Create Stylized Grass in Blender!

all right hello everyone today I'm gonna be showing you how to create this beautiful stylized wavy grass effect now this effect was actually shown to me by a user on my server that goes by the username of feline entity they're quite well-versed in the ways of blender but they put a particular emphasis on doing stylized work and they're also an add-on developer if you go to their Gumroad page you'll find the outline help right on for Blender 2.8 which will help you generate non-destructive outlines for your characters they really wanted to show off how to get this effect but they didn't want to go through the hassle of making a tutorial and that's where I come in now I'm gonna show you how to achieve this effect by yourself but if you look in the description you'll find a link to fill an entity's Gumroad in there you'll be able to pick up a package we've demonstration files for this effect and inside of those files they will also tell you a few extra tips and tricks to I won't cover in this video so I highly recommend you go and check it out so anyway let's begin okay so we're starting off from my start up file which will look a bit different to yours but it doesn't really matter that much what I'm gonna do is just delete everything inside of the scene to start with so I'm gonna press shift a then create a plane this whacked is our ground but we'll need to scale it up to get some nice coverage if I press the end key to open up the side menu and then in scale I'm just gonna click on the X and drag all the way down to Z and then type in 10 so we've got uniform scale of 10 all across the plane but now we've got the ground we of course want to create strands to whack to Sawgrass now a lot of people when they do wavy grass objects use planes because when you're gonna be instancing the object hundreds possibly thousands of times across an upper object you want it to be optimized and we'll talk a bit about that later but we're actually going to be using 3d meshes created from curves as our grass objects this is because we want to go for maximum stylistic fidelity so go to press shift D go down to curve and then choose path it'll be difficult to see because everything's bright but if I grab the z-axis handle and then move this up keeping it snap to the grid along the way by holding ctrl then we can see here above the plane now of course this infinitely thin strand isn't gonna give us much to work with so I'm gonna go to the curves tab then I'm gonna go to the geometry section and under bevel you see the depth value so we're gonna increase this until we get something a little bit thick I think I'll go for 0.5 that seems like a good amount now this strand object is sideways but that's okay because we'll be able to reorient it when we come to setting up the particle settings for the plane we one thing to keep in mind is though where this origin is this is where this strand of grass is going to be duplicated into the plane so of course we want to move the contents of this strand along the x-axis a bit so if I go into edit mode select all of these pick the move tool and then move them to the side now you'd think moving it all the way until the origin is right at the end would be a good idea but actually we're gonna move it just so the origin is slightly inside of the mesh here and this is because when the strand of grass comes to wave in the wind we're gonna need a little bit of flex room so anyway now we're gonna build the shape so I'm gonna select the end point here hold alt and press s and scale it all the way down and I'm gonna do a little bit for the next one and then I'm gonna leave it a bit chunky in the middle but for this very end point back here I'm actually gonna scale this down a little bit so this is gonna be one of our free dimensional strands of grass but we want to create some variation so I'm gonna go into object mode duplicate this about three more times and now we're gonna make some subtle changes just so the grass looks a bit varied even when it's not waving so I'm just gonna move some points around you can also do some rescheduling if you want but that's entirely up to you ok so now we've got our variations and now that these are prepared how do we get these onto the plane well this is where particle systems are going to come in handy if we click on the plane and then go to the particle properties tab I'm gonna press the plus icon then I'm gonna choose hair now you see these guidelines for all of these strands here but this is not what we're gonna need basically to get these objects onto the plane we need to tell the particle system to look at a collection of objects and then duplicate them randomly what this requires is that we actually put these objects into a collection beforehand so I'm gonna select all of them by shift-clicking press em choose new collection and the type grass then if I click on the plane again if we go down to the render section then either value render as we want to change it from path to collection then you'll see down here there's a value called instance collection we click on that and choose grass now you'll see that our objects have been duplicated across the plane but of course something is wrong they're all facing the wrong way so how do we fix this well all we need to do is take the object rotation value okay that's all well and good but it's a little bit sparse at the moment so how do we make this a bit more full well I'm gonna scroll up and change the number from 1,000 to 10,000 now this is where I should give you a warning about optimization because we have introduced a number of polygons inside of the original grass objects and were duplicating them many times this may not be appropriate for your computer but there are a couple of things you can do first of all if you look at the curve settings for the individual objects we can reduce the resolution preview value to something like well all the way down to one the object will become much more lower poly so you can do this for all of these to reduce the amount of vertices in the scene but because I've got a powerful computer then we're going for full fidelity I'm gonna keep that up another thing you can do is reduce the number of the particle objects so if I said this to 500 you see this happens but then there's something interesting down in the children's section of the settings if you open this submenu you can choose interpolated and it'll basically average out between the points of the duplicated particle objects in here there are extra settings for you to play with including clumping but we're not gonna focus on that right now so I'm going to disable this interpolation and reset the number to 10,000 okay so now that we've got objects duplicated on the plane how do we get to wavy effect well the way we're going to do this is we're gonna create a force field of some kind and then we're gonna rotate it around in a loop now this loop will be seamless so you'll be able to play it forever and just watch as the grass waves without jittering or ending abruptly the way to do this is to create a pivot point so we're gonna start off by pressing shift a then going to empty and then plane axes I will raise this above the plane keeping it to the grid just so we can see it better then I'm going to press shift a again go to force field and turbulence and I will raise this again into the same place but then I'm going to move this out to the side on the y-axis now you'll notice that as I move it the strands of grass are also wiggling about but it's very noisy the way we solve this noise is to play around with some of the physics settings so with the turbulence selected we're gonna go down to the physics tab then under size we're going to increase this and what you'll notice is that as we increase the value the waviness becomes much less noisy and much more representative of a light breeze so I'm gonna set this to 8 but as we move this around we get the feeling that it's a little bit weak so we can increase the strength of this by changing the strength value appropriately so I'll put this up to something like 5 so now as I move this around you see we get something that's much more representative of a gust of wind blowing over the grass okay so let's loop it now you don't need to do any animation with the timeline but you do need to increase the number of frames that are available and I'll explain to you why in a minute so see at the moment my start and end frames in the timeline are 1 and 300 we're gonna need to set this to 360 and the reason is because we'll want 1 degree of rotation per frame now if I click on the empty pivot object again press the N key and then take a look at where our rotation value is we can do a cool trick to automatically get a full rotation so what we need to do is click on this value then type in hashtag frame forward slash which also means divided by 180 and then the star symbol which means multiplied by pi and then press Enter even though I said this field has now gone oh pinky color or depending on your theme and if I scrub the timeline you can see that our pivot object is rotating but hold on the grass isn't moving and why is that that's because we didn't parent the force object to the pivot object so if you choose to force one then choose the pivot object then press ctrl + P then choose object keep transform it's now become parented to the pivot object so as we rotate this the force object moves as well and this means that as we play the timeline the force object rotates around slowly and consequently the field of grass is now moving okay cool so we've got this effect going but what do we do for shading well Before we jump into shading there's one thing I want to change in this file to make sure we get the proper colors coming through if you go to the render settings into the color management section then under view transform change it from filmic or whatever you could have set you to standard this will basically ensure that the colors shine through properly and for look you can choose anything you want but I like going for our high contrast compared to a low one okay now I'm gonna pause the timeline because we don't need this slowing us down while we're making edits I'm going to open the shader editor go to the object graph then I'm gonna choose one of the strands of grass up here I'll just choose this one then press new now because we're making something completely stylized we don't need the principal psdf shader we're going to make a texture coordinate node and a mapping node then we're going to take the UV value and plug it into the vector input now we're gonna create a gradient texture and plug this vector into here and then we're gonna put a color ramp in between the gradient texture and the material a pant-load and plug them in like so well you'll see here and the object is that we now have a gradient going from black to white and as I slide the handle you can see how the effect changes so this is what we're gonna use to compose our color so if I press the plus button and go for a sort of mild blue go to the end do something a bit more cyan and I don't want the bottom to be completely black so I'm gonna go for a bit of a darker blue like so so that's quite a nice gradient we can have unique variations for each of these different strands but I'm just gonna copy over the material so I'll select each of these and then select our original one press ctrl L and choose materials and you'll notice that this has also been automatically replicated to our field below I might move this green up just a tiny bit but now we want to do the ground material so if I click on the plane again press new get rid of the principal pstl at a regular RGB because we don't need all the data coming from the prints board attach it to the surface and then I want to make sure that the ground is roughly the same color as the bottom of this strand so while I'm hovering over this color box I'm going to press and hold down the D key then I'm going to hover over the strand you'll see that I've got the eyedropper tool then I will click and it will automatically assign the color to the color box so now we've got deep blue as the bottom of our ground so if i zoom in here and then play the timeline again you'll see that we've got this nicely stylized waving grass effect so that's how you put it together now of course you have complete control over the strength of the force field the color variation the shape of the strands etc and because they're 3d objects we can rotate around have a look from above and it will work perfectly fine so have fun playing around with this effect and make sure to go over to felines Gumba at page to download the extra resources there'll be some other cool tips and tricks in there that will show you some extra things you can do with this effect so thanks for watching I hope you found this interesting feel free to join our discord server to take part discussions share your work and get sneak previews of upcoming projects so thanks for watching have a great day and I'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: Curtis Holt

Views: 70,492

Keywords: blender 2.8, stylized, stylistic, non-realistic, grass, materials, nodes, shader, eevee, download, free, resources, curtis holt, feline entity

Id: 3tE7mr8GDyY

Length: 12min 19sec (739 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 26 2020