Create a Grass Environment in Blender

hello this is james from james films and today i wanted to show you how to make realistic looking grass in blender i'll walk you through actually creating the surface that we'll be scattering particles on adding in the particles themselves and then actually lighting and rendering the scene recently i've become synonymous with making these kinds of abstract surreal interior renders where i sort of bring the outdoors indoors this actually started as a project that i began around the beginning of quarantine where i really was missing hiking outdoors with a lot of my friends so i wanted to kind of create the experience of hiking but in a quarantined room in a small space that you're familiar with so these are some of the results of some of my projects that i've worked on and this actually spawned a much larger series that have been continuing over on my instagram page at james underscore films you can check out there for a lot more of these kinds of renders if this suits what you're interested in with surreal nature renders and without further ado let's get into the tutorial also just excuse the audio quality i just got a new microphone that will be coming in just a couple days so i'll be using that for future tutorials but hopefully this will suffice for now thanks for bearing with me so let's just talk about grass in the wild first and just show you a couple examples of what it looks like here so you can see there is not really when you think of grass and i guess initially trying to draw a picture of grass you usually will just draw blades of grass in the same color but you can see in real images there's so much variation in color and contrast and also just in length and size and distribution of grass in the scenes so you have to really take this all in consideration when you're actually making a render and try to achieve this sort of randomness but controlled randomness with the grass and i'll break down exactly what we're seeing in these images here so first let's talk about the lighting that you're seeing here so lighting is essential for getting really realistic looking grass because the grass it's kind of got this translucency to it almost in some cases where it can add some nice brightness or kind of glow like you see in this image on the right here to the scene or if it's getting blocked out by trees or other blades of grass or other things like lavender for example it can be shadowed and look darker so there's all this contrast that you can really bake in really well with 3d programs like blender and the key to actually getting good lighting in blender is to keep it simple to start out with you can always add in some more lights and point lights and sun lamps to add some extra contrast and lighting to the scene but to be honest with you for most of the renders i do i just keep it very simple and i use an hdri and a sun lamp and what these do are two different things so for the hgri i think it's a great starting point to initially get some kind of lighting and color to your scene if you're looking at these images from before if i go back here the skies in a scene are never one color you know a sky is never just perfectly blue or even if it's an overcast day it's never perfectly white there's always some kind of color variation in luminosity and also in saturation so an hdri that kind of fills in the gaps and gives you a good starting point to kind of be splashing lots of different color and brightness on the grass surface while i also add in a sun lamp to the scene and this just takes the light a step further and specifically targets the lighting intensity i think it adds in some really great shadows you can kind of crank up the intensity of it a bit and really show where the directionality of your light is coming you can do this to a certain extent with the hdri but i think to a certain point if you keep trying to push the brightness on an hdri the image just becomes too washed out and you're really losing a lot of that color variation that is essential and that what you're looking for with the hdri and with the sun lamp you can get really nice crisp shadows because of your ability to adjust the brightness and i'll get into this in more detail as we actually begin the process so let's also talk about the color of the grass too this is largely influenced by the lighting conditions obviously but grass also takes many different shapes and it's highly influenced by the surface that it's actually growing on so i've showed a couple examples here from what the images you're looking at before and you can see there's this color variation in parts that are hit by light it's nice and bright there's also kind of soily parts in here kind of more like mud or dirt and then you've got these kind of deeper greens which are maybe like moss or some kind of darker forms of grass similarly here you kind of have some dead grass almost and then scattered in between that there's some maybe clovers or or fresher grass that's there and then in here where this is really being splashed by the light you see this brightness you don't have almost this washed out perfectly translucent grass and then as we get further down here there's some darker grass which maybe doesn't get as much light because it's further down and some also kind of brighter ones here too and the actual color that you're seeing here sure it's also influenced largely by the lighting but also it's very much influenced by the surface that's underneath it so here you've got this forest floor here you've got some kind of planes and also some kind of grassland or meadow here and i've shown some examples of textures that are actually on a website from a great creator kaimosh he makes some really nice textures that he releases some versions of for free and you can see in these textures there's lots of variation there's leaves and grass and rocks and then there's also these kind of mossy surfaces so whenever i'm creating a render of grass i always start with the uv i start with the surface that's underneath and then build up on that surface it's really important to kind of have a nice base to understand the colors of your scene and trying to what kind of environment you're trying to create whether it be a dry forest floor or a kind of mossy wet area so let's also talk about the particles themselves so this is obviously uh the star of the scene here so to speak we've got a lot of different options to do this and if you look up other tutorials on youtube they'll often show you exactly how to create grass from scratch but these take a lot of time and it takes a lot of time even further to get the grass to look somewhat realistic and then you have to make other different variations of grass and clovers and whatnot so this just adds a lot of time and i think for beginners it can be very overwhelming and you can kind of feel like you're just swimming in place not really getting anywhere so what i'd recommend is to try to use some pre-made assets to save time and get to this really awesome quality very quickly so you can focus on what really matters which is creating the artwork if you like creating grass or photo scans why not by all means go ahead and make it but for this for beginners i really think it's a good starting point to actually just use some assets so you can get some experience modeling scenes lighting scenes texturing rendering all the things that are important to the full 3d process and not just focusing on one little aspect of making these grass particles so i'll talk about a couple different methods to do this specifically for this one i'm going to be using something called groswall which is available to try for free so you can actually get this and mess around with just a couple of their systems is kind of a limited version that you can experiment with i'll be using the full version for the sake of this tutorial but i want to keep in mind that i try to make my tutorials as free and accessible as possible for beginners because it's often a barrier of entry for a lot of people trying to get into 3d uh the cost of things i mean a lot of 3d software is really expensive and it's hard to just drop a thousand dollars if you're not sure you're going to like the software or if you're even maybe cut out to to take something on at such an advanced level and you really feel like you're not getting your money's worth so that's why blender is great because it's free there's no barrier of entry you can just download it and start experimenting and having a lot of fun with it so for this one we're going to be using a free texture from kai moish i use one of these in a previous video which was this sandy tutorial that i made you can check that one out that one's a lot of fun to do kind of touches on a different aspect of some of my surreal renders which is displacements of really cool terrain but we'll be pulling a kind of grassy moss looking texture which i've linked in the description as i mentioned i'll be using groswald and then we'll be using a free hdri from something called hdri skies which is also linked in the description so what we're actually going to be aiming for today is something that looks like this i would touch on one of the renders that i do where i apply grass in a room and i kind of build out an architectural scene and do all kinds of stuff in the background but for the sake of this tutorial i really want to focus on the grass and show you how to make it look realistic so we'll be getting something that looks sort of like the left image here and this is just a day and night version i did when i actually started first experimenting around with a couple of these different scatter softwares in blender so if i back out of this and actually go into blender let's just start a new scene here and i will also turn on the screencast keys because i noticed that in previous videos i had forgotten to enable these so this should hopefully be helpful for you to actually see every one of my steps here and i've made it nice and big so you can see exactly what i'm doing so in blender here i think what's really helpful to do is actually open up an image as a reference to work off of so you're not just working off of a blank slate here so i want to show you how i organize my blender window here when i start all my scenes so usually i like to go over to the right side here and click here and you can just drag this down and it makes a new window if you click on here you can make this an image editor and you can just import an image of your choice so let me just pull in an image of a grassy scene for example so these are a bunch of skies that i've downloaded royalty free from unsplash but let's just take this forest sunrise image here and apply this into the scene so what's great about this is you can hold your middle mouse middle mouse button down a bit of a tongue twister middle mouse button down you can hold it down and you can pan around on the image you can also scroll up and down with a scroll wheel to zoom in and out and this will just allows you to kind of take in some of the details of the image as you're working as a good reference point so i'm just going to leave that up there just kind of so i have a reference of the kind of color and lighting that i'm looking for with this and i'm just going to select these hit x and just get rid of them for now we're going to be using a mesh and a plane for the scene you can tab into edit mode and just scale this up by let's say five to start out with now right click hit subdivide right click again subdivide once more and then let's just make the number of cuts 50 here to start this just gives you a bit of geometry to start with so you can actually start displacing this terrain and adding in a bit of variation so when we're looking at some of those examples and this one's i think a great example here you see this is definitely not a flat surface there's no such thing as a perfectly flat surface in the wild here everything is going to have little bumps and lumps all throughout it divots and all kinds of different things in it so we want to actually try to create that in 3d and there's a couple different ways to do this i will touch on this a lot more in a specific tutorial for displacements but for this one i'm going to be using two different methods we're going to be using the sculpt tool to kind of get an idea of some of these hills that we add in so i kind of want to add in this bump of the hill that we're going to be applying to our scene so there's a lot of different brushes to choose from i like to use the inflate brush to quickly pull up the scene and first if you notice it's got this kind of weird you can kind of see it faintly there there's this blue thing kind of coasting around above where my my cursor is and that's because it's currently applying this as a symmetry so if i go over to the tool for the sculpt brush open up the symmetry menu you can see it's mirroring across the x-axis whatever i do so i'm just going to take that off for a second and with the skull brush what you can actually do is hit f and don't click on anything just move your your mouse left and right left to kind of decrease the size of this right to increase the size of this and then you can hit the left mouse again to commit your changes and that just rescales so you don't have to touch anything else you don't have to touch any of the sliders over here you could also do it in the radius here but i just find it easier to kind of quickly do this with your mouse you can alter the size of that you can also hit shift and then f which actually adjusts the falloff of your brush and if you pull it all the way up here there is no falloff whatsoever everything is the same exact strength or you could pull this down all the way down so there is just a little bit of touch in the center and some kind of fall off on the side i'm good with the default falloff on it so i'm just going to right click to undo that change and not commit it so if you're remembering that image i was showing as reference it had a nice big hill in the middle so let's just click hold down and just pull up that surface in the middle here it doesn't have to be exactly like what i'm doing here have fun with it mess around you can use the middle mouse button to pan around whatever you're doing here and just add in little bumps wherever you see fit you can zoom in again uh add in like a little bit more detail to it if you want so i kind of want this large hill here as a focal point so i think that looks pretty good so let's just go back to our object mode and if i zoom in here you'll notice you can kind of see all of these little squares here these are the geometry if you remember we displaced the terrain you can see it's got these uh all the little geometry here so just to get rid of that let's just shade it smooth and now it's a nice smooth surface so while i'm here let me just set up my camera so i've got an idea for what i'm working with and what i'd like to do is actually pull out this tab here so i can use the right side of my screen as the camera's viewpoint and if i click on the camera i can go to item and let's just make its 90 degree rotation in 90 our x rotation 90 rather and at z rotation also to 90 so we're going to be parallel with the surface let's shift it back over to zero on the y axis and if i hit zero on my numpad it takes me into the camera view here instagram if your formatting for that plays really well in 1200 by 1500 resolution i found that works the best for a lot of my images and if we just click on this camera we can now hit g and then x to constrain our movement to just the x-axis and oops i'm selecting different things let's hit g and then x just on the camera and we can pull it along the x-axis here and let's just hit g and z and then drag it down a bit on the z-axis let's move in a little bit more and so you can see our hill is a little bit flat so let's actually add a little bit more to it uh using the sculpt inflate brush you'll notice in the camera view the changes don't take effect immediately it takes a second for you to once you hit deselect on your mouse and then the changes appear and you can see there's like a kind of a weird crease in the geometry so if i just hit shift i can smooth that out with the same brush so this is starting to look pretty good i might add just a little bit more in here to balance my scene out and if you kind of want to get an idea for the composition of your scene which i find really helpful if you're coming from photography especially this is really helpful because this is what you often work with when you're looking down the viewport of your camera if you click on this icon for the camera here scroll all the way down to viewport display composition guides you can tick on the rule of thirds and i like to click on the center thing just so i get an idea for where the exact center of my jump rope of my scene is and there we go that is what the scene looks like if you're you don't want to see that and you just kind of want to see a render you can go over to this top tab here and uncheck show overlays now we're just seeing just what the scene will look like when it's rendered so let's add a little bit more displacement to this because this is looking really smooth still uh and like i said the real world as you can see over here has all kinds of little bumps and stuff in it so let's go to the modifiers tab add a another subdivision just to give us a little bit more geometry to work with you don't really need too much here so i'm just going to make the render and viewport both a level of one let's add a displacement modifier and hit new and then click on these sliders here to take us into the texturing tab and then let's apply a clouds to this you can see that looks absolutely insane so let's mess a little bit with the scale here and bring this up a little bit more so you can kind of see the lumpiness to our surface i think a scale of two will work pretty well for this i think the strength is a little bit too strong so let's just pull this down to maybe something like a point six point seven and that looks a bit better so now if i look at this you can actually see that there's some nice bumps to the surface and this will look really great once we start to scatter some grass particles on it so we have our terrain now let's actually start with the texturing and to do the texturing what i'd like to do is just go into the viewport shading mode on the right side here and let's just drag up this bottom menu here to do the shading using the shader editor if you don't already go over to edit preferences add-ons and type in node node wrangler this is a fantastic add-on and it's going to be immensely helpful as we do the texturing and lighting if it's not enabled just click on it and then go down here to the little three bars and hit save preferences you will now have the option to do some really cool node wrangling so i'm just going to click new texture and let's just call this our grass base texture here so we have our principal bsdf node here and what you can actually do is hit control shift and then t and this allows you to do a principled texture setup to your model so let me go over to my assets and i've saved that texture that i've linked in the description to my texturing tab and let me just type in kai it is right here and if you just left click and then select all of these and hit you now have the option to do a principled texture setup and blender will do the work automatically to make a really great texture set up for you so you can see it's already applied all the textures where they're supposed to be which i think is really nifty and it saves you the time of having to import all of these individually and clicking them all in one by one by one it's kind of exhausting to do so i think this actually already looks pretty good if i click out of the camera mode and look around here for the scale that scale looks decent to me and you'll notice it's pretty low resolution this is just a 1k texture so it's pretty low res but it does the purpose that we need it to do which is just to give us some different colors on the base beneath our render so i'm just going to go back to camera mode i think that looks pretty good to me and so if i zoom in here you can see it's got all the textures here if you did want to actually change the size of this event if this does look too small or too large to you you can just tab into edit mode let's just change this over to a uv editor hit select a to select all and then let's just you can scale it up or scale it down to adjust what you're looking at and if this is kind of a little bit laggy for you running a bit slow which it is a little bit for me here you can go over and actually just turn off the displacement and the subdivision in your viewport just so it runs much quicker so now you can see that's much faster there's not as much lag to it so i'll just zoom this out actually a little bit because it does look a little bit better zoomed out and that looks pretty good and then when you're done to commit your changes just hit tab i'll actually just leave the displacement and the subdivision off for now in the viewport because it's not essential that we see that at the moment so i don't really need this anymore so i'm just going to slide this down just so you get a better view of the terrain and one more thing i like to do actually with the camera is as we're about to get into this next step is to go once more down to the composition guys and you have this thing paspartu and you can just turn this on to one opacity and basically just blocks out everything around so you're just seeing just in the middle here uh what the camera is seeing which i think kind of helps for composition as well so let's go over to the lighting which i like to do next so first let's bring in that hdri if you click on the world scene tab here click on this little yellow button here environment texture open and then i've saved the hdri out it's right here just bring that in and actually one more thing we do need the this tab for one more second if we go back over to from object to world you have our hdri plugged into a texture set up here and to actually change the rotation to change where the light is coming from you can click on just this one right here where the image texture is coming in and hit control and t and it adds using the node editor node wrangler a mapping node and a texture coordinate node and the main thing you're going to want to concern yourself with is just this z rotation here you can spin this guy around to change where the light's coming from so you can see that appears to be the largest brightest light source in the image and i want that to kind of be coming in at an angle so we're really hitting our grass in a nice way so let me just shift this off to the left here you can see we're kind of getting a nice glow on this left edge i'm in ev here so i'm just going to turn on ambient occlusion and screen space reflection so we see a bit better what we're looking at let me crank up the strength a little bit here uh so you can see a bit better what this looks like and i'm also going to just bring the rotation of this down just a bit so we're just seeing the sky here there's another option that you can actually just completely get rid of this guy and add in another sky in post but just for the sake of simplicity let's just use this default sky from blender feel free to mess around a lot more here if you want to add in some more adjustments to the scene and to make it a bit more exciting have fun play around with this you don't need to follow this tutorial exactly that's part of the fun of artwork right is to add your own flair to it so i think now is about time to actually add in the grass particles themselves so let's left-click on our terrain here and i'm going to open up the groswald add-on here which they've got some great instructions on their website on exactly how to install this it's not too complex but you just need to install it as an add-on into your edit preferences add-ons tab right here so there's a couple different ways to set this up i won't go into details but i've got the grasswall pro add-on and i have it enabled it's really quick to set up and it adds in a great library of your their plants and keep in mind i'm using the pro version here so this is not a free version but there are certainly some tools you can still use with the free version to follow along with this so if i left click on my terrain and then i'm going to click this plus button to create a new particle system and basically what this has just done is create a uh a hair particle system just a default hair particle system on our terrain now i'm going to actually create new settings for this and now you can see it's starting to do something here it looks like it's getting closer actually adding in some grass particles and the way grass walled works is it has a species so there's a variety of different grass and plant species that it comes with and also some leaves and moss too and it's got different variants of them as well too so if i were to select let's say for my terrain let's just go with the creeping bent grass to start with here this will take a second to load in because it is a pretty high resolution object not too high resolution but just takes a second to load in there you can see there's a couple different variants to it so i've got this kind of large one a smaller one just some fragments of it and then some kind of flowered version and i can actually scatter these in interesting ways across the surface and you can see they're actually following the rotation of our surface that's why it's really great that we actually went around and did some sculpting to make it look a little bit different because now it's going normal to that surface wherever it is if i just keep that subdivision off for now and re-enable the displacement you can see we have some of these divots now in here too which are looking really great so there aren't a lot of grass particles in here so let's ramp up the density a little bit more to make it look a little bit more filled out i'm thinking that this grass looks a little bit too tall so i'm just going to bring down the size just a little bit here to maybe 0.55 i think that looks pretty decent but one thing i want you to keep in mind is when you're adding particles in it's adding a lot more extra geometry to your scene that could very quickly overload your computer and slow things down to a grinding halt so i think it's really important to keep optimization in mind when you're working on these renders so for example here we're only seeing the very front part of the scene and we're not seeing all of this beautiful grass that's behind here so it's useless to us at least since we're doing a static animation to have all that extra geometry so there's a couple different ways you can actually get rid of that to optimize your scene there's this optimization tab that's in here built into grosval and you can do something called camera culling which i'll just enable here just to show you it's taking my camera default as the active camera and you can see it's just clipping all the grass that's not visible to the camera so it actually has cut off a little bit of grass that's on the left and right edge of this camera but you'll notice that this grass is still visible behind here because the camera doesn't know that that's actually blocked from its viewport it still thinks that since this is in front of the camera it's part of the scene and it's visible so we actually want to get rid of that as well so we can actually do is go to distribution and show distribution properties and you're going to want to add in a new paint layer so if i click on this and i can go in here this is just doing some weight painting red is where particles are going to be 100 blue is where there are going to be zero particles and you can kind of go in between those if i go to the tool here you can see the weight adjusts that red or blue if it's one you're painting everything uh bluehome let me go down here this is taking a little bit of lag here this here there we go so if you go to zero it's painting everything blue one everything red so i'm just going to be uh just painting in on the scene here and i actually want to go back to grosvald and hit recalculate density so i can do this live so you see it if i hit right click you can actually adjust the weight right from here which is really nice i'm just going to bring this down to zero and go around to behind here and let's just paint this out and just get rid of this this is going to get rid of a lot of those particles that are behind the scene and aren't doing us any good you want to keep in mind that you're not deleting any particles in front you can actually go hit ctrl and then 3 on the numpad to flip around to behind and we can just erase all these particles here that are doing us no good so that looks pretty good if i go back into object mode you can see now all our particles are just in the front we've given the grass a little bit of a haircut which is quite nice so uh there we go so we have all our particles in the front and that's looking a lot more full out but if we look at our reference here there's no such thing as just one kind of grass formation here so we're not just dealing with one kind of grass unfortunately in our scene we've got lots of different kinds of grass here and before i go any further now that we have a grass actually to reference here let's add in our other form of light which is that sun lamp i'm just going to hit g and z to bring up here just so i can see it a bit better and just bring it over here just so i can see a bit better what i'm working with and just for a second i'm just going to disable this in the viewport just so i'm not loading down my screen i can quickly rotate this i'm going to hit r and then x to bring this up now you can see there's some shadows starting to form on the right edge there and i'm just gonna turn this a little bit more and let's just crank the brightness up quite a bit on this light don't be shy with it you can really uh ramp up that brightness let's do something like 20. so now you can see we've got a really nice glow from that left edge and i'm just gonna make the color ever so slightly yellowish which i think adds this nice warm hue to the seam let's bring back in our grass particles here and now you can see what we're working with we've got this really nice kind of glow on the grass we maybe don't need so many of these anymore since we've deleted some of the back so let's just pull this down to maybe something like 35 because we're going to be scattering some other grass and leaves in between what's really great about grass weld is you can actually edit the material of the grass in here and it's got a number of really great properties that go along with it one being the age of the grass so i can make this a little bit more dried out if i wanted to do that or just have it really nice and fresh which i think looks a little bit too cartoony it doesn't really look as photorealistic so somewhere kind of in between 5 and 0.5 and 0.8 i think looks pretty good you can also adjust the percentage of that to the extent of which it's affecting the grass and you can also adjust the translucency so you can make it completely opaque to lightness light coming through it so it's nice and dark or you can just have it completely absorb that light which has this really crazy glow to it which i think looks nice to a certain extent maybe a little bit too intense let's do something kind of in the middle here you can also affect the wetness which kind of makes it look a little bit more like dew in the early morning so i always like to turn that up a little bit you kind of have this nice little bit of of glow extra little glow in certain patches of the grass which looks really nice and also affect the dead patches and dryness of the grass so let's just add in a little bit of that just to break up some of the variation a bit more and let me just quickly click on this button here and hit auto name all systems and this will just actually apply the name of this grass to it so you know which which blade of grass we're working with because we're going to be adding a couple more to the scene so let's just hit the plus once more to create a new system create new settings and for this one right off the bat i actually want to go down to this density hit this drop down and then use this untitled density i should have given it a name let's just name it front word density or something like that and then if i go oops just get rid of that for a second if i click on that and re-enable that you can see once i add in a particle system to this let's add in some let's add in some dandelions to this so let me just change this version to this type the guy here and now it is still affecting the back of this here so i should have somehow changed this there we go recalculate density and tidal density that's the one yeah okay so i'm total density there we go and it's only currently scattering one so let's increase that density up quite a bit add in some more of these dandelions now you can see they are starting to appear looking pretty nice on our surface we can scale these up maybe just a little bit more and i like to add in a bit of randomness to their size so now we have some nice dandelions kind of poking out of our scene so also if i look at this image over here as a reference there's sometimes grass or moss or leaves underneath the grass here so let me just auto name this and let's add in some leaves underneath here to create this scene we can pick any one of these i'm just going to pick the see the maple leaf the various leaves it looks pretty good usually and what i'm going to do for right now now you can see my scene is starting to get a little bit overloaded is to turn off these ones so i'm just seeing the leaves underneath i can scatter these a lot more size is a bit extreme so let's pull that down that looks pretty decent i'm going to add in that untitled density 01 to it as well so now it's oops it's this guy i always name your systems i did a bad job naming that one but always name your system so you know which one is which so now that is only appearing on the front edge which looks really nice and if i add in that grass on top of it you see it looks pretty nice underneath it i can throw those dandelions back in on top and let's maybe just increase the density of this grass just a little bit more again because it is looking a little bit patchy so that's looking pretty decent to me and let's just add in one let's auto name that let's just add in one more system here and then we can call it a day and actually render this out i'm going to turn these off for a second just while i'm working with this so i see what i'm doing here create new settings and let's add in i think this looks pretty cool these curly dock things which i kind of like let's add in that untitled density calculate density and let's just scatter a whole bunch of these across our surface rescale these up a little bit that looks pretty nice let's rename it and let's add in all our systems back in again so that's looking pretty cool you know we've got our grass it looks pretty realistic and keep in mind this is just an eevee which already looks pretty great and if you're going to render an eevee also remember with roswell uh to enable in your light options contact shadows it's just going to look a lot nicer a lot crisper for this one i actually want to render it though in cycle so i'm going to just click on this render region option here and we're going to go over to cycles this will take a second to load in because there's quite a few particles so while this is loading in i'll take a time i take a second to plug my other youtube videos i make a lot of tutorials i've been trying to make a lot more recently and if you ever have any suggestions for tutorials be sure to leave them in the comments i've also started a patreon recently i'm just starting to build up the content on there a lot more so be sure to check that out that is linked in the description i just released a tutorial kind of comparing all the different types of scatter methods for grass in a lot more detail than just this video um so check that out so this is just about loaded up in here and you can see it's looking pretty cool already so we can probably just render this out if you if you'd like to do that and let me just talk a bit about some of the render settings here so if you're running with cpu you can usually just go with default i like to put the render samples up to something like 400 or 500 i think that looks pretty decent if it's a very well lit scene it's a bit darker lit you have things like glass you would always want to put your render up a little bit higher so you have more samples to kill some of that noise but i think this already looks pretty nice and so i can just click this out and render if i want i'm actually going to switch over to gpu however and go down to this performance tab and to actually get this open be able to adjust this you can hit auto and then auto tile size and you want to enable this because this allows you to change the tiling of your render so that's basically the the little boxes that appear up when you're rendering in cycles you can increase or decrease the tile size if you hit on this little cog here it opens up so you can make it 32 by 32 which would be the dimensions for the tile rendering but for gpu i usually like to use something like 256 about 256 or 512 so you're only going to have nine total tiles i feel like that's just faster there's a blender guru video i saw like i think a couple months back where he made a really great description kind of breaking down all these different styles um there are all these different render settings and ways to optimize things and that was what was optimized for gpu was a larger tile size so if you're rendering on gpu i'm just going to go something like that and if you remember from that reference image that i showed over here i added in a little chair to the scene so if you wanted to do something like that that chair actually comes for free in blender it's in an add-on that's called blender kit which i don't currently have enabled but you can enable it if you want it'll take a second to load in here because there's a lot of data that comes with it so now it says welcome to blender kit blender kit connects from blender to an online community built shared library of models materials and brushes so a lot of cool free stuff comes with it and it just appears over here in your menu so if i were to go down to blender kit and then hit models you can search by free only which if you want which i think looks nice there's a lot of already great free ones to choose from and you can just search for a model so if i just search for chair for example it's going to take a second to load and we've got a couple different options here to choose from there's like one chair in particular that i really like using which is the one i showed in that example and it's super simple to just import it into your scene if you just scroll through here you can look at all the models there's the chair by hans wagner if i just left click on that it'll take a second and it will load into my scene it is currently hidden beneath i believe and underneath my scene somewhere so let me just pull this guy up let me just switch out a rendered mode for a second here this is going to be really slow oh and you can see another great feature of grosswater is using the something called a proxy system here which is using these lods to speed up your viewport so you're not seeing all those individual particles of grass instead it's got these proxy shapes like large cubes or weird little geometric shapes here to take the place of those particles to really optimize your scene and they can go much faster oh there's our chair he's hidden over in the corner so let's just hit g shift z to bring it over shift it up and let's scale this bad boy up a little bit more hit r shift z to rotate and let's bring it down onto our hill and actually get this exactly on the hill let me just disable the particles in my viewport for a second here so i can see actually where our surface is you can see currently our chair is levitating midair which is not very realistic if you ask me so let's bring that down a bit here and we can kind of rotate this maybe a bit so it's kind of facing more towards the camera and it looks decent there if you kind of want to get the composition going a bit better you can once again re-enable the overlays so you can see i can center this up nicely in my screen that looks pretty good to me so let me just re-enable all these systems here and we can go back over to cycles mode and you can just render this out right here if you are so inclined but you can see this looks really nice you've got a really nice scene very quickly with some realistic looking grass so there we go this will take a second to load if you want to render this out i think this would look really great you've got a nice variation to the grass once again you're optimizing your scene so you're not putting a lot of grass in the background here so you can really well allocate your resources and it looks pretty cool it's got this kind of nice surreal vibe to it maybe this is a nice meditation spot maybe this is a place where i go to think about tutorial ideas who knows just have a lot of fun with this really experiment and just see what all kinds of different landscapes that you can create but always keep in mind the optimization of your scene you can very quickly run yourself out of memory if you're just importing a ton of particles into your scene so always think back to that as you're rendering that's my biggest tip for keeping your scenes optimized but this looks really really cool and so i think i'm happy with this one so i would just hit f12 to start the render on this this will take a little bit of time to cook so i will not have you guys sit through this but hopefully this was helpful for you you can see those tiles importing in and stuff is rendering up it's going to estimate about 10 minutes on this render not too bad not too bad um so yeah hopefully this was a helpful tutorial for you this is one i get asked quite a bit about how to do so i really want to break down on a pretty simple level for a beginner exactly how to do this kind of work in blender you can really do quite a lot with just a few little clicks to make some really cool products and just have a lot of fun with it so once again if you have any other tutorial ideas leave them in the comments let me know how i did with this one and once again i'll be having an awesome microphone in just a couple days so this audio quality will sound much much better but thanks so much for dropping by subscribe for more and check me out on instagram at james underscore films i'll catch you in the next one one one one one

Channel: James Tralie

Views: 57,193

Rating: 4.968761 out of 5

Keywords: blender tutorial, blender 3d, cinema4d, c4d, b3d, blender grass, photoreal grass, photorealistic grass, blender render, render, 3d modeling, 3d environment, grass 3d, photorealism, 3d photoreal, tutorial, blender art, blender concept art, concept art, environment design, blender, octane, cpu, gpu, nvidia, render 3d, graswald, quixel, texturing, blender texture

Id: WACuH8hf5_E

Length: 40min 16sec (2416 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 11 2020