Create a Sand-filled Environment in Blender

how's it going my name is james from james films and today i want to show you how to make both of these really cool images here which involve a really fun technique i've been developing over the past couple weeks and months to make sand look realistic and cool in these kind of abstract surreal spaces to show you how it collects in these corners and make these really beautiful displacements that look believable so for the first part of the video i'll show you how to make the left image here the one with no volumetrics and if you have a little bit of patience for both actually creating it and also the rendering which will take a lot more time with volume metrics then i can show you how to make this right image as well which i think looks really really nice with those nice volumetric light rays cascading into the image so first of all let's just talk about what we're going to be doing here so these are what sandy places look like in real life so the top three images are from this really interesting abandoned outpost in namibia where you see sand is kind of piled up in this room you have footprints left over from people have maybe walked through here before and you'll notice that the sand forms these interesting little peaks and hills that are oftentimes in the corners of the room in real life you can see a similar pattern as well where sand tends to kind of clump around certain solid areas where they're clumping around bushes here in some of these bottom scenes and they also form these almost like triangular patterns in a way too so if we look at this rightmost image here you can kind of see these like little triangle type patterns that are forming here at the peaks and there's little waves and stuff that will kind of come off as well from the peaks that are oftentimes in these pure middle structures so how do we recreate these in 3d space so these are some examples of some renders i've done over the past couple weeks we're trying to recreate these images in 3d and i think i've done a pretty good job here with this technique to make it pretty believable so you can see for some of these images i make it look like there's these kind of pooling of sand in the corners of the room you have these little sharp peaks that will go off into ripples of sand on the sides and then you'll have little footprints and stuff kind of scattered around in the scene to show evidence of people interacting with these spaces as well so how do we create this effect well it's actually quite simple and i'll just walk you through it in blender and it involves basically just a little bit of sculpting and two displacement maps stacked on top of each other so one of them is a voronoi noise texture which you'll add to add a little bit of the kind of triangular pyramidal structure to the dunes at large and then you also slap on a footprint displacement map which is actually available for free in the description if you can just click on that you can download that and have it ready to use for your scene and both of these in combination together will give you a very real very realistic very nice looking effect so without further ado let's get started so if we open up blender here and we'll actually use the default cube we'll save this little guy for today and i'm just going to rescale and then use the g tool just g to grab and pull different edges up to create a little box i'll delete that one edge so i can look into or one face to look into the scene a bit better and also remove the floor for right now because i'll add in a plane later so if you're just going to immediately use a boolean on this cube you'll introduce some awful n-guns and terrible geometry to it so i'd first recommend that you add a solidify modifier set to complex mode and then just add a little bit of negative thickness to kind of expand out the scene now you're safe to add in some booleans to create doorways or windows or whatever you want to add to your scene i'm going to create a doorway for this one i'll just use a simple cube for this and set its viewport display to wired so i can actually see what i'm working with in my scene and where it's going to be cutting in our main room so i'm just going to rename some things here always rename your layers you know what you're working with so it doesn't take you hours to find what you're working with here and i'll add in a boolean and set it to the cutter object and now we have a doorway look at that it's got a little bit of thickness to it so it actually looks like a real door it's not perfectly flat unlike the original cube that we got when we added that or one that came with the scene i'll now in a add in a plane for that bottom displacement of the sand and this is what we're going to be working with the majority of this tutorial i like to subdivide twice and then add in 50 cuts i think that gives me enough starter geometry and then i'll add in a subdivision surface with two subdivisions in the viewport and the render now we can add in a displacement our first displacement will be that foreign noise texture you can see it's going pretty wild there so that will be adjusted by just changing the sides up a bit here play around with this until it looks realistic for the size of your room or your space that you're creating it's also helpful to shade smooth so you don't have those crazy polygons kind of sticking out there now i'll show you one of two techniques to add the sand collecting in the corner the first is by going into edit mode proportional edit and then just using g to grab in point select and just pulling up these points and it will pull up the surrounding areas to create these little hills the second is to go into sculpt mode and use the inflate brush first make sure that you're not using symmetry so oftentimes it defaults to mirroring on the x you can adjust the radius and strength if you'd like and i also find it helpful to first actually deactivate your displacement so you're not looking at that the first place so if you make any mistakes here you can just use the smooth brush to smooth out things but just go around the scene and paint in your displacement with that sculpt brush that inflate brush i think it looks quite nice you can take your time with this really add in some nice details and keep resizing the brush changing the strength changing the radius until you have a nice scene with lots of little bumps and as i was showing in those initial images sand tends to collect in the corner room so really really exaggerate those bumps in the corners you'll see i'm really pulling up that left edge there and also the right one as well too to make sure that the sand looks like it's been collecting there for years really just blowing into those corners so now i like to set my camera so i understand what i'm working with so i can start to get an idea for perspective and also i set the resolution to 1200 by 1500 this i've talked about in other video in other videos is what instagram works best with uh it gives you the most real estate when you're uploading images onto instagram so i tend to upload most of my stuff there so i'll just set it to 1200x1500 and then i'm going to zero out all the location and rotation parameters so that my camera is straight along on that y-axis so take your time with this as well i think it's important to have really great perspective to work with and what's also helpful is if you go to viewport display composition guides and enable center and rule of thirds you can actually kind of get a better idea for where to place things to get really nice flow for your composition in the scene so i'll come back to my camera quite a few times during my rendering to make sure that the scene looks great it looks like it's working properly all the elements are reading well and working well with each other so always come back to this and adjust as you see fit i i always think it's helpful to have those composition guides on so now let's reactivate that displacement and the subdivision and that's looking pretty cool so far however it's still pretty intense so i'm actually going to increase the size of the varroa knight texture a bit just to make those ripples not so crazy and i'll also decrease the strength of this displacement so it's not so sharp too usually the sand is getting smoothed out over time so it's not going to be really peaky it's going to kind of look a little bit more smoothed out but still with these ripples and grooves and ridges so i'll adjust the strength a little bit more to just to pull it back just a little bit and we're going to be adding in that footprint displacement too to add a little bit extra punch to it so don't worry about that strength being too crazy for now i'm just going to uv unwrap this plane here and while i'm at it i'm just going to apply the subdivision first and then the displacement and we're going to add in a second displacement you could do this non-destructively if you want and have a displacement just added onto the thing additionally but i just like to work with the new geometry i think it's just a little bit easier personally and runs maybe a little bit faster i'm not quite sure how performance works for this necessarily but now this is the point where we're going to open up that footprint displacement that i've linked again in the description if you want to get that over there and what you're looking for with this footprint displacement is a black and white height map texture it will look something like this guy right here so just open that up i'll take a second to load in and there we go that looks pretty pretty cool look at that detail so no one's footprint is that big so we're going to actually have to resize this displacement a little bit but we can go into uv editor to do that so i'm just going to click off the overlays for this rightmost site so i can kind of see what i'm working with a bit better here and then just select all of the plane here and then i'm just going to hit s and then three i think that's reasonable to resize it and we can tab out of edit mode and see what we've done so that looks pretty nice however it is quite too strong so just pull that strength down a bit something like point two i think will work properly for this you can see we've got some nice footprints that look reasonably scaled in our image and they are playing really nicely with the little peaks we got from the voronoi texture and we got those nice collections of sand in the corner so look at that detail and this just took a couple clicks to get a really nice displacement already so now for the next couple steps i'm going to focus more on the lighting and texturing elements of the scene and i've linked an hdri that you can download that i use for this one in the description it's a nice sunset one has some nice oranges and blues to complement the scene quite nicely and you can find that again in the description of this video if you want to use this specific one so now what i'd like to do here is spend some time dialing in the colors and composition of my scene so i'm going to actually add in a texture for the sand here using an add-on that i've talked about before in previous videos called blender kit it is free comes with blender you just have to enable it and it's got a lot of great materials and models and you can just search for things in here too so i'm going to search for sand and i wouldn't look for a texture that has just nice little sand grains and a nice orangish yellow color here some of these are a little bit too busy i think but there's one that works pretty well here for my scene it's also got a little bit of extra detail with these pebbles in it and it is called sand with small stones right here so just click to add that while you're selected on the plane uh with the sand dune and there we go takes a couple seconds to add into my scene and now look at that i think that looks really realistic already uh so with some extra lighting and once we're rendering this in cycles this will look really believable and will read really well as sand and it's got these nice little pebbles in for extra little detail too extra little realism it's all about the realism with the details so also this comes pre-packaged with a nice shader too so if you wanted to adjust the colors or the bump or anything in the scene you can do that as well but if you're a beginner it's nice it's already packaged everything very well for you so now i'm just adjusting the hdri if you have node wrangler enabled you can just click on the image texture for the hdri press ctrl t and you're automatically given a texture coordinate node and a mapping node so you can just spin the hdri around to get a lighting setup that looks nice for you and what i'm looking for here basically is a position that gives me nice shadows and a little bit of brightness on those peaks of the dune i also like to add in a sun lamp to complement the hdri and add in this extra light brightness through the doorway so again i'll adjust this quite a bit i will revisit this quite a few times throughout the rendering to get the lighting setup that works the best for me that gives me the best details so i'm going to switch over to cycles here to get an idea for the final render that we'll be working with and you'll notice that it gets really dark and that our boolean is not applied so i'm actually just going to disable that cutter in the viewport and then the renders it'll take a second here to refresh and then once it does you will see that our hole is actually cut out again in the wall so now we have our doorway back again so this is what the scene is going to look like and i'm actually just going to uv unwrap but first i'm going to apply the solidify modifier and the boolean to my room here and you can see we've got some great geometry so just hit a to select everything and then uv unwrap by using q project which i think works well for this kind of scene and i think a concrete texture kind of a worn concrete texture will work well for this so let's revisit our blender kit and scroll through here a bit and i think the concrete texture i will use is this guy right here concrete base zero three it's got some nice bump to it it'll take a second to load in and it's already in there and it looks pretty nice and it already comes with a mapping note too so it's already all using our uv that we just unwrapped a second before again you can adjust the colors as you see fit i will actually ramp the brightness up a little bit on this in a second by using a bright contrast node just because i find it to be a little bit dark for the scenes a little bit too gray and also at a frame here you're seeing me actually adjust the bump a bit in the normal map i'm just ramping that up a bit so that there is a bit more contrast to those little bumps and ridges in the actual uh texture so i wanted to resize this a bit i noticed a little bit too much repetition so i just went into the uv editor and just scaled up the texture a little bit here which i think helps add a little bit more realism if the texture doesn't repeat and tile so many times i just kind of keep an eye on that when you're working just so there's not too much tiling going on so for this i think that works pretty well i kind of rotated it slightly because i thought they gave me a good result and now the scene is textured so to add one more detail into this i will actually add in a little chair just for scale i often like to add in shares into my scene i find that that gives a little bit of extra realism and kind of allows you to envision yourself in the scene but first i'll actually add in a ocean here and i'll show you how to very quickly add in some nice reflective water to the scene and also make sure that the clipping of the camera is set to something crazy like i don't know 100 000 meters so that it's not clipping the edge of that plane so i'm just going to add in a new texture on this plane call it water and this is a very simple texture i do this one quite a bit when i'm making oceans and lakes and rivers and things just turn the transmission to one roll the roughness down to just above zero i think just a little bit of roughness works and then add in a bump node connect that into the normal slot and then add in a musgrave texture and plug the factor into the height part of the bump so you'll notice that looks pretty weird so just ramp the scale up like crazy like 250 and you'll have something that looks a bit more realistic for the scale of an ocean so i'm going to go back to camera view so you can actually see what i'm working with here a bit more and it looks a little bit too uniform so what i'm actually going to do is go to control t on this and add in a mapping node and you can stretch the scale along the x or y to kind of distort it to make it look a little bit more like ripples of water so if you just pull down the scale a bit on the x-axis to like point three that looks pretty nice you'll also want to dial back the strength a little bit so it's not too crazy i think something on the order of like 0.1.15 or something works pretty well and so that looks pretty great i can also adjust the distance a little bit too that also makes it blend a little bit better and not make it look too bumpy and then yeah so that's pretty easy pretty quick to make some nice looking water i'm also just adjusting a couple other things here that'll just make the shader look a little bit nicer you can also change the base color a bit too sometimes add a little bit of blue to it a little bit of turquoise to make it look a bit more uh like nice ocean water or lake water and now i'm pulling over this menu here to show you i've got a bunch of skies that i've downloaded royalty free from unsplash just have a browse through there and find a nice sunset image that works well for you there's one that i i think will work well for this where it's kind of a plain sky with a nice bit of a gradient and again these are all royalty free images you can use them for your renders i used to use these all the time with photo composites but i think they work pretty well in the background of things so make sure you have the images as planes add-on enabled as well that'll allow you to import this image and give it an emission texture right off the bat so i'm going to add in this image of the most michel and it is looking nice you got this nice kind of blue to reddish orangish gradient and i'll just rescale it up so that it aligns well with my plane of ocean water that looks pretty nice and i will actually want to cut off the bottom part of this plane because it might actually show through when it the transmission of the ocean you'll actually be able to see the bottom of it so i'm just going to delete that by using a loop cut and then deleting the face of the bottom part so i'm just going to rename that to sky rename my other layers again i was kind of forgetting to rename these so always rename your things and make sure you know what you're working with so the scene looks pretty nice let's go into rendered mode just take a look at what we're working with here and show you one problem that has come up now that we've added in this plane and that is that the plane is now blocking a little bit of the incoming light into our scene so in order to deal with this go to visibility and then deselect ray visibility for shadow for the sky and that will allow the light to actually just pass right through into your scene i'm opening up blender kit again but this time looking at the free furniture models that are available and i'm going to use this one that share by hans wagner and i'll need to resize it just a little bit and rotate it so that it fits and scales properly with my environment and this is where those composition guides come in real handy because now i can put that chair right in that right corner and make it look like it fits really well in the scene so that looks pretty nice you've got this nice bit of abstraction and also this a bit of realism that kind of takes you back to the human world by having this chair sitting in there where you're able to potentially picture yourself vacationing and sitting on this chair and relaxing and enjoying uh a summer by the sea that's kind of the vibe i'm going for with this so if we go back to rendered mode this is where i'm just going to dial in some extra things you can skip ahead if you want here and this just play around and just experiment and see what works for you and what doesn't for me i just like to adjust the lighting a little bit maybe adjust the colors of things or change the texture brightness or add in a little bit of extra sunlight to things so i want to make sure that this chair aligns well with that shadow that's casting from the doorway so now i've aligned it between those nice beams of light that are coming in there so you've got a nice shadow on that back wall or on the right wall and also the chair is centered well on that sand this is the result that you'll get if you render this guy out i think it looks pretty nice but we can make it a little bit better with some volumetrics if you'd like so if you'll stick around for this extra little step right here i can show you how to do something really really cool so i often get asked on my videos how do you make really cool volumetrics in blender are you adding these in in photoshop are these just things that you've slapped into your image and the answer to that is you can do all of this in blender blenders volumetrics are fantastic it's got this really great shader called the principled volume which i can show you how to use in just a second but you can use this technique to get some really great results that look a lot like this so the secret to great lighting is actually something called gobos which if you're familiar with theater lighting if you've ever worked with a on on the set of a play before or even on films potentially there's these little filters called gobos that you can basically slap in front of a lamp and it creates these interesting patterns on the floor and if you're looking at the light rays that are scattered this is where the important part comes with volumetrics you've got these interesting patterns so it doesn't look like just one solid beam which light often looks like but all of these little holes and shapes kind of create these beautiful beams that will scatter the light in really interesting ways when it hits dust or particles in the air so how do we create this in blender so if we're back in blender here so there's a couple ways to do this in blender one of the ways i like to do it is by adding in a tree or something to scatter it but you can also do it by just adding in a plane simply enough going into edit mode and we're going to add in a couple subdivisions here so i'm going to subdivide it twice and then cut it 50 times like we did for the plane before but this time what we're going to do is actually select a bunch of random faces on here so if you go to select and then select random it will just select a bunch of random faces you can just hit x and delete those faces so now you've got a bunch of holes in this perforated plane so you can shade that smooth and then go over to add a subdivision surface and you'll just need one subdivision for this to kind of smooth out those edges so you don't really have these harsh rectangular edges as much anymore so i think that looks pretty great now you just want to place this in front of your light but out of the view of the scene so you don't want to see this kind of bizarre looking abstract shape in in the scene so i'm just gonna scale this and rotate it around so that is just off to the left so you're not gonna be seeing it behind that left wall but it will still be affecting the sun lamp that's coming in so if i go into rendered mode this will take a little bit of time to load up here but you'll notice on the back wall that there's a little bit of a pattern that's forming you can also see that manifesting itself in the sand there there's all these kind of little shadows and and bright regions and that's being affected by that gobo that i've just added into the scene so if i just toggle back to material mode we're going to add in the volume scattered part of the scene now by just adding in a cube scaling it up to be the size of our scene and then adding in a principled volume shader to this so what i'll do here is just scale this up so it's fitting in my scene properly and i'll just rename this to our volume so we know what we're looking at later go back to object mode and add in a principled volume so connect the volume output to the volume output here and you'll notice that that's pretty dense but first let's just actually display this as a wire so we can actually see our viewport in our scene again and i'm just going to increase the brightness of this a little bit in the color and also put it ever so slightly to the orangish yellowish tint so that we have kind of matched with the the background sky that we've added in which is kind of this hazy orange pink before so if i go back to rendered mode and i've decreased the density now down to 0.1 you can see the scenes become a lot darker because there's a lot more volume that the light is now having to pass through in our scene so you'll also notice that the back part of the scene is much brighter because there's no volume that's there so you'll want to grab this volume and make sure that it's it's properly filling the scene fully so that you're not having these crazy contrasts between the dark and the bright so i'm just going to change the color here again increase the brightness ever so slightly here this is all just a matter of personal preference just spend time with this and adjust the colors to how you see fit this is all artistic taste so i will also want to kind of get rid of that random bright patch in the back or in the foreground of my scene so i'm just going to extrude out this part of the geometry again this looks horribly messy but you're not going to be seeing it once we render it out so it doesn't really matter anyway it'll give us a bit of a better result and i'll show you in a second you want to be careful here when you're doing this because you can make the scene a bit too dark i think having a little bit of ambient light coming in from that hdri is helpful just to light the scene properly so you're not going to have so much noise if the scene's super dark and you've completely cut off all light in the scene it'll look pretty terrible but as you see the scene starting to render in the viewport on the right side there you've got these really great looking light rays already kind of cascading through it's really hard to tell because this keeps refreshing in cycles but it'll look really great once you render this out i promise you that i'm just going to add a loop cut in here and just show you why it's bad to add in just a fully blacked out space here without extra lights in the background if i fully pull this across you can just see how dark this scene gets and there is an insane amount of noise here because there's so many calculations going on because of all the light bounces with both the volume and also just it bouncing around inside this space here there's just a lot of a lot a lot of noise being added in here so let's just pull that back over just a little bit so we have some of this ambient light still coming in here um yeah so just pulling that over again you can see taken a sec to re-render there in the viewport but it looks much better already and looks pretty nice i'm just going to pull the volume back a little bit more too just to kill that front part where it looked kind of a little bit too bright just so the scene blends a bit better and again i'm just going to adjust some things here with the volume color it's a lot of trial and error here this is what 3d is about you got to be patient you know this is why i said that the volumetric session section here will take a little bit longer because it is a slower process it does take your computer longer to refresh and get things processed for you in the viewport especially but just take time with and have fun with it get a coffee get a tea in the meantime while stuff renders and loads out just so you can relax and enjoy the process it always should be fun doing this kind of stuff and i really think that volumetrics adds that extra touch of magic uh to these surreal scenes so now this is loading in a bit more you can actually see what this is looking like and it really does look fantastic honestly you've got these beautiful rays cascading in here and i think it might be a little bit too intense in terms of how many individual rays that we split up here so i'm actually going to revisit this gobo that we made before once again i'm going to tab into edit mode and i want to actually select random again and then delete some more of these faces just because it is a little bit too intense i'm going to turn off the subdivision i'm also going to go into material mode so this isn't refreshing constantly and slowing down my viewport but let's just select random again and then just x and then delete those faces so if i tap back into object mode once again apply that subdivision we've got a lot fewer of these little shapes and it i think will look a little bit more realistic not having so many scattered lights and that is loading up and looking really nicely so you can at this point render this out i'd advise you to actually increase your samples just a little bit just because volumetrics will add a lot more noise to your scene if you're just rendering at the same number of samples as you did before and also i'd encourage you to ramp your sunlight just a little bit more too just because the scene has gotten darker now that there's this volume so your lighting will have changed from your original scene that we rendered a little bit a little bit before this uh to how it will look now so just ramp the lighting of the sunlight and just of the hdri you can put it up a couple ticks and strength too and this is what the final image will look like i think this looks really great i did a little bit of post-processing here just to adjust the colors a little bit in the scene so be sure to subscribe for more i'm posting these tutorials fairly regularly so i want you to be in the know when they go live so you can tune in and be the first people to watch these videos check me out on instagram if you want to see more content like this and leave a comment what you want me to show you how to do next here or if you have any suggestions for things you'd like me to talk about stay tuned for the next one and see you guys soon

Channel: James Tralie

Views: 134,346

Rating: 4.9667234 out of 5

Keywords: blender, blender 2.9, 3d art, blender tutorial, blender sand, create sand blender, 3d design, environment design, concept art, tutorial, blender art, blender displacement, blender volumetrics, blender lighting, volumetrics, lighting design, art, displacement, blender texture

Id: llRkz1gVz6U

Length: 27min 31sec (1651 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 13 2020