Create Realistic Nature in Blender (Graswald Add-on)

I want Zach here and in this video I show you how to create this nature scene from start to finish utilizing the brand new classified ad on [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] warning in this video we will make heavy use of paid blender add-ons I know not everyone is fan of this but they can speed up your workflow quite a lot so we will certainly use the classified add-on for creating all the plants across weeds and stuff like this we will use the Grove which is an awesome paid add-on for creating ultra realistic trees and blender which I totally can recommend and we will use the cycles material world which is a library of over 100 awesome cycles materials which are easily customizable so all the links to the add-ons you find in the video description however if you want to create nature scenes from scratch without the use of paid add-ons check out my movie scene creation workshop there you will learn exactly that and if you're not planning on purchasing this add-ons I recommend to watch this video anyway because besides these add-ons there are some other cool tips and tricks you will learn along the way while creating this image so first we start with a quick overview about the class vault add-on and then we will jump right in to create this artwork here from start to finish and we will check if the class file add-on is really worth some money since you will ask me this in the comments anyway I just answer this here beforehand the creation process of this artwork took about 4 to 5 hours and the final rendering took about 5 hours in 4k resolution 800 samples in cycles on GPU rendering with an NVIDIA GTX 1080 Ti alright without further words let's get started let's take a quick look at the basic functionality of the add-on after you've installed the zip file in the user preferences add-ons you find all the settings down here in the as file tab so the easiest way to do it is by adding an object where you want to add the plans select this and then hit the plus button up here and then a new particle system will be created up here we have a list with all our particle systems you can add as many as you like and then down here in the species tab we can select species and under variant we can select different variations every species has different variations which you can combine in many different ways so that you have a lot of flexibility you can also filter the species according to different packages like grass weeds moss and the breeze which contains dead leaves small sticks and wooden parts stuff like this so pretty nice if you just want to cover the ground with stuff so for now let's go to weeds and take the dandelion and right now we don't see anything because we need to increase the density in the growth panel so let's increase this and this value defines how much of the space here is covered so that means if I increase the space here click in here hit enter then this will update and then the same amount of space according to the size of the object will be covered with plants so this is not the number of plants we have here then we have the seed value to randomize the position of the plants and you can see your rotation scale and stuff like this is already set up so we don't need to adjust anything else here so one very nice feature up here is the auto name feature if I click on that you can see it will auto name the particle system according to the emitter the species and the variant so if I change anything here it auto name it will rename this stuff up here I've found it really useful so you don't need to waste any time on typing names in here then up here you can switch to a local that means if I for example have another object here if I add another particle system then right now you can see we have all the particles in the list that means if you click on global you see all particle systems from the whole scene but if you click on local you can only see the particle systems from the selected object then also pretty nice if you have a particle system on your object let's choose a ten your line again then you can easily duplicate this with all the settings so I click on that then this will be duplicated and then for example I can choose different variations like the flowers here and now you can see the flowers will be placed on the same spot where we have the leaves if I copy this again I can for example add the dead leaves here as well so in this way I can basically change the variation so I don't just have the pure models here I can change it if it should have the flowers or the dead leaves or not and if I change the density of some of those variants then not every dandelion has a flower for example and in this way we are extremely flexible for the flowers here for example I can also change the height and I can change the resolution here that means if this is grass which you only show from far away then you can turn down the resolution and you can add or remove subsurf levels for the viewport and for the final rendering and you can see and then the individual models are even higher in quality they are already pretty high in quality if we take a closer look and change this to texture and zoom in here you can see that everything has pretty high textures all the tiny details even the the flower leaves here and also certainly the leaves of the dandelion and the black areas here are basically alpha Channel that means this is transparent while rendering so I think one of the biggest strengths of this package / add-on is the quality of the models because they are super realistic high-end detail and they even perform really well if you're doing close-up shots here and if I add an HDI map in the background you can see also the shading is super realistic we have nice reflections bump maps and this nice translucency that means if we have here strong sunlight the light is shining through here so this looks really realistic so for the viewport I would always turn the subdivisions down so the viewport wants more fluent let's go to the display tab here we can turn down the display that means it will not show every single plant in the viewport but in the final rendering and one other thing I find a really useful is a maximum draw type that means you can define if this plant in the viewport should be shown a solid object as a wireframe or what I use a lot as bounds because this is really few port friendly it's just a bounding box in wireframe mode and as you can see it one super smooth and when I'm done with placing my plants here then I always switch those two bounds and then I can work on the next layer of grass or weeds without slowing down the viewport too much then let's go over to distribution this is also really nice because here we can quickly paint a vertex map so I have to subdivide the mesh a bit in order to do this and then I click start paint now I can paint the areas where I want the plants to grow then I click on exit paint and if I just enable this year and increase the density you can see now this stuff is only growing here and you can always go back and start painting to change this and you can also paint a length map which is also pretty cool where you can define how big the plants should be all the settings for the white paint you find up here and the tools so you can also change this exit then another very powerful tool here is the material panel because let's take a closer look here we have the basic settings for example we can increase the age here and if we take a closer look here this does not only mean that the color is changing here that means that actually the texture is changing so the younger the plant the more green it is basically and if you are changing it to an old plant you can see at some point there's a transition between the young leaves and more or less dead leaves here also you can change the percentage for example if I set this to 0.5 only 50% of the plants are aged there we can change the translucency here that means that the sun is shining through you can see if I turn it down to zero no light is passing through and this is not looking that nice also we can change the wetness if we have a scene with rain or stuff like this we have this nice stronger sharper reflections on the leaves here and before we go to that plant settings we also can change the quality for example if you have a wide shot and don't need that high details you can change this to medium or low you can see then the texture quality is pretty low but it will render much faster so as you can see here with high quality this took seven seconds and with low quality it took only two seconds so now let's go back to high quality go to advanced settings and then you can see you have much more control over the aged translucency wetness but map and also you can change the color if for example if I chain to you we can create some onion vegetation on another planet for example also if you want to see the textures pretty nice you can go to the oval settings and enable optimal display then you see only the color and texture without all the shading information like shadow reflection pump map and stuff like this so and if I for example change this to a grass model then we also have more options down here for example we can add this dead patches that means we have dead spots in our meadow here we can change the trainers and if you have cut grass you can even add stripes to it like on a soccer field or similar so as you can see you have full control over the whole thing and in the end if you combine all these different species this looks pretty amazing so now let's take a look how the classified ad on performs in the creation process of a real artwork so I want to create a full artwork just for this tutorial and I thought about what I wanted to create certainly something with nature and with this little tool here called pure ref which is free and awesome to collect reference images create mood bots and stuff like this so I just drag and drop some images I found on Google and I really like the idea that there are some old buildings or vehicles and the nature is taking over I found this nice images here from this cars online and I want to do something similar to this but certainly modeling a car takes a lot of time so I search on land swap for a nice free car model and I found this 1968 Mustang GT fastback model by Adam T Rider which is pretty perfect for this purpose so let's just take the model here select everything from the car control C to copy it then I open up a new file to leave the stuff here I don't need and then ctrl V to paste it so let's move the camera with em to another layer so first of all the car is way too big let's delete this one here and since this unit here is 1 meter this is a huge car so let's select the body here and scale it down to see the scale we can check the dimensions here for the y-axis I just Google the size of the car and it is about 4.6 meters something about this it actually doesn't matter that this is the right size down to the millimeter okay then let's add a ground I simply add plane scale it a bit bigger here and that's the name of the layer with the camera press numpad zero and let's adjust the camera perspective right now I'm using the walk navigation with shift F and then with WASD you can move around just take a look in the head of the 3d viewer there you have all the shortcuts so I want to have a nice camera perspective but we will further adjust this later on but for now let's adjust the plane a bit so now let's switch over to scope mode here let's enabled Interpol for dynamic topology choose constant details and the resolution certainly is super low because it was just one big plane so let's increases and check the resolution if this is enough maybe a bit more maybe training and this should be fine then certainly we don't want to move this and then we can simply add geometry here so I just want to have this an even surface and what's also helpful here maybe we just split our view up here and switch to 3d view and press numpad 0 home button to see the camera perspective and full view and then let's just add a bit geometry here so I'm using the strong light strips brush or the standard Sculptra brush and I want to have a little hill behind the car because the car itself should be somehow placed a bit inside the ground so that it's standing there like forever already that's okay for now I will probably adjust this while working on this and now let's select the car and let's rotate this along the y axis a bit something like this but I still want to see the front of the car time to time for now let's change the car model so we have the tires here so we can rotate them a bit this looks a bit more interesting and let's select the hood here go to the modifiers apply the mower modifier and then we can also switch to sculpt mode press G for the grab brush and just move stuff a bit around since this car doesn't have our engine we should not overdose it here but since with the lighting we can set up everything that the inner just shows up black doesn't really matter so just a bit of damage is always nice here so same thing for the main body here here we don't have any more modifier so let's switch to scope mode and add some damage as well we can all won't try to add some damage to the tires also the parts we can move around a bit material damage to the car for that we need some lighting and we will use a very very simple light setup here and this consists out of a simple aerial lamp so let's scale this up a bit over here I hit shift Z to render and for now we simply scale this up put it above the car so we can see everything pretty nice so and we have a small problem because all the sups of modifiers are disabled on the car and it would take pretty long to select all the individual objects and enable the subsurf modifier so we can do it even quicker we simply select everything just make sure that one of the car elements is active so we can see the modifiers and then hold down alt and just enable this it will be enabled on all the selected objects voila now we have a high resolution object so end right now as mentioned this is pretty low resolution as you can see so the deformation is not that nice but if we increase that here we have a pretty high resolution but sadly we can't for example sculpt on the resolution from the subsurf modifier but there is a simple trick let's remove this from the body then let's select these two objects and with ctrl J let's join all of them and then I add a multi resolution modifier which is pretty similar to the SAPS of modifier when I satellite this we have a pretty high resolution and if I now go into sculpt mode and start sculpting you can see I actually can use the high resolution to add damage for example to the car here so now we have some extra damage all right now let's work on the materials of the car and the ground and since I want to create the scene as quick as possible I will use another paid asset pack here it's called the cycles material world which consists out of over a hundred ready-to-use cycles materials which are pretty flexible in terms of customization so let's import this so I go to file a pend go to the cycles material vault materials just click on the blend file and here I simply click on material and here I want to have the metal too so I hold on shift to select this then I want to have the rubber and I want to have the ground 7 then I click a pen from libraries so I import all the materials into my scene come on so and now I simply can select the body here go to materials and here we have the car paint and this I changed to metal the you - let's hit render over here to better see it and now we have this procedural damaged metal with some paint on it so and I think since the whole scene will be relatively Queen let's choose a reddish color since this perfectly fits together with green and it looks a little bit rusted and then as you can see down here we have a lot of settings to adjust for the material for example I think the West is pretty strong over here so let's turn down the rust intensity and displacement intensity is pretty high here turn it down a bit then let's scale these areas a bit and also the scratches make them a bit smaller and as you can see we also have this wrong edges which looks pretty nice so and as you can see with just a few clicks this works out pretty fine then select this area here this is the chrome one and let's change the roughness a bit because I don't want the chrome to be too shiny with a little bit of roughness this doesn't look that new anymore and for the tires I want to use the other rubber because here we can add some bump so it looks a little bit all over so I think that's already enough now let's select the ground here we use ground 7 but in order to make this work we need a UV map so we simply switch to edit mode select everything and press U and unwrap since this is basically just a square shape with open edges we don't need to add any seams now you can see we have this texture on the ground but certainly it's way too big and in the material settings we can simply scale this so let's increase the scaling and then you can see we have this nice texture on the ground and we basically just need a little bit color variation there because when we add all the grass and so on we will not really see the ground anymore just a short note here for whatever reason starting this point my screen recorder just cut off a part of the image on the bottom and on the right side so sorry for that I just realized this after I was done with the creation process but in general I think there's nothing really important missing here so for the ground let's enable the smooth shading and I think to make the whole process a bit easier for us let's delete all the windows because otherwise we have to deal with reflections and we have to add texture to the windows as well and I think since this car is really old it's ok if we don't have any windows anymore if we like we can damage the wipers for doing this switch to edit mode press over enabling proportional editing and then you can easily change the shape organically and also let's damage the seats a bit so apply the mower modify you can see this does not work because these two objects are linked to each other so press U and click on object in Taylor then it will be unlinked and now I can apply this and then instead of the subsurf modifier let's add the multiverse modifier and then inside a scope mode we can add just a little bit of damage over here and certainly we don't want to have a floating driving mower here yeah let's just delete it so before we get to the grass stuff I want to make a change for the camera so let's enable the camera here and there's one main thing I want to do here let's shift Ziya render this and I want to have a kind of fish eye lens here so I go to the camera settings camera selected click on panoramic and now you can see we have this fish eye type but it's pretty extreme at the moment so I increase the lens to maybe thirty then we can go a little bit closer now you can see we have this distortion in here but in my opinion it feels a bit more like we are standing in this scene and looking at this because we have our wider view basically and what you can also do if you want to work a bit on your composition and the display we have this composition guides and there I sometimes use the golden triangle and as you can see the car is already pretty good aligning with that also we have a dark spot over here and the dark spot here so this is a good contrast to the rest of the scene if we like we can also rotate this a bit we can always change the camera perspective there is now only one thing we have to keep in mind the viewport camera without rendering represents not the fish eye camera so we have to take care that when we place all the plans and stuff that we have to place it a bit around the camera perspective so that we fill up the whole area certainly we can enable the viewport rendering from time to time but I will not leave it always on because this will slow down the whole process here so finally let's get to the passivity part which suggests that we start with the ground here and we will start by adding all the debris stuff which is pretty flat and all the small and tiny plants and then step by step adding the larger plants and after that we will do that for the car so in order to make everything a bit more fluent let's select the car and disable them multiverse modifier just one thing to keep in mind here so that this not leads to confusion since the car model is now a lower solution the material changes a bit so we have more of the wrong effect up here and if we then increase the multiverse again it will be disappear because we have a higher resolution the material is automatically adjusting according to the resolution of the car basically now let's select the ground disable camera and let's also move the light over here so the ground is selected and let's hit the plus button here let's go to the breeze and let's start with the stuff over here here we have this wooden parts and there's sticks and let's start with the wooden parts here let's increase identity and very important so that everything one smoothly let's go to display and switch this to pounds that means we only see this wireframe bounding box of the objects and the few part is pretty smooth then let's go over to distribution and start painting for the density if I now paint over here we're now defining the areas where this wooden parts should be and since we are using the white paint here we can change the weight paint stuff over here but if we don't want to switch between the class file tab and the tools tab let's shift left click on the brushes here then this panel will be pinned by the way we also have a classified vertex tools panel down here to change the weight maps but certainly we can also do it over here so let's move over here you can move this wash settings around so basically this will now show up in every tap here but since we are now exclusively working with the classified top let's put it over here and let's keep it as long as we are drawing since if you want to erase some area simply put down the rate to zero and then you can remove stuff so also in the car is important and I think we don't need to take much care about that we are too close to the car since this are very flat pieces and they are not growing through the car if you are working with the plants or grass you have to take care because if the grass is growing through the body here this will not look that nice so if you think you're done you can go to the distribution tab and click on exit paint then as you can see we have it here now let's do a quick test rendering to see if this error recovered here is enough and this we can also use as orientation point for the other particle systems we will add so let's take a closer look I think this is good let's maybe change this to other species for a short while to just get a better idea what we have covered and I think we can even take some stuff away over here so let's get back to paint all right now let's get back to the video parts big and display back to bounce this is maybe a small buck or so at the moment that sometimes if you switch something here the bounce will not update I'm pretty sure they will fix it in the future and so let's get back to bounce and maybe we can add a bit more density here let's try for now let's auto name this let's call this ground and then auto name again then we have this nice ground name here as well then I hide this and click on copy and paste basically this one button here then let's choose the sticks end in this case I want to change the seeds so they are not lying on the same spot as the woody the breeze something like this maybe let's increase the particle size a bit then again let's change the display to bounce and yeah I will now add some further degrees but let's fast forward this a bit so this is what we have so far let's do a quick test render keep in mind we will change the lighting and stuff like this at the end so everything will be a bit brighter but I think we have a nice ground coverage of some stuff lying around there so this is basically just to fill the gaps between the grass and stuff like this now let's hide all that stuff and let's go on waste the smaller plants so let's create a new particle system and this case let's go on with the weeds and let's check I think this one is relatively small not that small but maybe we can take the small one here yeah then let's change the display to bounce and let's go to the distribution and here we can pick the existing vertex cool and then unlink this so if we like we can paint in here as you can see here it's growing through the tires so let's go to a paint erase some stuff here which is too close to the car it's alternating this and then I just copy this maybe let's increase the density here from this because this should cover a large area here and the second one there we take larger ones but here we don't want to have that much and we want to have different seed and again here we have to check if this is somehow strange growing through the car and a little bit but I'm not really sure if we will see it at the end if we have larger grass patches over there but here this is not that nice so let's go to a distribution unlink start painting and let's remove some stuff over here so I think this should be fine let's change this to bounce Auto name and let's do it again with the third variation so this is what we have already by the way we can press control B and select the camera area and then it will only run on this stuff which is really inside the camera and for the camera if we selected we can change the passport to all four to one so it's completely black and we will only see the frame which is inside the area of the camera so we know exactly what we will see at the end since I think the workflow is pretty clear I will now add different kind of grass and weeds and stuff like this and I will fast forward the process now because it's basically all the same when I'm done with this we will go over to change some material settings of the grass so when we have maybe a little bit more dry grass and plans here all over the place and then we will go over to the car at some moss and other DePriest and some plants so let's get started so I think that all the weeds and debris stuff now let's add the grass I want to have pretty high grass so let's check which one would fit best here let's choose one of the existing vertex groups and see how the grass looks rendered so if we take this one we need a lot I think in general we need a lot and also we need different vertex group here we will definitely change the color of the grass but I think let's check the first one here yeah I think this is pretty nice and here we have to increase the density cried a lot because we want to have a lot of grass here and what we also want to have is that the grass looks a bit dry so let's increase the age to one and let's set the percentage to 50% so we have a little bit of dry grass or old grass in between and let's go to advanced and then we have also the dead patches here so we can add that pictures let's try 40% can also increase the trainer's a bit yeah so very important here that the grass is not growing through the car so let's work on the wait map a bit so let's check how our scene looks so far let's enable all all they stop here which is pretty much and Rena this as you can see some of the grass assets don't have the texture on it this grey area here and it seems to be a small back here you can fix this by simply selecting this go on share mat and then click on this again and I just do it for all the grass stuff since I think this is the only thing which is affected but yeah I'm pretty sure they will fix stuff like this in the near future so look at this and this looks nice already so let's get to the grass and let's increase the display to 100% because right now we have not enough grass that's what I'm talking about now let's get over to the car but maybe we can increase the strength of the lamp a bit yeah much better now let's disable all that stuff here up here let's switch to local because then we only see the particle systems of the selected object because if I now select the body of the car we have a empty space here to work on so the car is selected and I disable the multi rest so it's much easier to work on especially if we are painting vertex groups and so on and let's start with a very special one hit the plus button and I'm talking about the moss so let's choose a moss I take this one it's a bit bigger so we can see it better and display we set two bounds in this case it's pretty important to do that because we need to increase the density quite a lot in order to have the right amount but I give it a bit lower at the moment and first of all it's started to paint on here and I don't want to have Moss everywhere so I think it looks cooler if it is just growing in some areas especially on the bottom part here but yeah we have to check this out so if this is done let's go back and now let's drastically increase this year I mean we increase like two thousand or even more let's just check how this looks rendered damn look at that looks pretty nice already but I think we can even increase this a bit more let's try two thousand five hundred and if you are using the smaller mores like this one you need way more density here so I think for this scene I will leave this one because this looks also pretty nice but maybe maybe we should not do it too much because then we can't see the car anymore that nice and maybe we should also paint a length map so let's switch to length start painting and here maybe first of all we paint all over the place and then let's reduce the weight and then we can change the size in there bit so it doesn't have the same strength everywhere so let's see this in action yeah that's much much better so I think for the moss the the length map or the size vertex group here is really important because if everything is just one big green thing looks like the car full of hair or anything like this so in this way this looks much much better and I think it's important that at least in some areas we also add moss like and front here or on the tires so let's add some moss here and copy this over to other objects so I copy this one then and this one here is called tire so let's quickly go back to global and the copied one under growth we can apply to the tire here maybe a bit less particles and the same thing over here this one is called tire thee with 0 3 so I won't add this to every single little object here but I think this area here is still important because it's pretty big here and maybe also on the seats so I guess if you're working with moss and stuff like this this would be pretty helpful if you join as many parts as possible so you basically can just draw over the whole car and don't need to worry about ya selecting each object and adding so much particle systems here so and now let's analyze the castle art part by adding some debris stuff to the body here as well so I done with the classified part I added some stakes leaves and wooden parts to the body here and now I don't want to enable all the particle systems to check the whole thing so I will do a quick test render in low resolution so let's make this 50% of the resolution and let's decrease the sampling to 64 let's set the background to be transparent and let's also change the world settings to be completely black so I said the strings to Leo and now let's hit f12 to see how this looks all right this is what we got so far looks pretty nice in general maybe I will add some more brown tone to the grass and weed here maybe also to the moss maybe we can change the moss length or distribution here on the hood and definitely we need to add some moss over here and after this we will add some trees to the background but more about this a bit later so I think I'm done with a class-wide part here I disabled all the particle systems but now we need something here in the background and I want to add some trees there because I want to have this mysterious forest feel later on so we need to add some trees and you can either use the free sapling add-on which you can find in the user preferences or you can download some ones from plane swap purchase some models on the planer market but I would recommend the grove add-on which is besides the classified ad on one of the coolest nature things you can have for blender because the trees are looking so realistic and you can even animate them besides this add-on you can also purchase this tricks here different tricks from different species which are also in ultra high resolution and along with the add-on also you get a bunch of nice bark textures which you just can put on your trees and there's already a UV map automatically so you don't need to do anything there so I just copy and paste the twigs into my scene here and now let's hit shift a mesh and click on the Grove I'm using a version 6 here so in order to get all the settings you have to open up the operator panel and I want to create a European oak so I just use a preset here because if you scroll down here you have so many options and yeah it's a bit much but you can do awesome stuff just by clicking a few buttons here so don't worry and here let's add the tricks the epical and the lateral trick so and now in order to grow in this tree we simply have to click on the grow button here and now you can see the trees growing if you want to grow this even bigger you can add more years so let's put this to ten and if I now click on grow it will add another ten years to the tree so now it's getting bigger but if we compare it to our scene here it is still relatively small but since we will only see some of the Leafs in our scene we don't need to grow a giant tree here let's add another ten years and that's fine I think so you can see in how we have a larger tree you can also cut off branches if you like just by pressing D and draw a line here and then for example you can cut this off by pressing the poon button and if you know what grows this even further it will interact here in the way that this branch keeps cut off so this is pretty nice so now let's add a texture here let's go to the materials and let's open the texture so as mentioned there are a bunch of nice textures shipped with the add-on and let's take oak tree so textures edit now let's use this tree to fill out the areas in the background so let's move it over here and if we like we can also change the maximum draw type of these two objects here two bounds as well and just hold down alt click on bounds and then it will change this for both objects and now this should run a bit smoother and I play some really low because I just want to have some leaves of the tree showing up in my scene here so let's do a surrender here and as you can see now we have this nice Leafs in the background and now if we enable all the grass stuff then the whole scene is filled up with nature stuff which looks pretty nice I think but before we finish this render there's one thing I want to add for the mood so I just add a big hoop here is really huge and let's go to the material settings and new on the surface let's click on this and click on the remove button so we don't have any information for the surface we just want to add a volume scatter shader here and now as you already can see we add some fog to our scene but we have to lower the density cried a lot with this anisotropic value here you can define how much the light is distributed in this volumetric field so if I put it down it's distributed pretty strong and with this one area light here it looks like we have a cloudy sky and the light is shining yeah in this Glade here so somewhere in the forest we have this car you can also change the color of the volume material if you like if you want to have it a little bit more blueish but I think the gray look already fits pretty well yeah in the creation process of such a 3d rendering most of the time is taken by the final tweaking so I think like in 50 percent of the time of the creation process you create the whole scene and then the other 50% is just spending time on tweaking values and changing little things here and there so after the last step you just saw I put in just a bit more time and finalized this but I think it's really useless to show you the time lapse or stuff like this I will just show you all that changes I did here all right this was the first rendering I did I will show you all the changes in blender in a second but I just want to show you some things I did here first of all I added some individual plans here which I found pretty nice because then you have this little extra detail on your object which not looks like you have just put in a particle system there but somehow I was not 100% satisfied with all that and that's mainly because here we have the dead leaves lying on the hood and somehow this felt too noisy for me too distracting so I wanted to change this and also I didn't like the flowers here in this case and somehow this also was a bit distracting in my opinion and I also don't like that the wipers and the mirror here has no moss on it so I did my second render which is also the final render we will do some brightness tweaking and Photoshop in just a moment but here you can see the changes we don't have all this noisy stuff here anymore I adjusted the growth of the moss a bit and as you can see now moss is also growing here on every part and as you can see I replaced the flowers with some not coloured flowers basically and for the final rendering here I also used different grass models as you can see so these are not the same as we edit previously so far so good now let's take a quick look inside blender what main changes I did here so now I will a to the stuff that I already showed you in the video so mainly I adjusted the ground here as you can see I pulled out the car a bit so that we can see the front here a bit better in the final rendering also I change the camera perspective so I'm a bit closer here and I also changed the lens a bit as you can see we basically have more distortion because I wanted to have a wider field of view so that we can see more of the forest and the meadow here around the car and what I also did I enable depth of field that means select the camera go to display enable limits then you have this little cross here and then under depth of field you can change the distance of the focus here and with the size you can control the depth of fear that means how strong this is so we just have a slight depth of field here in the background and the foreground here is in focus this adds to the realism of the scene yeah then as mentioned I added this extra plants here and it's super easy to do so if you were go on another layer just create a new plane for example let's create a new particle system and choose whatever you want to have and you don't need to setup anything here because we just want to click on link to scene and then as you can see you can delete the particle system now these models are linked to our scene and you can place them by hand so you have more control especially if you want to have some details or you have a close-up shot and you want to place some of the plants exactly how you want them certainly you can also go into edit mode and move stuff around and in this way it was easy to just add this extra plants here also I moved the trees a bit closer to the car to have some of the branches hanging a bit over the car which also I think supports the mood of the scene so that it feels like the car is really hidden somewhere in the forest also I placed some of the stinging nettles in a more nice way that it supports somehow the composition of our scene so that our car is basically framed with plants which looks really nice and we have some plants in the foreground then which are a little bit out of focus which also helps to add depth to the scene if we look back on the image you can see it over here we have this nice flow of these stinging nettles here which as mentioned are framing the car somehow and as mentioned we have a little bit more depth in the scene then I also join different parts of the car like this here all these extra parts and then it was super easy to just draw the moss all over the parts and same I did for the interior and stuff like this so this made the most placing and growing stuff much easier I also increased the most density and I also changed the most hype from this one here to the one which I found looked a bit better in this scene also as mentioned I changed the grass type which I found works a bit better it looks a little bit Wilder and yes supports the scene better and as mentioned I removed all the colorful flowers so then let's talk about the render settings and lighting setup so one important thing here in the scene tab and the color management I enabled the filmic view transform it's a bit hard to explain in just a few words but basically this allows us to use much brighter lights here without over blowing the image just Google for filmic blender and you will have a lot of information and tutorials on YouTube as well with that said let's check the lamp as you can see i extremely increased the strength of the lamp so it's much brighter and it's really important to have a bright image to get the mood right and also i tweaked the volume cube a bit so as you can see i change the anisotropic quite a bit that means the light is not spreading that much anymore so it doesn't look like there's fork instead it looks a bit more like the light is shining from above and we have this kind of light glow or anything like this yeah after i was happy with the camera perspective and all the light setup I went over to other render settings and here in my case I went at the double full HD resolution which took also five hours to render so this is not necessary but I wanted to have this in very high resolution here then the sampling the render samples I said through 800 I think in this more noisy nature scenes you don't need that much samples but yeah since I leaved my computer render over the night it doesn't really matter to me then on the film I said background to be transparent so we can change this in Photoshop later on I used GPU rendering and another performance to have important I have the Auto tile size add-on enabled so the tiles will be adjusted automatically so you don't have to care about this because this is influencing your window time quite a lot so go to the user preferences and enable auto tile size yeah and for the output I set this to PNG rgba for the Alpha Channel and 16-bit and then I hit render so I don't have the final full rendering here in place anymore but I have this small part rendered and if you will then want to save the image go to image save as image and then here you also can change the image settings and the name of the image save as image and then you're good to go and one thing I just forgot under the render layer tab I enabled denoising so that we get a noise free image in the end so now I just drag and drop the image into Photoshop because we definitely need to adjust the brightness most of the time if your output in rendering from a 3d application it is somehow too dark especially I see this on beginner renders but also my renders are always too dark so I always put them into Photoshop and here I do some adjustments because maybe the image looks good to your eye but every screen is different in brightness so never trust your screen and because of that we have some nice tools here in Photoshop for example which are also available in any other applications like or quita we can check our values so the simplest way to do this is by adding a levels layer and here we have the histogram and this is a very cool tool to quickly check the values in your image this over here means completely black and this over here means completely white and at the moment you can see that to this point we are not using all the values up to white and we don't use all the values down to black so and to fix this I basically move this handle over here where the the mountain here starts basically and then I can move the brightness value over here so now we are using the full spectrum from black to white and as you can see the image looks much better now there are also some great tutorials on the sir Graham on YouTube definitely learn this this is not only important for photographs also for CG artists really important these tools here like the histograms shows how the values in our image actually are so we don't need to guess but I do it mostly a bit different I do right click on this layer here and convert this to a smart object that means if I add any effects to this layer I can easily disable them or remove them if I don't do this all the effects I apply will be automatically applied to this layer and I can't remove them later on so this is one little thing I always do then I go to filter Camera Raw filter and here as you can see we have more control over all these values like blacks whites shadows highlights exposure and stuff like this and a good starting point is simply by clicking on auto most of the time this is way too bright in my opinion so after that I go over the values and adjust them to my personal preference and the good thing is up here you also have the histogram to check so and right now the image is a bit too saturated so down here I set the vibrance and saturation down to zero if you like you can go over to the FX panel and since we have two noise our image there is no noise in our image left but to achieve photo realism it's always nice to have this little amount of film grain in the image so under FX grain we can add this not too strong just a little bit so and there's one final thing I do back to the FX panel we can add this vignette effect which is basically this darkened edges here and in this particular case this fits to the scene pretty good because if we darken the edges here we take the focus out of these edges and the focus goes more into the center of our image so not too much we can also adjust this a bit further yeah something like this okay and as you can see this is original and this is a just one now we still have this bright spots here in the background and this is alpha Channel transparence we have here in the image and if this is right away this feels like this is not a very dense forest so I add a new layer and just fill it with black color and now it feels like we have a very dense forest so and now I want to add a very tiny effect because if you are in the nature or in the forest there's always stuff flying around like little particles or insects so I went to the website PhotoPass org which is pretty awesome if you're doing photo bashing for creating concept art or stuff like this here you get high quality images for a very low price and here I purchased the Wayne particle spec and I want to use this image here you can see it's white particles on black background and if we set the blend mode to screen then the black area will be transparent and now we can only see the particles now let's scale it up and I don't want this strong part up here so I scale it up move it around a bit because mainly we need some particles up here in the volumetric area also let's lower the opacity to make that not that prominent and also if we like with old drag and drop a left-click we can duplicate this layer and maybe add a few more particles so if you want to check the particles simply disable the layer with a car and then you can see all that stuff which is flying around here so and this easy we can add a little bit more life to our scene without and with so when you're done with all the tweaks we can add a little color effect by simply clicking down here and choosing color lookup and then another 3d lut file you can click in and click down here and then with the mouse wheel over this you can change this and there are some nice color filters you can add to your scene certainly I won't use something which is X room is strong but for example if I use this one here because I like the blue tone here in the dark areas in order to make that not that strong we can simply turn down the opacity of this effect so if I just want to have this slight bluish color here but yeah this certainly you can do according your personal preference yeah when you go to all the adjustments in place save the image and voila you have your final rendering yeah guys in about 4 hours excluding the render time I was able to create this beautiful artwork utilizing this paid add-ons so personally in my opinion especially if the time factor is important in the things you are doing add-ons like this are really helpful and totally worth the money however if you're new to blender or relatively new I would recommend to first learn how you can do all this stuff on your own just to improve yourself your skills and then when you have the skills use this kind of add-ons to speed up your work so let me know in the comments if you ever purchased an add-on for blender and if so which add-on was it and did it help you to speed up your work or improve your work yeah as mentioned you can find all the links to the add-ons in the video description and if you want to learn how to create nature scenes from scratch check out my movie scene creation workshop please like this video if you like share with your friends and subscribe and don't forget to check the Bell icon to get notified for future videos thanks a lot for watching guys see you in the next video goodbye [Music] [Music] you

Channel: CG Boost

Views: 152,963

Rating: 4.9581943 out of 5

Keywords: blender tutorial, blender 2.7, graswald addon, graswald tutorial, blender graswald tutorial, create nature in blender, realistsic nature in blender, the grove tutorial, cycles material vault, create grass in blender, cg nature tutorial, 3d nature, realistic trees in blender, create a meadow in blender, create moss in blender, realistic forest, create a forest in blender, realistic rendering in cycles, cycles, volumetric material, fisheye camera blender, filmic blender

Id: p0UL24930hU

Length: 63min 41sec (3821 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 20 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/Vashchuk]

These add-ons can be really handy. Thanks