Create An easy Stylized Forest Animation Loop in Eevee, Blender Tutorial

how's it going guys so in today's tutorial we're going to be learning how to make this simple forest tree animation no external assets needed everything in this tutorial is done inside of blender so that's really cool about this one and um the project file if you'd like to get your hands on it it's in the description for a dollar everybody on patreon you'll be getting that on all three tiers if you don't know about the patreon there's tons of cool stuff on it i just released a tutorial on how i use foam to be able to use it real time in blender and eevee i have a lot of other things like i released 10 new procedural materials that's part of a really big pack so that's a sample pack for that and a bunch of other cool stuff is happening on the patreon you know check that out in the description uh but let's get into the tutorial so i'm gonna go ahead and get a new file going here and i'm just delete everything out of your scene i'm going to hit shift a and then get in a plane here and i'm going to hit s8 and then control a and apply scale that's super super important to apply your scale now what i'm going to do is get in a new add-on so we'll go to edit preferences and in the add-ons you're going to type in tree you want to use the uh this add-on right here add curve tree generator so to click the little check mark on that and then shift a you'll go here to curves right here tree generation and we have that right there you can bring up this dialog and load preset and i'm going to get i think the let's see what we have here japanese maple is what i used for this animation now let's get ourselves some leaves so click up here it says geometry and go here to leaves click show leaves and then on leaf scale just bring it up to whatever you think is appropriate for this tree here and now we have our tree and by default the leaves are parented to the tree so that's really great but they are separate geometry so we're going to go ahead and just shrink him down something like this and then move him over and then go again and get in and i'm going to get three different trees so i'm going to go back to geometry load japanese maple and then right here on random seed click that just to get some differences and then back here two leaves so i'm going to do that one more time on a new tree you can go ahead and add as few or many trees as you'd like for this part of the tutorial alright so now we have our trees we're not going to worry about shading them right now because they're practically going to be silhouettes in this design so shading is far from a priority in this tutorial so next up is to duplicate them around your square this is going to be a looping animation so make sure that when you are arranging your trees to be around the area that they stay within this 8 by 8 square that's extremely important that they stay within the square so what you would want to do is just select both things here shift d and move it around and just randomly select different ones and then when you're finished with selecting one if you want some differentiation which is very important to have it look different even though they're duplicated just rotate them both around so you'll select the the tree base and just rotate it like that and so we'll go in and i'm going to go ahead and move these trees around duplicate them and make a forest all right so i have the trees positioned out as i like now this is the direct center and i don't want any trees in the middle there so i'm just going to move that away so i'm going to hit the tilde key right above the tab on my keyboard for me and hit front i'm going to hit shift a and add in my camera and then i'm gonna move him back on the y-axis to negative eight that brings him to the very edge of my eight by eight square and i'm gonna bring him up hit zero to go to my camera view and then i'm going to move this tree a little bit over here and then move these away so i mean you know in the camera so i want to be a little more dynamic and as i'm designing i am going to be duplicating and moving some trees around to get more of an organic uh forest but this will look relatively man-made um as these are just the way they look but you can do whatever tree whatever design you want so here is what i have so far now what i'm gonna do is i'm going to click on my camera here the the outliner and hit h to hide it because now what i'm going to do is hit b box select everything hit m new collection and call it trees and we're going to be collection instancing this so instead of using an array modifier we're going to use a little a better method of duplicating things in a long string for uh looping animations is collection instance so you'll hit shift a collection instance trees now hold down control so it snaps to grid and snap that right there so we'll just do just like that on these i messed up on this one so we'll go back and then what i want to do is get another collection instance on the trees and then bring it this way just like that and then i'm going to duplicate these two guys bring them this direction and then uh and then do that again and we pretty much have our tiled forest but when we get in actually into the view you won't be able to tell that it's tiled in that way so right over here i'm going to give myself 120 frames in my camera i'm going to click the little green camera icon and give myself a fairly wide focal length and then i'm going to hit g and then bring it down i'm going to hit r twice to sort of point him up just like that and then now we're going to animate him going in through the forest to loop it so right here in edit preferences make sure that in the uh animations that your default interpolation is at linear so now right here i'm going to go back to frame zero that's super super important for you to do that start at frame zero click negative eight click the keyframe for it and then go to positive eight because we're going to the very edge of our eight by eight square going to the edge and then now we have a seamless loop going through this thing now at the end you'll be able to see that some disappear but you won't be able to see that once we add in our volume and all our stylistic fun now here on this plane i'm going to hit tab right click subdivide i'm going to give it 50 subdivisions and then i'm going to give it a displacement modifier so let's go ahead and get that displacement new give my strength at zero point uh 0.1 for now and i'm gonna click this little icon to go to the textures add a clouds give the depth pretty low and the size something like this and then i'm a right-click shade smooth and then bring that strength up something like this and then now we have a nice animation to run our camera through it's perfectly seamless and let's start shading and lighting that's the fun part so we're going to be using some volume to really light this in our very stylistic way so shading i mean uh sorry shift a add a mesh add a cube hit s8 enter ctrl a apply that scale and hit zero to go back into the view hit the little camera icon and we're gonna go from cycles to ev if you're not already there turn on ambient occlusion here turn on bloom screen space reflections and motion blur now we're going to go over here to shading and i'm going to just hit z and go to the rendered view so i'm hitting new making sure that that cube is selected delete the principle add in a volume so principled volume here get the volume here plug it straight into the volume tab on our world brightness bring that down to zero and then right up here i'm going to delete these gizmos because they're causing this gray mass it looks like something is not there so i'm going to delete those i mean just hide them i'm going to get my density at 0.1 and my emission strength at 0.1 as well so now we have our beautiful fog this is the part where you add whatever color you like for me i found the pink to be the greatest um or the not the nicest looking one for me i really enjoyed seeing that and then now what we're going to do i'm going to hit shift a and add in a plane s8 just like that we have a new plane here and then i'm going to just bring it down a little bit don't want to overtake our little hills and then go back to shading i'm going to click new and now we're going to shade uh the this new plane bring up the transmission bring down the roughness let's get a bump node because we're going to make some little water ripples now so bump node noise texture just like this plug the factor into the height and then you'll need the node wrangler add-on so edit preferences go to add-ons here type in node turn on the node wrangler add-on because now we're going to click on the noise control t plug the object into the mapping node and then bring that strength down a little bit bring that detail up a little bit so it's nice ripples in the water and bring up the scale just a little bit too and so now we have some nice water i'm going to bring up my timeline just so i can use it within the shading workspace and then we can run our camera through our nice little forest and then i messed one thing up you can see it stops so we can see how our cube is only in this thing right here so it's only this one thing so hit m click trees it's going to add everything to the trees and now you you just see this big box we're going to i want to remove the fact that it's sort of overtaking everything so click on the little yellow box which is the transform go to viewport display from textured to wire and then now he's sort of invisible so we can see everything that's going on which is really nice so we can go back and we can press play on everything here and we can go through our nice little forest and everything looks nice and cool all right now let's add some style first off click on the camera icon go to color management and make sure you're in filmic and i like to be at very high contrast and to even add even more contrast because i'm a big fan of contrast bring your gamma down and that will even make it look even more contrasty get those really nice blacks even even though we're not getting full black so now we're flying through our scene really nice and let's go ahead and add some style to this this is something you see on instagram all the time it's a very popular style to do within motion graphics and abstract art which is adding this plane r x 90 to rotate them i'm going to bring him up a little bit toward my camera so i'm going to bring him like that scale it down and then i'm going to use the scale tool scale it up something like this bring it up he will be intersecting with trees but that's okay and then we're gonna add in first off control a apply the scale so that our wireframe modifier maps correctly we'll add the water frame just like that i'm going to click uh boundary to give it that other boundary there and then bring the thickness down a little bit let me go back to rendered view add in an emission material just like that make it nice and blue and then bring up that strength and then i think i'm gonna have to make him a nice deep blue to counteract all this craziness going on around us so now we have that i'm gonna click on the plane hold down control click on the camera control p object what that's going to do is parent the object to the camera so that it stays in the same position as he's slicing through all our trees and all our fun stuff just like that and it looks really cool and everyone's gonna like it so let's go on and add in a little bit of roughness to this plane here on the ground so let's go back to shading here click new and then we'll add in a bump node here so we want this ground to be not so perfectly smooth so we're going to add in another noise texture here i'm going to hit ctrl t use the object coordinate plug the factor into the height and then bring our distance down just like this bring up that detail and then bring up that scale so now we have a little bit of roughness a little bit of bumpiness going on the ground just to add in a little bit of detail on this ground which is uh fairly necessary and then again we're not even going to shade these trees we're not going to do anything to that because it's not entirely that necessary for all these trees because they're just silhouettes just reflecting a little bit and it's there by default cuts out a lot of the work for you next thing we're going to do is the last thing is adding some particles that glow up and we fly through so i'm going to hit shift a make our particle we're going to use an icosphere and then i'm going to give my subdivisions that like i'm going to give it some divisions of 3. i'm going to hit g to move them over here and then there he is i'm going to shade smooth by hitting right click by right clicking here and then we have our particle let's go ahead and add in the same emission material that we added to the uh the little little plane over there so the same old emission material i'm going to click on the plane and then let's add a particle system so clicking on this for particle system plus hair right here on render we're going to use from path to object and on instance object what i want to do is click this little eyedropper i'm going to find the particle eyedropper select him now we have all these bring your scale randomness pretty low and then our actual scale pretty low too i'm going to give it at 0.05 sorry 0.005 makes them pretty small it's what i want but if you can see they're all on the ground and i want them higher how do we do that the way to do that is you click your particle hit tab and then we'll click on this little move tool and then if you bring that what it does is it's moving the anchor point and it raises those particles up just like we're looking for and uh if we look at the render view now we are flying through some nice particles and you can always bring them farther down farther up really whatever you want what i'm going to do just to perfect some stuff and make it look better i'm going to click on the cube go back to shading make it a little more vibrant on the pink thus making it a little bit darker so everything's a little bit brighter and then you can go and play with that do anything that you'd like but for me this piece is finished it's nice it's simple it looks great it's a great motion graphics background for concerts anything you want for your client or for your own personal work and it's fun and you can do all kinds of stuff with this workflow so to export it we'll go back here to this printer icon do whatever resolution you want i'm going to keep it at 1920 by 1080. right here on png go to ffmpeg video or keep it at png if you want to do a image sequence on encoding change that to uh mp4 and then on medium quality go to perceptually lossless select where you want to save it go to render and render animation and when you're done you'll have a really nice beautiful animation in eevee so thank you guys for watching and i hope you learned something

Channel: Ducky 3D

Views: 123,704

Keywords: forest, trees, blender trees, blender forest, Blender, Beginner, Blender tutorial, Blender Animation, Blender Abstract, Blender Particles, Blender Lines, Blender Cinema 4D, Blender Abstract Tutorial, Blender loop, Blender VJ Loop, project breakdown, blender breakdown, Blender 2.80, blender 2.8 tutorial, Blender Eevee, Blender 3D, Blender Guru, Remington Graphics, Intro To Blender, blender vaporwave, vaporwave eevee, CG Cookie, Midge Sinnaeve

Id: owSJY_SxNj4

Length: 16min 28sec (988 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 30 2020