Create a Photo Realistic Forest - Blender 2.92 Tutorial (With Quixel Megascans)

g'day everyone and welcome to the latest tutorial from just the basics today we're going to be using the brand new blender version 2.92 to create a photorealistic forest so let's dive straight in in our tutorial today we're going to be making use of qixel mega scans this is a paid for subscription however if you're not interested in using any paid for subscriptions i'm going to be linking some alternatives this is purely just for getting our textures and resources for creating this scene this tutorial isn't going to focus on creating pbr materials rather it's focusing on the process we would take to create a forest so we'll be a step-by-step tutorial it's just for the sake of time when it comes to textures i'm going to be making use of this asset but once again if you don't want to use it you can use other free alternatives such as 3d assets dot one where you can simply enter a keyword and search for a texture of your choice otherwise inside of blender we can head over to edit and preferences and go to add-ons and enable the blender kit online asset library once we do that you'll see that we have this little search bar with materials models brushes and hdr eyes that we can access completely for free in use with our project so if you want to use that for your textures that's another great alternative i just wanted to get this out of the way at the start of the tutorial as i know many people often dislike it when they get halfway through a tutorial and find out that it requires a paid for subscription you may be familiar with quicksilver mega scans and that is that if you do have it in connection with an unreal engine license it is free to use they're just not licensed for use inside of blender so you can do that as a try before you buy unofficial method if you like but i do find they're very affordable and they also have a great selection of free assets so now with all that out of the way let's jump straight into the tutorial opening up blender let's set a few things up straight away for starters we want to go ahead and select render properties and change our render engine from ev to cycles i also want to set my render device to gpu compute here i'll also adjust my render settings for later i'll change the sample amount down to 50 activate adaptive sampling and under denoising just turn that on and select optics denoising next under my world settings i want to change the color to sky texture this will load up the brand new sky texture which is fantastic for creating realistic lighting finally to set things up i'm going to head to edit and preferences and under my add-ons once more i'm going to enable another add-on this is the sapling tree generator add-on so if you don't have this enabled already please do as this will be super helpful in our tutorial now that that's done let's start creating our base mesh so initially i'm going to delete the default cube and default light sad face next we'll hit shift a and add in a brand new mesh that's the plane and then hit s 1 0 enter to scale it up 10 times larger than what it initially was now that we've done this let's go ahead and hit tab to enter edit mode and then right click and select subdivide now i can go ahead and increase the number of cuts from 1 to 50. this will give plenty of geometry to adjust the landscape of my mesh so having done that i'll hit tab to exit edit mode and then switch to the sculpting tab here the brush works very similarly to a photoshop brush if you're familiar with that you can just right click and bring up your radius and strength settings what we basically want to do is add in a bit of interesting terrain and create a bit of a forest path in the middle of our scene something that we can add a bit of a forest trail texture to go through to give a bit of interesting diversity so have a bit of fun with this it's a good chance to practice the basics of sculpting if you want to change your brush of course you can just select the brush style down here or you can always go file and append new brushes in but for what we're creating today this is going to be fantastic let's jump back to our layout now right click on our mesh and select shade smooth i'm also going to hit s and z just to flatten this out a little bit to make it less extreme having done that it's time to import some materials to texture our plane so to do this with bridge all i need is to make sure i've downloaded the latest plugin for blender which i'll have a link for in the description i also need to make sure i download quicksilver bridge which is free to use and just basically the asset library program for your computer once you've done that head into blender and once again in our preferences we'll need to manually install this add-on so we can head to our downloads and just select that 3.2.zip file once we've done that it'll bring up the mega scans add-on which we'll need to make sure we enable just by searching mega scans and checking that box next to it you may need to restart blender at this point so i recommend saving your project let's just go ahead and call this landscape and now we can load up bridge and start importing some materials so the first thing i want is something that is going to be good for a forest environment so i'm just going to search forest among what i've already downloaded and there's a great selection here i can choose from i'm particularly looking for surfaces so i'll just search for surface and i might make use of these ground forest texture i'm going to set that down to 2k resolution as i don't need anything too high and just export that into blender having done that i also need a material for our forest path so i'll have a look through and all i want is something that's a bit of a muddy kind of beaten path i think this rocky soil ground will work fine for what i'm looking for so i'll set that to 2k resolution and export that as well now what we're going to do is effectively the best method i could find on how to blend two materials inside of blender and this is actually not my own technique but rather one i found from a really great blended tutorial so i'll have a link to that in the description because credit where credit is due what we can do is head to our material properties and select this little material drop down and go ahead and just select the ground forest material first of all then we can switch to viewport shading by selecting this icon or hitting z and two on our number pad well we can see how forest material is looking it's looking pretty good although there are some irregularities with it so to fix these let's just go up to the top left hand corner until we see this crosshair which indicates we can now split our view by left clicking and dragging to the right we've split our view successfully so let's switch this viewport from 3d to shader editor and hit n to remove this side toolbar here and now we can edit our material properties a bit easier something i will need to adjust is i need to change the normal map from being placed in the alpha slot to the normal this is due to blender's principle shader being updated with a new emission strength node it now pushes all the normal maps out of order just by one slot so let's just drag that where it's meant to be normal to normal and now our texture is looking much better but it's also a bit too small i want this texture to feel a bit larger like it's a forest area so to scale that up i'm going to once again go up here to the top left hand corner just beneath the little blender logo until i see that crosshair and click and drag down to split this view in half again this time i'm going to change the viewport to uv editor this is where i can control how much of my image is projected onto my plane and this is just my ideal or preferred workspace so i know different people may have different preferences but for this tutorial i just find this is the easiest way and say switching between the uv editing and the shading tab so what we can do then is it tabbed into edit mode and with our uv map now appearing hit a to select all of that it should appear orange once it's all selected we can hit s to scale it up and now let's scale it up five times larger than what it was having done that we can hit tab to exit edit mode but you may notice nothing on our material has actually changed the reason for this is currently our material is locked to texture coordinate generated we need to change it that our uv map is affecting our texture so let's go ahead and now plug uv into vector and this will now mean that blender will use our uv map to determine how much of the texture is seen and you can see now it is scaled up beautifully but for the next part of our tutorial we want to be able to blend in our muddy terrain texture for where the path will be how do we do this well with our material slot still open here we're going to hit this little addition to add a new material in and select this drop down and select our second texture which is the rocky soil ground while we're there we might also switch this to uv to vector that way it will be affected by the same uv properties as our forest path is or our forest floor is i should say and we'll also make sure that underneath it is not plugged into alpha but rather normal to normal now that we've done that we're going to need to go ahead and copy all these nodes everything except for the material output in fact we can delete that material output so let's go ahead and select all of this and then hit ctrl c which is the shortcut for copy now heading back to our top texture the ground forest we can hit control v in the shade editor to paste in our dirt material with everything still selected that we've just pasted in we're going to hit g which stands for grab now we can grab that secondary material that dirt material down and we have both our forest ground texture here and our forest path texture here what we want to do is merge the two together so grabbing our material output node we're going to stretch it down here and obviously we cannot plug both principled shaders into the one material output but what we can do and this is the technique i learned from a previous youtube tutorial as mentioned so not my own idea but we can hit shift a and search for a mix shader now dropping this in we can connect both materials up to this mix shader evidently though it's still only going to display one of them and in this case it's our forest path texture now to correct this what we can do is hit shift a and add in two extra nodes one is a vertex color this will enable us to then choose which texture to display where based on a color to choose that color let's hit shift a and add in our second node which is a separate rgb let's plug color to image so now we can determine which color we want to use we're going to take the red channel so that's the r and plug it into factor now looking at our scene it's changed back to being a forest floor once again let's go ahead and start adding in this forest path texture now to do that we might switch back to solid view so we can see a color and then switch to vertex paint the first thing we want to do is change our color from white to completely red so i've just gone to rgb i'm minimizing the green and the blue hues from this color so now we've left with complete red if i go through and paint my landscape completely red now notice what happens when i switch back to material preview you'll notice it's completely showing our forest path texture so if i go ahead and switch my brush from add to subtract you'll notice that everywhere i subtract now removes completely my forest path texture replacing it only with the forest floor so we can once again right click to bring up our brush settings and paint in everywhere that we want our forest floor to appear leaving everywhere that we want our forest path to appear this is a really fun way to texture it's actually very simple very easy to follow and it can create some nice customizations so we don't want this path to be too wide want it to be somewhat interesting so have a bit of curving and that's looking pretty good in fact i could even make that a little bit narrower just so it's nothing too extreme fantastic here we have a nice forest path through a forest so with that being done we have completed our base mesh all we need to do now is populate it with foliage and trees to do that let's switch our vertex paint back to object mode let's head to our object properties and just rename this from plane to forest underscore floor that way we'll be able to identify it easier later now we're going to press h to hide this and begin creating our trees to do that we're going to hit shift a and go down the curve and select sampling tree generator this will automatically load in a base tree mesh for us with that loaded we can now adjust it to create some custom trees we're going to take a look at creating three custom trees and then basically make another three variations of those trees so we'll have a total of six trees all up ready to populate our woods so the first thing i'll need to do is in the menu under geometry we're going to load the white birch preset i'm going to change the shape from custom to inverse conical then i'm going to head to branch radius and change the ratio or the thickness of the branches from 0.02 to 0.04 just to increase that slightly next i'll head to branch splitting and change the levels from 2 to 3. this will create more smaller branches off of our larger ones if this is slowing down your computer at this point though i recommend turning that level mount down if your computer can handle it it's definitely worth having it up a little bit it just creates that extra level of realism but it is not necessary moving on to our final setting we can change from branch splitting to leaves here on the leaves we're going to press show leaves so you can see what we're doing the first thing i'll need to do is change my leaf shape from hexagonal to rectangular as we're going to be applying a texture for all these leaves so a simple square or rectangle will be much simpler and easier to work with when it comes to our uv maps next let's change the leaf count from 16 to 20. i'm also going to change the leaf scale from 0.2 to 0.5 to make them that much bigger having done that our first tree is complete and ready to go let's click left click and drag to select it and then hit g and y to grab it along the y axis and just move it out of the way for the moment now let's go ahead and create our second tree once again we're going to add in a sapling tree generator we're going to head back to geometry and this time we're going to load the douglas underscore fir preset this creates a basic pine tree mesh and there's only a few things we'll adjust here one is the branch splitting i'll change that from two to three and the next is the leaves i'll change this to rectangular instead of hexagonal also change the leaf count from 25 to 30 just to give a few more and then the leaf scale from 0.17 to 0.8 so now we have our second tree completed already let's go ahead and left click and drag and then hit gy to move that out to the side it's quite a difference in size to our first tree so i may just hit s to scale that down the slightest amount finally let's create our last tree to do this i'm going to hit shift a and add in the tree generator add-on again change back to geometry and finally loaded the japanese maple preset i'm going to head over to the branch splitting and change the levels from two to three then i'm going to head to leaves enable show leaves change them from hexagonal to rectangular then the leave count from negative 5 to 30. finally the last two settings i'm going to change is the leaf scale so overall i'm going to make them twice as big by turning it up to 0.4 and then i'm also going to make the leaves much thicker so they're less long and rectangular and more squarish by changing the leaf scale on the x from 0.2 to 0.53 this is a value i already worked out before recording this tutorial so if you want to experiment some more with what you think works best please feel free to go ahead and do that now let's left click and drag to select our tree and hit s to scale that up in size until it's something similar to our trees we've already created and basically we have three trees here ready to go what we are missing is textures for these trees now the texturing process is really simple and easy let's have a bit of a breakdown as to how we go about doing this the first thing we need to do is convert our tree trunks into a mesh because currently we added them as a curve so if we were to go into our curve settings they would be all curves for the sake of this tutorial we're also going to need them as meshes for texturing as it's much simpler in my opinion so to change them or convert them to meshes we simply select our tree trunk and right click and select convert to mesh let's do this with the others right click and select convert to mesh and the same with our final pine tree now the next thing we need to do is so we can turn these trees into the one object we're going to need to adjust some of the naming of the uv properties what do we mean by that well let's break it down if i select these leaves and head over to this little green triangle here which is entitled object data properties you'll notice that it has an option for uv maps if i just minimize these others and leave only uv maps open you'll see that my uv map for this tree has a name it's currently leaf uv the bottom one for the trunk however is uv map both the leaves and the tree trunk they're connected to need to share the same name if we're to make them one object that is the one tree with leaves as a mesh later on so right now before we do any texturing let's go ahead and change this name i'm going to go and just change it simply to zero zero one and then hit ctrl a and ctrl c to copy that and paste that onto the leaves i'll do the same for my other trees following suit making this one zero zero two and the leaves the same and finally zero zero three for my last tree now that that's done it's going to make it nice and simple when it comes to creating these into one mesh but first let's add some textures so i'm going to head back to qixel and i'm going to select some bark textures first of all at this point you can grab textures or resources from whatever is your preferred site but as i mentioned earlier this is just the simplest method i've found for creating forest in my vfx workflow so let's grab this maritime bark and i'll include links to all the textures i'm using here if you do wish to use them i'll also grab this eubark and i might grab this elm bark while i'm here i might just grab one or two other varieties so i can perhaps mix it up a little bit if i want to create some different variations on these trees next let's go ahead and find some leaves so these are under the subheading or the tag atlas usually and so i've got a few downloaded that i can use straight away i'll go ahead and just import them and having done that i can jump back into blender and begin the texturing process now this texturing process is very simple and in fact it may be a bit repetitive so it's only really necessary to show you how to do it on one tree and this can then be repeated across the others so let's break that down selecting a tree trunk i'm going to hit tab to into edit mode i need to unwrap this tree or in other words tell blender how a 3d mesh should display a 2d material to do that i'll hit a to select everything once it's orange you know it's all selected then i can hit u and select cube projection although our tree is not a cube it's made up of many smaller cubes so this is the best method for projecting trees i found currently let's go ahead and select that and now with our tree appearing unwrapped in our uv image editor we can hit a to select that entire mask and then s to scale it up and hit 10 and enter so our tree's uv map will now be 10 times larger than it was initially let's give it a material now in our material settings i'm just going to select one from the drop down menu i might go with birch bark first of all and here you can see we have a similar issue for our materials earlier we need to make sure the normal map is plugged into normal and we also need to make sure that the uv coordinate is plugged into vector having done that i can now tab out of edit mode and you'll see that my tree bark texture is applying nicely now for the leaves let's just go ahead and select a drop down set of leaves and then we can go to our material and just adjust these irregularities uv to vector again and of course normal to normal in this case emission strength into alpha now this uv map needs to be adjusted only slightly i'll hit tab to go into edit mode and i can see that i have currently four leaves but only part of them is being portrayed so let's hit s and y to scale this down vertically into more of a square similar to the shape of our actual leaves then i'll move this over just one leaf and scale it down until it is only covering that one leaf now having done that we have our first tree completely textured and if i tab out of edit mode you'll see that it's looking pretty good if i hit z and then switch to rendered view we can give it a quick preview and just see if we're happy with how entry is looking and for the most part i think i'm pretty happy with that for the amount of time it's taken us to create if you prefer to buy tree assets that's always another option but this is just a nice simple way to create them easily inside a blender then let's move on to our other trees we'll head back to material preview and this method is essentially repeated what we have already done so i'm just going to speed up this and you can listen to some music as you texture your trees as well because it is essentially the same thing let me know if you have any questions down in the comments and i'm happy to answer them as soon as i can so let's do some texturing [Music] okay now that we've done that and we have all of our trees textured and ready to go we can create some variety on these trees so let's just select our first tree trunk i'm going to hit shift d to duplicate that then hit x to just lock it to the x axis and move it forward a little bit this is going to act as basically a bit of a dead tree that can sit in our forest so let's rotate this on the zed 180 degrees and then hit s and y to just shrink it a little bit and make it a bit more unique having done that let's go ahead and select our other two trees and just go ahead and hit shift d to duplicate them and move them forward a little bit so what i'm going to do then is grab this first tree here and i'm going to go ahead and just select this hazel leaves and select one of the other leaf varieties to give it a bit more random variety having done that we now have a little bit of a difference in variety between these two trees i might also select the trunk and change the bark type as well so i'm going to change this one to you bark and that's looking good we've got some nice randomness in the trees and for my last one i'm only going to adjust the type of branch it's displaying by changing it on the uv map so now essentially we have a variety of six different trees although they're somewhat similar it'll be enough to create some believability to our forest having done that let's go ahead and make all the trees one object so i'll just select each one the leaves and the branch and then hit ctrl j to make them into one object now that we've done that we can left click and select to grab all of them or drag all them rather over to the side so let's just enable our little arrows here and move them out of the way of our finished plane and while we have them all selected i'm going to hit ctrl g which stands for group or collection this will get them all as one group of objects when we add them to our scene so we can essentially just duplicate that multiple times to create a forest so let's call this forest trees now that we've done that we can hit enter and it's time to import any final assets or touches we want for our forest so for me i'm going to jump back into bridge and i'm going to add in some other different assets i like for example this common firm will work really nicely so i'll just set that to 2k then export that jumping back into blender i'll be able to see that that's just imported in here and i can scale it up a little bit until it's about the size i want it to be in relation to my trees this will just help as well as a bit later on because we can size it up in the hair particle properties but it's better if we have it everything to scale before doing that i need to adjust the materials on this slightly as well and having done that i can go back to bridge and just grab a few other assets for example i also like having some grass so i might just grab some of this grass clump and switch that to 2k then export that this one likewise i can scale up a little bit and then drag that out of the way for use later and finally the last thing i'll need is perhaps some clover i like this as a nice covering alternative to grass so with that imported we have all the foliage that we need in our scene so let's once again drag this out of the way maybe scale it up a little bit to size and what we're going to need to do is select all of these different assets we've just created and we're going to need to create them into one collection as well which will be our foliage collection so what we can do is just maximize all of them in our scene collection and just go ahead and pressing control we can select all those lods that is level of detail models and select them all there by holding down control and left clicking now i can hit ctrl g to add in a new group or collection and this time i'm going to call it foliage having done that we now have a collection made up of our unique assets so the final thing to do is add them to our forest jumping up to our menu here we can see our forest floor is currently set to invisible let's enable visibility again and here we will see our forest what we want to do is we want to control where our forest will be appearing we don't want it to appear obviously on our path perhaps just little bits of shrub so what we'll do is we'll select our plane and then we'll head over from object mode to weight paint and here in white paint we can paint in essentially where we want our forest to appear so all i'm going to do is paint in everywhere the path isn't make it nice and red the greener or yellow areas will only have a slight amount of our forest assets being displayed we can adjust this by changing the weight or radius and the strength so let's just turn that weight back up to full for the moment and then we might feather it out closer to the edges so having painted that in we might just go turn down the weight a little bit and turn down the strength and we can just feather in our edges a little bit more perhaps even adding a little bit of feathering in some of the spots too now with our weight map completely drawn up what we can do is we can head back to our object mode and add in our hair particle system so that's found under the particle properties symbolized by this little blue particle symbol let's hit plus to add a new one in and we're going to call this forest trees it's always good practice to get in the habit of renaming things to what they actually represent definitely makes your workflow much easier let's change this from emitter to hair change this to advanced settings and then head down to render and instead of rendering a path we're going to render a collection so let's select our forest trees collection now you can see our forest trees are appearing all displayed incorrectly this is to do with the origin of these trees so to fix this we need to head to rotation let's enable that first of all and then change them from orientation axis velocity here to global y now all our trees will be standing up vertically which is fantastic we have a few too many trees here so let's change that number down from 1000 to 200 make it a bit lighter so now let's go ahead and change the scale ramness from zero to point zero five to give a bit more randomness we can might even turn it up to 0.1 now they're still covering our forest path to apply the weight paint that we've added in what we can do is we can head down to our vertex groups here's where we can control the density or the areas of our map our mesh that will have our hair particle system displayed if we select density you'll see it brings up one option group this is the weight painting we just did earlier if we select that you'll see now there is a clearing or a partial clearing where our forest path is we can correct this a little bit by heading back to weight paint and just maybe moving by going ahead to subtract removing some of the painting that's near the edges as evidently it's a bit too close that way we can just clear up any trees that might be on our path excellent that's looking great let's head back to object mode now and let's go ahead and add in our foliage to complete the look to do that we're going to need to go ahead and add in another particle system by hitting this plus again this time we'll call it grass or even foliage would be better wouldn't it and let's go to hair advanced check rotation change it to global zed this time go under render and change it to collection and select our foliage collection and now you can see our foliage is being portrayed excellently across the world we might go down to vertex groups and just enable our weight map again and here it's all off to the side so then all we have left to do is turn that can up a little bit maybe to 10 000 and see how that's looking it's definitely covering it very well so we can probably turn that down to half 5 000 might be more appropriate now it's time to render our scene and have a preview of how it's looking so let's go to rendered view and just deselect that and what i might do is hit zero to jump to my camera view i'm just going to zoom in a little bit then hit n and bring up my little transform properties and switch to view and select lock camera to view so now wherever i scroll while my camera view is what i will see i can move the camera around and hit n to remove that then i can head over to my output properties and just select render only the region inside my camera so now let's just line up a nice shot and have a look at how our scene is appearing well we can see already it's looking really nice in fact it's very believable just from this scene here but we might need to add some more randomness to it so let's go back to material preview for a moment and jump into our hair particles settings again for our forest trees i might just rename them up here as it doesn't seem to have affected that name now forest trees what i want to do is i want to add in some ram randomness to the rotation so let's change this from 0 to 0.1 and now we have a bit more randomness maybe down a little bit 0.06 that's a bit better i might also turn that phase up just a little bit and that's looking pretty good maybe under physics we can also just turn up the brownian value a little bit this gives a bit more of a randomness to our trees and finally let's head over to our foliage settings i'm going to just change the scale ramness from 0 to 0.05 give them a bit more randomness there and also the random rotation 2.06 as well and now let's give this a render again that little bit of randomness i think has gone a long way in just selling the scene much more there might be still too much foliage so we can experiment with these numbers maybe try three thousand i just might adjust the amount of trees that are in my scene by turning that down to a hundred as well as i was just experimenting and i like that look a little bit more i might also adjust my lighting by heading to the world lighting tab and just changing the rotation as i find sometimes this can give you much nicer results just depending on where you want your lighting to be i'll also go back to my render property and change the color management look from none to very high contrast i like this high saturation contrast look a bit better i think it just looks that much nicer i'll select my camera just here in my scene collection and under my camera settings i'm going to change the focal length to wide by changing it from 50 to 30 millimeters and then i'm also going to enable depth of field all that's left to do now is render out our final scene so hopefully that was simple enough to follow along i hope it made sense and hope you guys enjoyed watching thanks so much again for your support and i can't wait to see what we get to make together next time well everyone thanks again and for now that has been just the basics of how to create a photorealistic forest inside of blender

Channel: Just The Basics

Views: 42,009

Rating: 4.9711537 out of 5

Keywords: Just the Basics

Id: rei0q8JR_OU

Length: 33min 50sec (2030 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 19 2021