop and give it about F 2.0 well maybe a 1.8 as the shallow depth of field this will now make objects further from the camera blurry to give it that realistic look and I'm gonna go ahead and change the blades to be 6 on our bouquet blur okay alright with that done we're gonna camera now we're gonna have the depth of field if we were to check that now I'm not going to check it just yet when I rotate my camera a little bit here upwards to the side a little bit and pull it down just to kind of find find the angle I'm going for that's looking pretty good okay so next step is to set up the mist now I'm gonna go mist by choosing mist right there and then in our world settings if we go to our render layers first and choose mist you can see now in our world settings here we have the mist pass and this is gonna be where our mist starts and where it ends and you can see just like the crosshairs this is two dots on this line and the depth is gonna be where it stops and the start is gonna be obviously where it starts so I'm gonna take the depth to be right about to our last tree there as you can see there it looks about right maybe a little bit less and then starting about five is good starting around our first tree there maybe a little bit further out starts but that'll give us a good range of depth for our mist pass so with that setup we can go ahead and in our render settings here choose what our render resolution is gonna be I don't want anything crazy big because it I'm ready to take too long so I'm gonna make its 1280 by maybe like 640 so it's a little bit widescreen as I thought it worked well for this scene and then I'm gonna crank the resolution to be all the way up I'm gonna pull the camera back a little bit and now that I change the resolution as well and just some other settings that you'll want to set up the background is going to need to be transparent so you can choose that right here now we won't have the background in the background and there's gonna be some other settings along the ways that you're gonna want to talk probably tweak but up pretty much you can start a render now and if you see airs will fix the problems but I'm going to do that now like I said there could always be more detail added into a nature scene you can go crazy adding any sort of logs or mossy areas and stuff I actually grabbed a log from a previous scene I created a series I did on my channel while back and I actually used that log just to throw in there as well because the more nature you throw out in your scenes the better it will look and now that you know the proper way of appending files and bring them in you guys can feel free to do more of that yourself but as it is I'm gonna go now and render in a second actually I just thought of something that would be kind of cool to show and that is showing you guys how to make kind of a dead looking tree so I'm just going to grab this tree here to have it edit mode and all I'm gonna do is grab L and select our main tree here and some of the other branches would be kind of cool but we don't need them so I'm going to go ahead and hit P and actually let's go shift D first so we duplicated it and then P and separate by selection now I can tab out of edit mode and we have a separate tree here with no branches applied to it and you can use this as a dead tree in your background just to add some more variation to your forest and give yourself some better looks you want to scale it down quite a bit and make it look kind of like a dead bush your branch back there if I hit Z you can see what its gonna look like through the trees and yeah just shifty grab along the shifts ed and I kind of placed some about any forest rotating them at different angles and stuff and you'll get some some sort of cool-looking variety the more variety you can fit into a nature scene the better so I'm gonna do that I'm gonna pull this pine tree down a little bit as it looks like it's floating in the air there okay that's a little better and maybe just one more tree over here as I'm moving them around 50 grab a little shift said just to kind of hang in there nicely add a few more leaves to our scene rotate it around and yeah something like that oops got lost in the rotation no no worries just hit escape and you can fix it there we go nice tree kind of hanging in there in the corner there should look good and with all that said and done we hit save so if you want to double check your particle systems make sure that the render box is checked on all of them and you should be ready to roll the other thing you want to do is make sure that in the render layers you have both of them selected which we do and then also any sort of tweaks on your trees if you want to check that now you can go ahead and do that and what I actually found to work faster when you want to check your materials is instead of having to preview the whole render you go shift B so you can just find a border and then you switch to rendered view and we can see now if just this area is looking good and make any tweaks that we want to it so as this loads in a real quick loading all the textures up you can see that a forest it's looking pretty good actually if you want to tweak something like the maple leaf leaves right here you could grab them like I'm going to do now you have your note here this is what I created in the nature as a pack and for example you could give it the random fall leaf color and you can make these leaves look to be fall colored leaves so like they're all turning red if I change all these leaves to have the random color here you can see that we get the cool of fall color leaves in our scene so if you want to add some of that to your scene that's an option to give you some some variation but yeah the more you add variations you seen the more the more cool it will look in my opinion okay so all that said and done though I think this is gonna look pretty good so we can render it and then we can jump to our final stage of compositing so if you didn't check what I did there I just shibby and selected everything so it renders the whole shebang you can also do this in the render settings here by checking the border and I'm going to change that to GPU render save our project and we'll render it ok so as our scenes started rendering here I saw a pretty glaring mistake right off the bat with our grass looking way blown out in color and I thought about just fixing it off-camera or recording the spot where I made the mistake but instead I thought I'd keep it going and I show you guys how to fix something like this if you come across an issue like this yourself and you need to fix it so first of all we're gonna quick tweak our textures a little bit because obviously they're just a little bright to begin with so I'm going to go ahead and in this scene our textures are just a little bright so I'm gonna grab one of our graph models here and I'm gonna tap into edit mode to open this group in the graph settings and ambitionally grab the color for it and I'm gonna make it a bit darker every one of these so tab here we have the color connecting into the color for our principle shader and this is where I tweak the color I have our color RGB curves there and I'm just darkening the color on all of these a bit go into the color and making a big darker so it's not as blown out on all of these so once that is done we're gonna have just quick check all of these real quick and make sure that we've darkened them and it looks looks to be about so so with that said and done the next step is going to be changing our lighting a little bit so we have a little bit too much direct lighting directly on our grass if I go record or rendered right here with just a border on our grass you can see there's still kind of blown out and bright so to fix this I'm gonna change some of our render settings here by rotating our light source to be a little bit less direct right on our grass so to do that I'm gonna change our Y to be about a 7 and our X to be about 3 now this is what I found to work pretty well for this scene but it is going to vary depending on your HDR so you'll want to turn on your HDR so you can really see in the background as you move it around so that's all fine and dandy but the last thing that I need to change is a less grass particles in general because we don't want to be too crazy particles all over the place so I'm gonna make the particles more random in size by taking this down and you can see that's already fixing an issue I took the number down a bit and I'm gonna make the overall size just a little bit bigger I think because in making the random size a bit smaller so the overall size can be a little bit bigger now so I'll take that up a bit but with that done now the last thing I wanted to do is take the total number down a little bit so we'll go down to 2,000 plus the particles that we have as children so you can see that's looking quite a bit better and then the last setting is gonna be to choose filmic as filmic keeps things from being blown out of color with much wider spectrum of colors so I'm going to choose filmic right here as our render color and if I choose that you can see we have much more control over the color in the grass there so with that all said and done we should be ready to render again there's just one last thing that I forgot to mention that I'm going to do now and that is add some extra glossy to our scene so I'm going to choose glossy I'm going to choose direct indirect and color this will give us some more control in the compositor to add some extra layer of gloss to our scene to kind of make it look like a wet maybe rain forest I thought it was just kind of a cool look so I'm gonna go ahead and do that here and you're also gonna want to render an environment pass so check that as well and then the last setting here is denoising this will speed up your render time quite a bit because you don't need as many samples when I use do you noising so go ahead and check that box and then you can take your samples and your sampling it down even more for especially like a test and render like this I'm gonna take it down to just 50 as it's not my final render and I don't need crazy samples so with denoising on I'm just gonna take that down to 50 samples we'll go ahead and shift B select everything or you can uncheck border here either way it works and hit save and then we'll turn on both layers and render one more time alright and there is our first render pass and you can see that it's not looking too terrible it's pretty low quality due to the low sort of sample count we're going with and the denoising is messing up a few areas here and there but overall it's it's not so bad and it's looking like it has potential there's some areas that could use a little bit of texture tweaking and maybe areas that the part close could be spread out maybe some grass over here still but all in all it's not so bad so I'm gonna make a few tweaks but then when we get into the compositing so the I'll render it out again later but for now I'm gonna leave this open so I can see what I'm doing and I'm going to pull this up to my 3d view so usually you have some tweaks like I said after you make a render and as you can see here I did duplicate the trees a few times just to kind of block light from coming in the front here because our HDR is lit from all sides we wanted to put some trees behind it so I did duplicate a few trees and just stick them right behind the camera there to kind of block some of the light coming at the scene from this angle and actually I could probably do more of that maybe duplicate some of these trees and just kind of fill out the forest behind the camera so things that aren't visible to the camera directly but would be blocking light from reaching past the camera all right so with that done a few things first off the lighting on our tree here it looks like the bump could be a little bit stronger so I might break our window here go into our node editor here and with our tree selected I might just grab our group here and give the bump a little more strength so I could take the bump and just crank this up to be more about a one more point eights I was pretty low we can crank that up quite a bit higher um so that will look good actually we might that's the leaf my bed put the back grab the maple bark yes got the displacements and just make this a bit strong or something like a three and yeah where that will look a little bit better and everything else is not looking so bad like I said I would tweak the grass here to put some grass over here and maybe some grass that with you as well so with a grass vertex scoop selected let's pull this down jump to our weight paint mode and yeah um a little bit of grass over here a little bit of grass over here but oh no I think we have a nice-looking scene coming along here another sort of particle that I had added to my scene to add a little bit more detail to it was just some really small trees and I did that by just grabbing a branch off one of my trees um they come the nature isit packs come with the branches the tree does so you could grab any of those branches and you it's in your scene but um yeah I just duplicated some of the branches just like the tree would have been duplicated to give a little bit more sort of small bushy trees like you might find in a forest but all in all it's looking not so bad I think the guy said that a few times actually somewhere it's to hit this but I think the ferns could be a little bit bigger so grabby ferns and make those a little bit bigger but now this step is over and it is time actually I think I should put a few ferns but here as well this is the last thing I'm gonna do before whoops wait being mowed down for dicks paint mode there we go more ferns back - that looks better so the next thing to do now is going to be our compositing stage so this is where we can add some real cool effects to our scene so I'll switch to the compositor now choose use nose and backdrop and let's go to that hit alt V to make a little bit bigger or smaller V just to make it smaller and what I'm gonna start off by doing is you remember we rendered out the glossy pass and that miss pass I'm gonna start with the glossy pass so the first step is gonna be to add the direct and the indirect passes together I'm gonna do this with a color mix I'm gonna change it to add I'm just going to grab the direct and the indirect and together perfect if I go ctrl shift you can see what that's looking like kind of a messy sort of classy pass and then I'm going to hit shift D switch it to multiply and I'm gonna multiply the color to the bottom of this so now we can see we have that some extra sort of cutting of the classiness which is gonna be good and then I'm going to take this pass and when I denoise it a little bit so I'm gonna use the node D speckle it's in the let me see the distort I'm at one of these is gonna be in here filter yeah D speckle put that in there and I'm just going to take the threshold way down like a point zero six just to reduce some of the noise in this glossy pass and then I'm going to take it and we go shift a add in a color mix again and this time I'm going to switch it to add and I'm going to mix it with our image put the image of the top socket the glossy in the bottom and now you can see the difference if I go to this layer versus this layer it just gives us a sense of shine to everything now it's too much on its own but I like giving just about 0.5 of that to the scene and this was a tip actually learned from Lucas Bieber doing the wave scene that he sent over and it kind of works for other scenes like this to kind of give it a glossy look to your scene to make it look kind of wet like a rain forest so that's looking pretty good and the next step is gonna be to add that mist in so let's go ahead and drop in a converter color ramp and connect the mist pass to this if we take a look at it you can see we have a Miss Pass now a few issues with it first of all I want to duplicate that D speckle noise and do the same thing for this to kind of take away some of that noise it'll help a little bit and secondly what I'm going to do is I don't want the mist to be hanging quite so high so a tip that I learned that I did and worked really well actually is using a box mask to kind of take out the top here where the mist is right now that I don't want to be so to do this I'm just going to add in a matte a box mask and you can see here this is the size of our mask I'm just going to leave a sender like that I'm going to take the scale to be up quite a bit wider along with the X there and then up quite a bit bigger on the why I'm holding the shift' as I'm doing this because it's kind of a sensitive so it's easier to move in small increments with shift and then we'll raise it up to be just the top third of our image I'm going to throw that into a filter blur node change it to fast Gaussian if we take a look at this we can crank this up a bit now and just gonna blur the edge mainly along the y-axis like so and then I'm going to invert this so I'm going to throw it into a color invert node and I'm going to multiply it to our missed pass so it takes away the white values of the missed pass up higher where I don't want this mist to be up in the sky it's sort of like a low hanging fog so I'm gonna change this now to a color mix I'm going to change it to multiply hook this one in the bottom socket hook this one on the top socket and you can see now that we have it working I don't want to be a hundred percent but something like that looks pretty good and then make the the transition a little bit more blurred by fading that a bit alright so now I can take this mist pass and go shift a color mix what do we have it right here and I can mix it directly with this and when I do that you can see right now it's not looking great because it's multiplying I mean let me see here it's mixing as the color and I want to be mixing as a factor so we're mixing in white right here I'm just going to take a darker sort of mist to it and a slight Bluegreen look not too much though and that's looking not looking too bad and so the last step all not the last step but the most important step left I would say is to add something in the background here and what are we going to add but but we already rendered here so this is a trick that I also came up with that worked really well for extending our scene without having to render a ton of nature and that is using our same scene duplicated and put in the background a few times to look like it goes on longer without really having to render all that so to do this we're first going to drop in a translate node when we were shift a add node distort translate and I'm gonna grab our image here the one with the the glossy already applied to it connect it right in there and if we take a look at this it's pretty much just the same image right now except I'm going to be able to slide it as you can see along the x-axis so that's going to work perfect I want to wrap though along the x-axis so I can slide it and it's going to repeat itself as you can see there now I'm going to set up a scale node I'm gonna drop that down I'm going to change it to relative and I'm gonna make it a bit smaller so I'm taking it's not about 0.4 and then the y-axis is gonna come down a bit as well all right so that's looking not too terrible you might see where I'm going with this I'm gonna throw it into a blur node so filter blur fast Gaussian and we'll just give it a small amount of blur just to continue that depth of field faking it this time and then I'm going to drop it into a color alpha over this is gonna be the top sockets all right image here is going to be in the bottom sockets and as you can see it's working it's in the background but it's not exactly where we want it to be and that's what this translate notice for we can take it and we can kind of position where we want to be by moving the y-axis here and we can drop it in right about so so it's connected to the top there but still kind of connecting the back there as well and that's looking not so bad it's actually looking pretty good the last thing we want to do is we need to add we could scale us maybe a little bit on the Y you can kind of stretch those trees back there to make it look like it goes on a little bit more than it really does if I pull this down a little bit right about there and then scale these trees up a little bit something like that then I can pull this down a little bit as well so that's looking pretty good and what I can do now is I want to reduce the amount of the amount of fog just a little bit on this scene but I also want to add some fog to the top layer so I'm gonna use the same node here just to add its own separate fog up here so let me go ahead and use this as a factor up there and you can see that now we have fog on both layers but I'm gonna adjust the amount here so to do that I'm just gonna duplicate this node take the original node here connect it to the bottom socket and now depending on how much this is it's gonna be how much fog we have down there same thing with this node here I want to do that here as well so I can control the amount of fog this factor if it's at zero will be a hundred percent if I crank it up it'll be less so you can use this to kind of decide how much fog you want in your scene obviously you want to be more foggy in the distance and not as foggy in the front here now I think I blurred the background a little bit too much here I'm going to take that down just a little bit so we don't want it to be too different just a little bit of blur and then you can play around with the mist values until you find a value that blends it in nicely right now it looks like there's not enough mist on the front here as it's sort of cutting into the background there and you also want you as convert pre-multiply okay so now we can kind of work with this to find the right amount of mist right about so and then this was gonna have to be a little bit more misty as well like so a little more mist here would be good here we go and as you can see that's looking looking pretty nice now the one thing is because we're using this as the value we're not kidding pure mist on everything like it should be so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna quick feed this mist pass going to our background layer into a color ramp node so to go ahead and do that we just drop it in there I'll just pull it up here drop our mist pass into it and then into this factor so this I can control now if I take the black feather up we're gonna have some pure mist so you can see like this tree that's being duplicated back there I want the mist to be starting at about a level 0.5 or so and then just going from there because it's already supposed to be misty back there so that's gonna do that and we can control the amount again with this node here and we can control how it's aligned to the background by moving whoops not the Y but the x-axis here on our translate node so you can for example pull it around until you find kind of a pattern that looks cool and that kind of looks cool it's kind of like a curving trail so that looks pretty nice and now the last thing is going to be and that is the environment pass that we rendered out here we're gonna use that to fill in any gaps in the background that might still remain so to do this it's just a simple alpha over node alpha over and we're gonna do it just for our top layer here so right before it comes in right here is where we want to drop that alpha over node I know things are getting a little bit hairy here but uh if I just kind of pull these around so you can get a clearer view of it we just have this convertor node changing our top mist value and our alpha over node here to throw the environment on it so we can throw the environment on our background layer there as you can see there and that will kind of fill in the black areas back there and give us a better looking background and of course we also have to flip these around still the background is behind those trees and that looks a bit better there as you can see now and you're getting a pretty nice-looking results so now you can see that a forest continues going on back there and we're having some nicer looking nicer looking backgrounds you could also rotate your HDR a little bit if you're not happy with what you're seeing back there just to get something that's looking a little better um in fact I might do that right now real quick for you guys if I go ahead and turn off transparency over here and then I go to a blank layer like I did and if I go to rendered view I can open up our node editor here and you can see that we're just getting a little bit of the highlights right here and I'd rather be over here a little bit more so I'm going to take our world settings here switch it to the world settings so we can change the background here hit end it close off the properties and I'm gonna pull this to the side a little bit more so the brightness will be over here and not right in our path there now we'll just have some of the nature there in the background so that will work well and I can go ahead and hit solid and check transparent again go back to our two layers as well so the last few tweaks are gonna obviously be color tweaks and you can also add the light rays like I added in my scene I'll quick show you guys how do the light rays but we'll get into the end of this tutorial now so I don't want to take too much more time for the light rays though it's a basic in add filter Sunbeam right there and we're going to take the factor of our environment I don't know our mist pass for this if I go to this real quick you can see that we're not seeing anything until I give us some ray lengths and then I'm going to place it so the center of our arrays basically at the point where your lamp is going to be where the Sun is coming in your scene is lined up with the Rays so basically I'm just lining it up to where I imagine the Sun possibly being in the scene which is up here somewhere and I am increasing the ray length to about a point 3 yourself so we have some nice beam coming down and I want to be off scene so I want the Sun not to be in the scene but I want to be up and out of the scene like so and we just get some nice rays coming across the scene here now something like that right about there yeah right about there coming from over there and now what I'm gonna do with this is I'm going to take this mist pass I'm gonna duplicate that multiply node and I'm gonna put it on it to multiply the essentially I'm multiplying the mist pass here as you can see if I go to it over it so basically this is gonna be cutting off the Rays so it's not visible and it just works better to give the Rays the effect that I want so now if I take this and I just add it we'll just duplicate this mix note here for example now if I just add it to here actually I could add it after our our alpha over notes so pretty much the last node right now if I change it to add I connect this to the the top socket and that went to the bottom the more I add here the more you can see those sunbeams and mist kind of coming in and it just adds another layer of mist mixed in with the sunbeams this time to give it kind of a cool we were looking effect if you want to control the sunbeams a little bit more you could throw a vector or a converter math node over it right here drop it in there switch it to multiply and crank that intensity up a bit I Fisher it now there's gonna be more intense so just something kind of cool that you can do and obviously the mist is a little bit strong now so you might want to take it down a notch but you can see kind of the mist like right here for example pouring through and it just gives it a cool-looking effect you don't want to go too high with this I'm going to take it down to about a point 0.3 something 0.3 0.4 will work but that's gonna do it guys the last thing is color grading and believe it or not I'm gonna leave the color grading mostly for Adobe Lightroom now I know a lot of you guys like to do everything within blender and I do too but there are certain things color-grading that is just easier to do in another program so I'm going to do just some basic color grading here you guys could do more if you want but then I'll show you how to do the last bit and touches in a program like Adobe Lightroom we just get quicker updates and things just look a little bit better it works a little bit faster you have a little bit more control but for the basic color grade that I'm going to do right in here I'm going to switch it to offset power slope I'm going to give it a little bit more bright on the the highlights here and this is kind of the darks here so I'm going to take this one up to make it darker it's kind of backwards but this is just the way this works it goes up for darker and then I'm gonna crank this up a little bit too so this is basically adding some contrast to the scene I'm gonna give the shadows a slight blue hue by pulling it away from the blue because this like I said this slider works just a little bit backwards it's the way it's supposed to be working and then I can give this a little bit of a warm or hue something like that a little bit of a red hue alright and then I could set I can crank the blacks up a little bit more still and crank the brights up a little bit more still just to give a little bit more contrast you could also go to your settings here and choose a different contrast like a medium high contrast for example and that will give you a little bit more contrast to your scene but oh this is looking pretty good and like I said I'm gonna render it out one more time now with the adjustments we made alright and there we have it a much better looking for scene than before with those tweaks that we made obviously there's always countless tweaks you can make you can even go ahead and do some of the extra things I did like little mushrooms on the trees and like I said the logs but there is our finished scene guys it's looking very nice the last thing I'm gonna do like I promised earlier to show you how to do a little bit of color grading in Adobe Lightroom and then we'll call this project done so I'm gonna go ahead and save it and then to save my image out so I'm just making sure my last note is connected to the composite node then I can go to my UV image editor down here grab the rendered result by starting to right type out the rendered results you'll see it right there just make sure that's updated I'm connecting that it might have not yep the color grading wasn't there yet so then I'm just gonna go save as image I'm gonna save it as our finished forest with that done we save the image then we jump over to Lightroom here I'm just going to go ahead and open up that image here and do a little bit of color grading on these same things like I said can be done in blender it's just a little bit easier in my opinion to do it in Lightroom because you have quicker updates and a little bit more control so going over to develop will grab that image and a few things starting with the tone curve I like to crush the blacks a little bit to make it look a little bit more like it's like it's a forest scene here so I'm going to come down here I'm gonna change that to a point curve nope not that I'm gonna come up here with the whites make a little bit brighter I'm going to take the blacks down a bit down here like so by pulling the blacks out a bit giving ourselves a bit more contrast essentially and you can change the middle one here then define like the middle ground for the contrast that you're looking for and take the whites down maybe just a little bit as well but pulling that down okay a little bit of tweaking there and now we can take the contrast up a little bit up here as well I like to take the saturation down a little bit actually so doesn't look too overly saturated but then you can add in a little bit of vibrance to bring back some of that color so something like that looks pretty cool and a few last things crushing the blacks a little bit up here as well makes it look better playing out the shadows sometimes go and brighter something screen darker depending on the scene and the highlights as well maybe taking the highlights down a little bit here and maybe making the whites a little bit brighter here okay that's the that looks good it doesn't really need to be adjusted for the whites the last thing that is coming down here we can actually change the individual colors for each group you can really change like the hue for example and maybe pull out some more color in these leaves so if I go to over here I can change from hue luminance and saturation figure in saturation and crank it up on the orange you can see that we really make those leaf colors pop a little bit more soon with the yellow here I can make the leaf colors pop up a bit more in here it's subtle but um it's definitely noticeable if you're looking for it so I'm going to pull up the saturation a little bit for those things to make them a little bit more visible the same thing with the luminance you can make them a little bit brighter if I grab these type they're for the green and the yellow as well you can see right in here it's where it's really making the most difference when I change like the yellow for example and you don't want to go too crazy with this but it can give you a little bit more control over it now this is more for like the bright blue highlights I'm going to take these down a little bit and then you can be able to adjust the grass with the green here obviously going brighter or darker depending on what you want a little bit brighter here looks good and then the hue again if you want to change the hue of the grass to be little bit more blue to be more little yellow whatever fits your fancy yeah you have lots of control and Lightroom here doing some of these a little bit of adjustments I'll just go through all this and play with them a little bit until I find I'm hitting the colors that I'm really looking for but that is looking pretty good last few things we can do is if you scroll down here we can easily add a vignette a little bit of sharpening a little bit of noise reduction I like to add not too much noise reduction because you don't want to ruin your details but a little bit can sometimes cleaning image up a little bit a little bit of the vignettes looks nice and the last thing is a little bit of grain to image can help fake that it's a render so there it is guys I hope you've had fun following along with this tutorial creating something cool so thanks for watching guys leave a like if you enjoyed the video leave a dislike if you didn't leave a comment if you had a question and I'll see you all in my next video tutorial bye

Channel: CG Geek

Views: 266,181

Keywords: Nature, Blender, Forest, Tutorial, Grass, Rock, Tree, realistic, environment, model, texture, 3d, unreal, unity

Id: DtC4-mwPRww

Length: 72min 13sec (4333 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 09 2018