Create stylized trees in Blender 2.8 - Eevee island environment beginner tutorial pt. 1

hello everyone welcome to the CG cookie livestream my name is Kent Rimmel and I know we have someone here that's it's their first time Karen welcome if anyone else is new this livestream is a great place to wear the best parts of it is to ask questions as we go which you don't get with pre-recorded tutorials in that I can answer them fairly quickly and in real time and so do that with the with two brackets and a Q the letter Q in between those brackets and that will add the tag question to your comment that makes it very easy for me to spot in the chat so let me know if everything's good like audios good videos good but it looks like it is on my end so yeah we'll continue on but yeah welcome today we're going to be starting a new project in blender that's summer themed at least I have to remind myself I talked to Wayne you know fairly often Wayne Dixon in Australia and it's opposite seasons for him so I assume the whole world thinks of summer as you know bright sunny beaches and in hot weather but for him it's it's the exact opposite but hopefully wherever your you are you know this this resonates with your summer season and yeah so this is the project we've got this tropical scene we've got one of our characters Melvin kind of I guess the theme I came up with for him was he came to surf and yet it is a calm day so he's just sitting there waiting peacefully but yeah I think it's a fun image it's certainly a fun creation process it's a very appealing aesthetic it's simple geometry we're approximating a lot of detail and it just ends up being a fun creation process compared to like realism for example where there's often a lot of pressure and a lot of super fine details to keep track of with this sort of style we can create it fairly quickly by comparison and so I'm hoping to do this in about three weeks three maybe four weeks of streams where we about to our you know streams every week once a week so yeah that's that's the format for this project I see one question from sac when I try to link things in 2.8 it will not let me pick files from my secondary Drive is this a bug or just because it's still in beta that's interesting because your secondary Drive that almost sounds like an O like an operating system issue more than a blender thing I'm gonna be linking that's gonna be a big part of this project is linking in our asset so I'm gonna be going over that and I have yet to experience any issues so when that comes about if maybe we'll cover that once we get there I don't know if it'll be this week but probably next maybe is when we start linking stuff in if not the third week the way I'm going to approach this is by creating a bunch of assets first you know like the palm tree a bush a little fern plant a rock I'm going to be creating those things individually and then later we will assemble those in a complete blend file so that won't be soon but it will happen question for Miranda do I need to dig up my tablet today or are we in sculpt free zone I'm not gonna be sculpting I might sculpt a rock actually if I have time I'm gonna start with a palm tree and then do a bush and then maybe get to sculpting but I will be using my tablet for painting a little bit of texture so yeah you might want to grab it if you want to follow along excellent so where this project was inspired is I've been doing a freelance project on the side with Wayne actually and I've been creating a lot of these environments simplistic environments like a mountain lake a mountain valley with a bunch of trees it's just been a very fun aesthetic that has taught me some things specifically about like rendering with evie rendering large scenes with Eevee I feel like a lot of people or a lot of render Eevee renders are like single objects that focus on on just the object and whether it's a portrait or whether it's a car or or a just a singular you know what am I trying to say product rendering kind of thing whereas I don't see a lot of it being used for like open environments so that's kind of fun to explore before we actually get started now this is I'm gonna try to create exactly this scene right here and if I orbit around you can see that it actually looks pretty pretty goofy whenever you're not looking through the camera so we're gonna be focusing on on the camera angle specifically and saving ourselves work by only making it look good in camera but I am going to try and create exactly this however before starting a project like this whether whatever kind of environment you're going to create you got a look at reference you got to start framing your mind to understand what you're creating and I'm gonna do that real quickly just to kind of show you what my process is a lot have you already seen this before but I love unsplash.com it's cc0 public domain images that are really really nice high quality photography you know type imagery so if we look up just the word Beach this is gonna give us all the information that we need from what the sky looks like to what the surf looks like at a you know kind of stereotypical tropical environment so this is perfect for an above view of what our surf will be that the shore of the ocean makes with the sand that's going to be an excellent source of reference we're going to approximate the the white foam but for now I'm gonna focus on some some vegetation specifically so here we've got a great photo of a couple palm trees you know and here's where I'm gonna make mental notes about the the the parts of the tree like the the trunk obviously the branches the the branch like middle part along with the branch leaves I guess or I guess that's what that's called on a palm tree um there's also this this part at the top that's like where the branches grow out of it's this like round cluster so I'm gonna start collecting this this information in my head making mental notes but then also I need to think about the the jungle portion as a whole so let's see if we can scroll down and find a better example perfect here we go so here we've got a picture of the ocean the sand and the jungle itself and the jungle if you've ever tried to create a jungle it can be extra complex there's just a lot of parts that you have to create in order to accomplish the feeling of a jungle but we want to boil that down to the absolute essential parts so in this case I'm in my research and development I came up with a palm tree we need a palm tree that we can duplicate around so this for the sake of duplication I need to have a couple variants of that palm tree so that they all don't look completely duplicated I also need some bushes some small vegetation like a fern right here is a good example pictured in the left of the frame just a small leafy you know kind of bush but then there's also a ton of leafy vegetation that is not as clear-cut as as the palm tree so more generic type bushes that can be scaled large or or scaled small and then fill up the majority of the empty space between palm trees between bushes and between rocks so there's gonna be I think that's four things yeah rocks is another thing I do want to add some some rocky parts but yeah so that's kind of breaking down the image to its simplest parts and that's what we gonna be creating today I'm gonna start with a palm tree try and create a bush and then the variance and then also a rock is the goal see if I missed any questions no excellent all right don't hesitate to ask let's get started so I am going to open a fresh blender scene file new general and the first thing I think I'll do is create the file structure since this is not a typical scene where we're just going to create everything in one blend file we're gonna use this this library type system so I am going to let's see I'm gonna save my scene but really just to open the file browser pretty sure I clicked save as that would be a kind of weird thing to crash on alright okay excellent guys I'm sorry about that I have it that's been a first I've never seen blender crash on the open menu or whatever it was but you'll see that I have blender open now it looks like the menus working so we'll continue on then right so what I wanted to do is is save the file first and show you how we can organize the file structure so file I'm going to save as now I am going up all right so I've got two folders here and this is just for me teaching I've got the R and D folder which is the project folder that I researched and now this is the recorded version so in R and D we have a library and an assembly folder so I'm going to create those in our record directory so hit the new button and new folder and assemblies plural because we can if this process is great for making multiple scenes from the same library and then another folder called Lib for library yes Omar the freelance job has been done in evey up to this point it consists of several videos and the first one we did with EB we're starting to actually we might rethink that for these second ones because there's some some animation artifacts with like ambient occlusion and screen space reflections that can sometimes be annoying to work with but that's still about it it worked pretty good other than that and anyway we have rendered it in evey all green all green excellent and so yeah I've created the assemblies and Lib directory assemblies is where we're going to save assembled versions of our files and that's going to come later right now we're focusing on the library now within the library I'm gonna create three folders alright the first one is going to be char for character and this is where character library files will live I'm gonna create another one called props this is our trees are rocks are bushes they will live in here and in one more folder for text which is all the textures that we create will be found in the single directory alright so this is kind of standard organization for this type of library linking project structure and I mean standard like everyone maybe has their own naming convention but ballpark this is pretty common now we are creating props so we're going to go into props and for each prop I'm going to create another folder so this is palm-tree okay and within palm-tree we're gonna have one master palm-tree file but we're going to work on versions you know which is common practice to save iterative iteratively to save iterations and so i'm going to create another folder called versions or just V er perhaps so in here we'll start finally that was several folders to create but we're gonna start with palm-tree underscore oh one excellent alright so now we've established our folder structure and the whole project will will be organized as a result so for the palm-tree gonna get rid of our everything in our scene I'm gonna just start fresh and we're going to begin with a I'm just going to start with a circle because we're going to start with the trunk of the palm tree and that's going to consist of a circle I like to start that way now I'm gonna hit shift a to bring up the add menu and obviously circle now for the vertice count i'm for the vertex count I'm gonna go down to I'm thinking twelve so right now we're kind of establishing like what the poly count is gonna you know be for our assets and it is low poly but it's not exactly game resolution because I will model it in case I will model it to be able to accept a subdivision surface modifier if needed so it's going to be all quad geometry so it's kind of in the middle but um I can easily turn sub subdivision off for low poly stuff in the distance or I can turn it on for a little bit smoother of an effect but in general its low detail low poly count so that's that's what the twelve vertices will give me tab into edit mode and we can start extruding this thing up so e-z and i'm going to create the first palm tree shrink it a little bit at the top the first palm tree is going to be straight up and down and then from I'll create variants just to manipulate them and curve the trunks and tilt them a little bit shrink them stuff like that so yeah I'm gonna the way we model this is start big at the trunk we're gonna then shrink it at the top and I'm going to create these segments along the length so I'm going to cut with control arm also I should I should probably enable screencast keys for your convenience there we go yeah that'll be fine and control arm scroll my mouse wheel up and we're just going to pick a ballpark like 1 2 3 4 5 segments I think we'll be fine and this is how we're going to create the segmentation result but first I do want to give it a little bit of a curve because the be straight the straight trunk right now is not very believable it's not very appealing so we want to start scaling some of these differently all right and then at the top it is going to kind of splay out a bit and I'm gonna get there in just a second but you can see as we look down the length we've got this extended you know wine bottle type shape all right that's gonna represent our our palm trees quite well I might actually cut another edge there and scale down but if I think of the red line the x-axis as a as a grid as a ground plane I might move this down alright so that way whenever we place the tree it will automatically be placed under the surface and we don't we won't risk any gaps maybe just smooth this out a little bit more it's a little too low poly for me alright so we've got this extended wineglass shape now we can start cutting some segments now what's going to be a good way to do that I'm thinking I will bevel each one control be bevel and maybe scale every other one down using the let's see can I do this with other scale shift Z so it only scales in the z axis no it scales in every other axis except Z and then I don't want it to be completely uniform like all of these actions i I do want to go in and maybe offset a few of them manually maybe make this one a little bit skinnier on the inside maybe make some of them a little bit plumper and yeah we're just creating the segmentation in general also it's so evenly spaced right now we can we can mess that up make it imperfect imperfect is a big part of making things believable so just drag a few of these down maybe rotate them to continuing on with that imperfect kind of aesthetic there we go yeah I don't want any straight lines really awesome how's this look in object mode I will right click and choose shade smooth and yeah I think that's looking pretty good for a trunk now the top at least for now you know we can come back and alter things later for the top I'm going to create a sort of triangular pattern like serrated edge at the top and that's going to then house that I don't know the terminology exactly but the the like chunked at the top the round bit where the where the branches grow out of so this this serrated edge is going to achieve that for us now how did I best do this I found some interesting I'll just select every other one I won't make this complex I'm gonna select every other edge and hit e to extrude and bring it up and then I'm going to scale using individual origins scale and hit zero hit s and then whoops s and 0 all right now do the same thing for our other edges II move it up s zero there we go and then I can select in vertex mode I'm just gonna select all of these verts go to vertex merge vertices by distance and you'll see it says remove 12 vertices that means there because we scaled to zero there were two verts on top of each other and now they're not there combined into one excellent now this is too consistent so let's just select random serrated edges serrated verts and then kind of move some lower some higher I also need to splay them out all right now select all of them not these bottom ones and we can scale from the median point all right so we give them a bit of a display is that the right word yeah spread excellent now it might be a little too like harsh of a transition like this line right here is very harsh so I want to smooth that out a bit more so cutting a new edge in there here we got making it a little more smooth all right pretty simple modeling in general nothing complex yet I might bring this down so the segmentation is a little more uneven let's add a subdivision surface modifier just to see how this is holding up as a smooth object gonna hit control hold control and hit 2 on the number pad or not the number pad I'm sorry the 2 above your letter keys that's going to add a subdivision surface modifier for us and the the segmentation definitely smooths out so do am i okay with that I might be ok with that maybe that's not that big of a deal again how close are we gonna be to these palm trees not that close but I don't think I like how how rounded this stuff became so hit ctrl 0 to turn off that subdivision surface modifier and what am I gonna do what's a quick way what if I bevel these kind of going off script here I think I was fine leaving it the way it was when I rehearsed control we try beveling this see what it does and I need to open the options and choose vertex only that's not really what I want is it what will that do for smoothing it's bad geometry but maybe we can be okay with that I think I'm just making this too complex at last and we really could just pull it much further out and am I even gonna see it smooth I'm not sure that I will yeah I'm just gonna ignore the subdivision surface modifier for now if I need if I really want it later I can address that but I want to keep this simple you know I I really want to keep it simple and ignoring the subdivision surface will be an act of keeping it simpler all right next I need to add a little bit of thickness to this serrated edge so I'm going to select all of these verts yes it doesn't matter if it's those verts I'm gonna select any part of the any like edge loop that has 12 verts shift D to duplicate it scale it down a bit and then I'm going to just the best way to do this I don't think it is let's see if I can do this a little bit quicker I'm trying to give it some thickness but I think I just did it the a less optimal way I'm gonna select all of these not that bottom edge shift D to duplicate and then scale that all right now I'm going to fill the space that we created to generate the thickness and I thought that was going to there we go all right so just holding it or hitting F making sure my mouse is in a in a like near the direction that I want to fill all right so you've got all that filled but they're bad it's it's a normals are reversed right you can see that that artifacts happening in the shading oh that's a good idea Jake make a vertex group and exclude it for the subdivision surface that's that's a good option too yeah I wonder if subdivision will come up in the research that I did like the R&D version I did not use subdivision but there are a couple spots where I saw like really harsh angles that I might have wanted to so yeah I'm curious if I will want to do that by the end you'll see that my process is not it's gonna be evolving right like I haven't rehearsed this to the tee every single step so I'm going to be trying things see if it works and then either going with it or changing approach that's very much a part of the computer graphics creation process problem solving trying things seeing what works and what doesn't one more question from number nine you can also press shift ctrl B for Bert a vertex only bevel I did not know that shift control B shift control B oh that's nice that's really nice I've always just turned it on in the options thank you what was I doing all right yeah so we've got this thickness built up now I need to select everything and hit shift in which will recalculate our normals it looks like the the this things getting in the way of the screencast keys what if I move the screencast keys to the right let's try that try to keep that out of your way so you can see those alright now that I've got some thickness I can e to extrude this interior edge and then I just need to fill it so with twelve verts I should be able to use grid fill note that I have my spacebar key map to the tool search which is how it was in 2.7 X so spacebar for me and what was that doing fill yeah look up fill and grid fill it's gonna be the cleanest type of fill excellent maybe smooth that out vertex smooth vertices and then shift are repeat that alright so now I've got this nice bowl which will accept the round cluster that's gonna go in here soon now what I might want to do let me let me see here I might want to you know slide these verts like this that way I've got a sharper point on the serrated edge and then with those verts on top of each other again I will just select all those and merge vertices by distance excellent I think that this all of these are completely consistent in that they're all in a straight line I'm gonna try to avoid that so I'm gonna select a few of them bring them down maybe bring a couple up again deep D like making this imperfect I was gonna say D perfectionist it make up a weird word alright that's looking a little more natural the more imperfect it looks the more natural and organic it looks excellent so that I think basically concludes the trunk as far as modeling next let's add a mesh cube I'm going to hit ctrl - is that what I'm gonna do no that's not what I'm gonna do thinking through that again it's not what I want to do shift a let's instead add a UV sphere because that's gonna be better whoops accidentally moved it I didn't want to move it before I change the the resolution of that sphere let's try it again mesh UV sphere let's think about how much we want I'm gonna make this segments match so 12 is that right yeah 12 segments and then 4 rings whoops then go in the wrong direction I think about seven let's go with eight there we go all right I'm gonna move this to the top now tab into edit mode scale it in Z all right this is gonna be that cluster from which all of the branches grow out of all right so this looks good is it too big no I feel like I need to increase the size of the serrated edge see here holding control and connecting the knee the shortest path of vertices to kind of make my way around that loop select won't work because of the triangles so that I've selected that I'm gonna hit ctrl + to grow that selection but I didn't want these shift select to unselect these to deselect that interior ring okay now I can either just regular scale or alt s I think that's what I'll do so let's leave local view alt s maybe scale actually okay that's what I want s shift Z scale in everything but Z all right now that's that's got a little bit more depth it makes more sense okay maybe use the proportional editing with the fall-off set to random for which part I mean yeah that's definitely useful um I don't think I'm that's exactly what I want in this situation because I don't quite yet want random verts oh maybe you're talking about this I think you're talking about the serrated edge the part yeah anyway alright so with the with the cluster up here I want to do the same a similar type of segmentation although still a little bit different there's going to be a serrated edge nature to it so I'm going to select every other now there is a way to select every other how do I do that it's called checker checker select okay I think I still like I've forgotten how to do this already but select an edge so alt click to select an edge loop vertex or is it select actually checker deselect yeah so this will select every other vert is actually really useful in this scenario because then I can slide these up and I get this serrated pattern but let's see here yeah maybe I'll do that and then repeat the process select check or deselect and neck that actually does the opposite pattern which is kind of cool select checker deselect okay that one did the same must be based on the active element checker Diesel idea oh sorry I missed that number nine yeah check or deselect it are you the one that first told me about it someone told me about it recently might have been in a stream chat but yeah I love checker deselect all right there we go now for these I can it's still quad geometry so I can you know cut a new edge loop and do the same sort of thing that we did below alt s alright so now we're getting that type of pattern let's shade smooth an object mode excellent that's going to look good all right cool now what about I think I need to make certain edges hard all right so if I tab into edit mode on the trunk I think these edges would do best if they're hardened so I'm going to try that I'm going to select these and then right click and choose mark as sharp all right now back to object mode in our object data in the normal section let's enable auto smooth and the angle all the way up to 180 all right now this segmentation appears a little more clearly I like the way that looks I want to do the same thing up here yeah I think that's it control e also you can either right-click or ctrl e mark sharp enable auto smooth angle all the way up to 180 so putting the angle up to 180 sets all the phases to be smooth all the edges to be smooth except the ones that we have set to be sharp all right so that's kind of the low-poly cluster now we're ready to move on to modeling the limbs and the leaves so if I miss any questions don't think so excellent Oh Jonathan used the checker deselect in his modeling a sports car wow that was an old course yeah I didn't I didn't know about that till recently that's the thing about blender there's so many easter-egg so many tiny tools like hidden around in all the corners I don't think I'll ever know all of them but yeah if you guys ever see me like doing something that a tool could do much easier just let me know because I learn a lot from you guys all right so those limbs how are we gonna start those I think I'll also start with let's just start with a cylinder and since these are going to be very thin branches that we're creating like the spine of the branch we need we don't need very many verts so I'm gonna leave that as like six count vertices and then for the radius it can be a lot a lot skinnier let's make it taller is that the depth yeah okay depth and then do we not have control oh so I don't have control of how many cuts we have vertically okay that's fine I'm gonna move that to the top and actually move jump into edit mode and move all the components so that the origin that orange dot is closer to the end all right so the same you know similar modeling situation as the trunk I'm going to select the top face scale that I think I might scale it zero actually I'm not gonna merge it yet because as long as it's not merged I still have the ability to cut edges and so I'm control are cutting a new edge and let's see here I might just cut one new edge maybe okay I'm gonna cut several but for now I'm gonna start small I'm gonna cut two edges and then better define the profile all right I'm going to kind of move them up alt s to push them out okay so now we've got a better profile then I can cut a few more edges in here all right now this is going to be enough to to bend our trunk and the way I'm going to do that is shift let's see an object mode shift s brings up our snap menu we're going to snap our cursor to the selection alrights going to put it at our object origin and then I can tab into edit mode and select our top verts which also can be merged by the way so in in wireframe B box select those verts merge vertice by distance and then I can enable proportional editing right here or with the Oh hot key and I will I like to use connected only by default so that's just kind of my behavior does it I don't think it really matters here we're gonna use the pivot of the 3d cursor that we set at the bottom and this way we can rotate a branch but the fall-off this kind of s-curve is not what I want I want to use the sharp fall-off all right now this is going to give us a fairly clean Bend only issue here is that our edges are kind of tilted I don't think that's a big deal I'm gonna let that ride and then next I need to get the actual leaves so the way the way we're going to achieve you know the define serrated I guess serrated is like the the word of the stream but the really fine like spiky leaves along the branch is we're gonna create a simple shape that doesn't take into account the cuts and then we will add the cuts in a texture so I can simply grab the curvature of this branch all right shift D to duplicate it and then e to extrude turn-off proportional editing and use the median point as my pivot and start to shape this leaf kind of kind of round it over on the ends give it a little bit more thickness on the in the middle there we go and now I want to want to duplicate this over if I use my view right here I essentially want to duplicate it straight over in that direction but it doesn't really align to any axes of the world if I was thinking a little you know better if I was thinking more in the future I could have I would have done that that's okay we can um we can use the view angle let me remove those annotations we can use the view angle as our coordinates all right so I could orientations rather so in global instead of using global which is the global read for the x axis Y for the green act for the yet green axis green for the y axis and global I can use view and then scale my duplicate well let's duplicate it first now I'm scaling an X exactly horizontal according to my screen in my view which is perfect negative one not scaled it that direction and we might just need to do a tiny bit of cleanup let's see did I never merge those we hide everything but that middle spine okay I did merge those there we go excellent so we've got this leaf started and let me check my normal since I did scale those negatively I might have a bit of a normal issue like inverted normal so the way you can check your normals is in the viewport overlay face orientation alright so I want blue to be faced on the outside with the bin dual bend tool do the same thing the bend modifier would definitely bend our tree branch you know a little more cleanly I just don't want to go through the process of setting it up establishing an or a origin like an origin point but is there a bend tool that's not the modifier use custom transform so I'm not I've not used custom transforms yet I understand the concept but I guess I've IV I've worked without that for so long that I I don't use custom transforms yet and it seems like a it's like a an advanced technique that I haven't even adopted so I've still got to learn about custom transforms alright so that this red leaf is faced the wrong direction I want to shift in after selecting it move it correctly so now we've got correct orientations we've got a branch that we can now duplicate around so you'll find with me when it comes to duplication I like to use this rule of three where I need three variants to break the illusion of or break the obvious nough son so I've got one branch that's kind of my default I'm going to duplicate it now kind of rotate it and then modify this one so that it has maybe a harsher curve so let's right-click whoops I'm sorry I want to place my cursor shift right click places my cursor at so I can use it as a pivot and then I can rotate this down for a harsher curve maybe even these guys out a bit and then what should the next one be I'm gonna duplicate my original one median point and rotate oh I'm still using view orientations let's go back to global I can rotate this around and this will be what's the other version this could be maybe it could be twisted let's enable proportional editing and I will turn connected only off for this I want all the object all the parts of this mesh to rotate at the same time yeah maybe we can give it like a twist nice what is a custom transform I honestly so you have this plus button here and I think that's where it comes from create an orientation from a selection so you can like I'm I haven't even played with this yet I know it's powerful I just haven't done it yet but you can something like add the plus button and so now we've got this this specific face let's let's just call it custom orientation eh all right now when I I think it's using the face orientation I think this is a weird face to do it on but it's yeah so I'm I don't know that's kind of where you get it you that's where the setting is but essentially you're it's like a optimal way to do what I was just kind of had the problem doing like I wanted to scale it visually in X but but that didn't align with the global or local orientation so you create a custom orientation based on a face I think that's a decent explanation of what it's for but um spikey okay yeah number nine or spiky feel free to correct me if I'm not presenting that correctly you have all these people offering suggestions and then Omar's like making jokes I love it okay so we've got the three variant remember that I use this kind of rule of three so I can turn off our face orientation and this is all I need to like duplicate and build out the canopy of the of the tree all right so let's uh and the beauty of this is they're all using the exact same geometry so they will all share the same UVs and any other object any other data that we might need to share so I'm gonna select them and smooth them just do a test control - so yeah these will look pretty good they'll look fine if I decide to smooth them I think all right let's remove that subsurf modifier control zero now we can duplicate these around and I'm just going to try and pick from them randomly too to avoid the duplication to avoid the repetitious appearance so shifty duplicate and I can rotate place them further down on the on the cluster scale it's smaller shifty duplicate this again so I'm duplicating the same one a few times and then moving it at different spots let's duplicate one of these twisty ones also if you want to snap this to the surface you can use face snapping so enable the magnet enable face and then project I like to use project individual elements the difference being with that turned off it snaps no it doesn't do that anymore um the way it used to work is you disable project individual elements and it would snap oh yeah there it is so it's snapping to whatever your mouse cursor is but when you enable that it doesn't snap that way like it it maintains the offset from your cursor to the origin and that's just a little less jarring in my opinion also I can turn off the magnet icon and whenever I need to enable it hold control during transformation so move and then hold control and it'll start snapping all right let's I'm kind of keeping the ones at the bottom a little bit smaller towards the middle and up up to the top they'll get bigger and bigger and then I can duplicate around the kind of neutral branch it's definitely you know something of a skill to build up over time where you can duplicate and and like avoid the pattern that you might find yourself when you duplicate basically learning how to duplicate without making it obvious is kind of the art form um Omar when when you do your freelance is your workflow blender centrist meaning crease Auto smooth or do you still try to aim to make your models expand to work on their other software so the project I'm involved with now is the first one that is all blender most of the time I get jobs for generic CG stuff and and I will use blender but it doesn't end up in blender and so I typically have an idea before the project starts but yeah I've never I've always avoided creases for some reason and maybe it's time for me to stop that but but generally I do try and model with them like not being blender centric like I will I don't know I kind of do a mix maybe I'm evolving over time but I used to never model based on blender tools you know I would always apply modifiers make sure that that they that it could exist outside of blender you know when you have a bunch of modifiers controlling your object it won't export properly you know you you you won't that those modifiers cannot make it to the other 3d package so I would always try and model that way but maybe the more I think about answering that I think over time maybe I am softening up to that perspective and I will use blender specific tools I don't know maybe I'm just getting involved in projects that are more blender related I still think it's the safer option to to not model using that way in case you have to exit blender but you know it's not it's not a massive massively important point hope that makes some sense oh my goodness yeah question barrage why not alt D to save on memory so yeah I am going to alt D duplicates with it being linked um why am I not doing that now I don't think I have a reason for why I'm not doing it now they definitely will share data at some point but yeah I don't really have a good reason why I'm not doing that now yeah I don't know I think if I had to come up with the reason whenever you link data you can no longer apply scales which can get annoying you have to make them all single users and sometimes I do like to apply the scale or apply rotation and that kind of thing so I think that's why I'm not doing it I don't know I kind of form these habits and I have to remember wait why am I doing this but alt D is great for duplicating with the linked within being linked absolutely alright I really want to just get these things populated a kind of tired of duplicating them there were a few more questions so maybe I'll try and answer this questions while I'm duplicating to speed this up I want to periodically like zoom out and see you know what what the coverage is like it's looking oh it's looking pretty good right now maybe I can twist a few more whoa all right there were a few more questions number nine wouldn't it be better to use alt D for this okay same kind of thing Omar better yet why not group instance and save much more on memory group instance is that is that new to blender two point eight the the instancing obscene collections I know that it's possible I just don't have intent to like group instancing but all the group instance origin points being at the center and no longer allowing any modifiers to be used kind of kills it okay so maybe it's best I avoid it until I really know how useful it is or what the you know have some experience with it alright I think that was all for the questions by the way if anyone is not aware of like how I'm rotating so you can I can just hitting our once will rotate according to my view rotating twice hitting R twice will kind of do this like trackball kind of rotation so I'm using both of those as I need them Wow there's a two twist twisty ones right beside each other so let me change that up again still trying to keep in mind how the coverage is over the entire thing I do want this to look good from all angles because I want the ability to duplicate this around our assembly scene and not worry about it looking better from certain angles you know a lot of times when you create a 3d scene you'll only build it to one camera angle but for the assets within that assembly we'll do that with the assembly but for the assets within I wanted to make I want to make sure they look good from all angles so don't neglect the backside for example it can be very easy to do okay I think this is a decent amount of coverage but I won't know for sure it looks like there's a pretty big bear spot here I won't know for sure until I get some texture on this until we see how it all works together just fill this bear spot okay I think that looks pretty good for now let me save the file I haven't even saved this yet yeah I know I did saved one version so I'll save over this ctrl s and then file save as a new version so that we start that iterative process [Music] question this isn't a question but I would like to thank you and see you cookie team for making such a great place to learn I subscribe to another site like this and it doesn't even come close such a great community Wow Thank You Zack curious what other site is that if you don't mind sharing you don't have to but I'm curious all right so we've got this blocked out essentially now we can start to add some textures and that will better give us an idea of what the true coverage of our branches looks like plural site is good but there's no instructor interaction and I like you too me too but I just wait for the sales nice okay cool yeah we've heard a little bit like similar feedback about plural site we've definitely tried to increase interaction with instructors over the past few years and namely with live streams also with classes which are related to live streams but yeah it was kind of a renaissance for me in online teaching whenever we started to do streams I just really like to I guess get to know you you guys guys and gals and that's been a lot of fun for me so it sounds like that might be mutual which is awesome okay how are we going to texture this let me think about it for a second because we want to be optimal right we we don't want to we want to say as much time as we can and the easiest way is since all of these share the exact same mesh data they'll all share the same UVs that means we only have to unwrap one branch the cluster and the trunk and the trunk and the cluster are are basically cylinders so it'll be pretty easy to unwrap this let's try using the workspaces that blender 2.8 provides us with let's go to UV editing and I will tab into what's already tabbed into edit mode for me how fancy and yeah let me go into local view with the forward slash on the number pad and I really just need to alt click in edge mode to select an edge maybe on the bottom side alright this runs the length of our cylinder and I don't need the I don't need the end let me go ahead and delete that okay so here's the thing if I delete this face these branches are no longer identical so maybe it is a good time to share their data for some reason I want I'm wondering like if there's a reason that I'm not sharing the data yet oh no I can't share the data you know because we have three different variants bummer I wish I deleted that face earlier on it's not a big deal it's not a big deal it's more of an OCD thing just knowing that there's a face I want to delete but I won't so we won't worry about that but yeah I can't share data because between all of them because they're slightly different so if I share data between the curve like this twisty one and the original one control L object data it no longer has the curve all right so that's maybe that's why I wasn't sharing the data but they don't have to be sharing data in order to share you v's like I can I can link those manually from Miranda Ken did you know that if you select any face and then press shift one you will look at the front view of that face and shipped three and shift slash etc you will look a front view of that face shift one interesting so so I did I didn't know about shifts seven not shift one but like shift seven will align the view to the normal I believe of the face what does shift one do looks like it's looking at the horizontal direction of the so the normal is always gonna I wonder if I can just show the normals it's for anyone who doesn't know what's going on yeah so you can show face normals let me increase their size a bit alright so you can see that that that a face normal basically just sticks straight out perpendicular to the face and shift seven aligns directly in line with that direction ship one seems to align yeah you can see that one is perfectly straight it's aligned to the to the left I guess and then shift three is the other horizontal axis so those are your three axes that's kind of cool very very useful definitely that would also mean that we can be anyway yeah that's that is very cool let's turn off the normal visualization and what was i doing oh yeah I'm laying out you v's so even though the shape of these of these branches are not exactly the same the vertex count and vertex order are exactly the same so let me that means I just have to unwrap one one of these branches so it's go to local View tab into edit mode ignore the face on the bottom and select an edge loop I guess this doesn't mean I need to to unwrap that cut some seams ctrl e mark seam and then that should be all I need to do select everything you unwrap what is this why didn't that unwrap does anyone know why that is not unwrapping let's see instead of unwrapped how about we just to kind of reset this I'm gonna hit you and then project from view all right you unwrap that thing is not unwrapping does anyone know why I'm a little bit lost why this object is not unwrapping mark seamer mark sharp I mean mark seam is there I don't think mark sharp has anything to do with it this is just not unwrapping you all right that's the second time I've never have seen that happen I've never seen that happen did I oh wait I marked it as a I see what you're saying now I marked it sharp and not as a seam good lord I'm a professional I swear believe me please control a clear sharp now I shouldn't have done that let me undo where it still is sharp I'm sorry control I'm gonna select one of the sharp edges control II we start over I'm trying to go too fast select one of the sharp edges shift L maybe nope shift G select similar and I want all of the sharpness yeah okay there we go now I've selected only my sharp edges control e clear sharp control e mark seem good good gracious all right now we've got good unwrap save save save thank you the safe police here comes in handy tremendously all right so we've saved that out excellent now we've got some good clean you've ease and we can confirm this if we go to our view overlays stretching and specifically area stretching so everything is almost entirely blue there's a little bit of greenish teal up towards the tip of the spine but the spine is not that important it's not very visible so let's orient these a little bit so that I can maximize our texture our Texel density I'm gonna select this and move it off because it's not that important so I'm just gonna place this wherever it can fit after I maximize the size of our leaves all right so I'm going to scale these up maybe move them apart a little bit more make sure they still fit in this space and then I'll put the spine Oh what am i doing I've completely this is only the branch we're got we got other objects to UV so there's no need to do that quite yet all right let's continue using our other objects which we can do all together I think this is the one with the yeah all right so with these these are the essential objects I need to UV so tab into edit mode when you do all three of them at the same time that's a nice new perk of of a blender 2.8 tabbing to edit mode on multiple objects so let's uh unwrap this guy I think what I'll do let me turn off our sharp visibility so in our what are these called viewport overlays turn off sharp I just want to focus on let's see here it is essentially a cylinder so can I just cut one edge like that ctrl e mark seam you unwrap that's not that's not particularly good let's do it a different way I'm just gonna cut it in sections ctrl a mark seam and then I will probably have to cut one down the middle control a mark seam all right let's see how this does you unwrap that does seem better I'm not sure what the green is about maybe it's the method conformal let's change it to angle based there we go much cleaner much closer to blue in case this is the first time we're seeing it blue means the least amount of stretching and red means the most amount of stretching the worst kind of stretching so you know green from blue to green to yellow to orange to red is gradually getting worse in terms of stretching so you want it to be as close to blue when you unwrap it as possible the leaves are mirrored across couldn't you just stack them on top of each other yes I'm glad you mentioned that I did do that in the research but I have not done that here so thank you for that reminder yes I am going to do that so what you're talking about is since these are duplicate like mirror Leafs leaves I'm going to use the same movies for both of them and even further optimized that's a great suggestion from number nine so let me select those and I'm just going to move they should move right on top of each other but if they're not I can just move and snap if I change snapping to be vertex excellent now it's just one bit of it's one portion of the texture that will will a texture both sides that is a good optimization this is much cleaner now for the trunk I guess I'll do the same sort of thing just cut into segments that way I don't have one really long UV island and then I cut up the middle control e whoops control e mark seam I think I need to cut along this as well let me go into let me go to local view on just the trunk yeah I need to cut this seam but since it's triangles it has a hard time selecting edge loops it's actually I think I might have to go one by one control Emaar king there we go you unwrap excellent very clean I like that alright so leave local view let's go back to selecting these are the objects I believe that I'll have you these perfect all right now tapping into edit mode I can select all our UVs and hit UV averaged island scale alright and then why are why are my leaves bright red I can't remember why that would be the case is it cuz they're reversed what if I scale no let's see I might need to see a texture grid to make sure that there's not an error with that I'm not I can remember why that would be why that wouldn't be blue because it's a very clean unwrap question from Omar would you say the live streaming pressure steals 40% of one's brain power while when you're modeling alone you have a hundred percent of focus yes yes I wish it wasn't so obvious but I definitely feel like I'm bumbling around even it's not that I don't bumble around when I'm on my own there's plenty of problems solving going on but like yeah there's no pressure to maybe look like you you know what you're talking about so you just put music on and start working but if it looks like I am bumbling it definitely feels that way - hey Gonzo's in here mr. jonathan gonzales our unity instructor hello okay that's that is bizarre look at that so that must have been why it was red because I didn't have the other part of the branch selected now and I have that selected where we're blue again UV averaged Islands average Islands scale with everything selected there we go all right now we're all blue and remember I do not want to lose the fact that these verts are they actually got a little misaligned huh not sure how that happened what I'm gonna do is pack these objects first no I think I'm gonna have to pack with the leaf as well and then just reposition the mirrored verts over top of it that's kind of lame but I'm going to select one of the leaves select everything else and then you UV the UV menu and pack Islands and then maybe play around with the margin there we go I'm just going for a quick and dirty honestly trying to find a good value I think that's pretty good makes the least amount it wastes the least amount of space I'm gonna leave it like that and then this leaf I will position over top of this one one more time do you get but luckily this is a small like it's a it's a simple low res mesh so this just is a quick quick kind of fix alright alright I think we are good to go now your tongue game is strong while your L gosh what do I do with my tongue well I have no clue what I would be doing with my tongue Danzo has the less lag recording um oh man you know what I bet I did I'll bet some I'll bet I I still am using the default YouTube latency is it like 20 seconds 15 seconds something like that and I don't mean to keep clicking that file save thank you thank you for the save police I'm going to shift ctrl s space of AD one increment so now we're up to version 3 I think someone did change that for me let's see stream options yeah it's back to normal latency I you say I'm able to stream at ultra-low latency I just need to remember to set that next time sorry about that sorry about the delay all right some apparently I do strange things with my tongue well I'm concentrating okay so we are we got our you V's laid out now we're ready to start painting but first let me let me share you V's between all of the branches alright so tab out of edit mode just select our branch objects make sure that the you vide branch is selected as the active object that brighter orange color ctrl L transfer UV maps what and I got an error let me switch this to the info cylinder 11 has 178 loops for 46 faces and expected 148 he's not the same verts anymore all right that one was fine one of the branches is wrong oh why is this part of that mesh oh it must be a link duplicate yeah it's sharing two users okay let's try that again control L transfer UV maps what is cylinder 11 what's wrong with you cylinder 11 fine I don't know what's wrong with you I'm just deleting you oh I did notice just now my tongue was out I'm super self-conscious about my my tongue game transfer UV maps there we go now all of them share the exact same movies perfect we can start painting this finally let's get rid of that info and I'll save the scene this will be the last version with just the model so shift ctrl s let's iterate up one more time and this will be the beginning of the texture painting yeah I'm not sure what was up with cylinder 11 it was causing trouble as the rebellious one alright so we can use one texture since we placed all of those UV s on one atlas one one UV space we can use one texture for everything so I'm going to create a new texture first though I want to I want to pull down I'm still using the UV editing I don't think texture paint really does a lot I don't know well I don't know why it's separate but I would just combine these in UV texture slap UV editing slash texture paint but I'm gonna just stay at UV editing and switch the bottom add a bottom viewport and switch it to the shader editor this is how I like to work with blender 2.8 whenever I'm texture painting you got your 3d view your 2d UV editor and then your shader view so I can see all of these and how they inform each other right so I need to add a material so just select all my objects create a new material down here I'm going to call it palm tree and ctrl L in the viewport to make sure that they all share that same material and then I can add shift a texture image texture click the new button and we need to decide on a texture resolution size I think 2048 will be enough 2048 and I'll call this palm tree color I will need an alpha Channel um and then for the the base color let's just make it like a gray basically the bark color so like a grayish brown something like this okay alright now we can look at that that's going to be where our texture information is populated though before I do that since it's still a generated texture let's actually use in the image option let's let's uh use UV grid alright and then switch in the viewports would be looked at oh we need to plug that in shift control I've got the node Wrangler tool enabled if you do not have that enabled you can go to preferences I recommend turning it on and leaving it on if you do any texture painting or node editing material creation specifically look for node Wrangler all right make sure you have that enabled because you can shift ctrl click on this and that that shows the raw output of this node as as a texture in the in the viewport alright so it looks like all of our squares are actually very very even which is great perfect alright now I can go back to blank and we have that color that we picked alright this is gonna be the trunk color can I just say I'm impressed with your speed simple props tend to take days for me because I never think it's good enough well I mean I'm being maybe a little less critical of this so it could be improved but yeah I I do try and try and go fast cuz I'm sure going slow is a like watching paint dry with computer graphics but thank you we've all been self taught and conscious about our tongue game jeath alright so we've got our texture started I'm going to begin I guess with the trunk might as well and let me take a quick look at reference so we can frame our understanding of what these colors should be I had a really good one up top I think okay excellent yeah so we've got the brown base color we want the B's blacks spots kind of randomly placed and then we want streaks of a varying brownish Gray's okay so that's kind of my idea that's that's what we're gonna roll with I think I'll start by adding the streaks let me first usually what I like to start with is a gradient but or maybe not start with it but at some point I'm going to add a gradient let's just start with the streaks make it simple I'm gonna switch to my pen and tablet so um no longer using the mouse and let's go into local view on this object and then switch to texture paint mode all right I'm going to select the color oh yeah right click and show so I I don't know if this is default I I think I'm using pretty much default blender 2.8 but they have the top bar hidden by default I think and to show that it's literally hidden and you have to right-click on any button any of the menus and choose header show tool settings alright now we've got our color accessible and our paint tools if you don't want to use the top bar you can use this over here the active tool and workspace settings if you click on that you've got all these all these settings populated there in a vertical column whichever you like I personally have grown to favor the top bar and I want to select the color this brown color actually no no no we don't we don't need to do that I was going to just make it a darker version and then make a lighter version but instead I can just use black and white so over here in the in the color palette also available in the brush menu black and white and if I change the mix to be overlay is what I want when I paint white it will make it brighter and when I hold ctrl to make that second slot active that second color active it goes darker all right so that's gonna be great for these like streaks that I was talking about as far as the fall-off I do want to use the sharp fall-off it just a little bit smoother a little bit softer of a stroke though maybe I can increase that even more there we go all right so that's my brush set up we've got overlay I want to make sure that the radius and the strength are set to pressure sensitivity on my tablet and then I can start you know making strokes back and forth just randomly picking whether to use white or black oh but my default in the fall-off section we've got this normal fall-off enabled I want to turn that off and I also want to turn off under options by the way you can click and drag this menu by middle mouse clicking and dragging and options I want to turn off occlude and call now to revert back to before we paint it I can just if I go to the in panel under the image you can choose discard the image paint that you've already done and now we go back to that solid color and now with those settings turned off the occlude and culling especially when I paint a stroke it goes all the way through the mesh to the other side all right I don't want that harsh fall-off you know before it was like airbrushing and of course you're not gonna airbrush the backside the the paint's gonna gonna spread and miss that it's just occluded and so now I've turned that off since we're working with computers and can do non real life stuff and I get to start painting these streaks and it will go all the way to the other side all right so this isn't rocket science we're just painting streaks I do want to you know orbit around the object so that I'm painting streaks at different angles just to keep it somewhat random and varied but yeah we're approximating the detail you know we're not we're not being super detail-oriented about this we're just based on the reference image approximating it essentially so let me finish up these streaks it might not look like much but once we apply it to the material it will look pretty good I think might be easier just to like do a whole row of dark streaks yeah that's much faster it's kind of fun to see it populated in the 2d version and then go back over with some light streaks now I'm not holding control there we go I should have done that from the beginning that was much more efficient and perfect all right so after that I do want to add some gradients I love gradients if you've ever heard me talk about texture painting I always try to include gradients whenever I can and the fill brush has a gradient option I think also the regular brush does too though I want to use it as a fill so go to fill and then I'm kind of bouncing between both of these settings in different these are literally duplicated settings in different places all right I can enable gradient and black to white is going to be what I want because again I will use the overlay option all right so first what I'm gonna do I'm gonna go segment my set by segments and do a gradient from dark to light all the way up and then do one big gradient one global gradient from bottom to top oh we've got some questions you might want to make sure the mapping is connected to the UVs for some reason even though I had UV maps it was using generated UV s behind the scenes okay so with an image texture by default if you don't have any vector information any UV texture coordinate information coming in it should use your UVs whatever you V's are part of the object if you use a procedural texture it will use generated but to your point to make sure we can using since I've got node Wrangler enabled we can hit ctrl T and that will provide our texture coordinates and we have you these plugged into a mapping node which is just there as an option I don't really need it yet maybe not at all actually so let's get rid of it so now we've got explicit UV s going into our arc texture I think that's a good idea you know it's it's safe to make sure like number nine was saying make sure you've got that explicitly set up lászló question how do you handle seams I tried texture painting once and even though I only painted black and white it was extremely jittery and weird-looking and the UV map was fine to put it more generally how to paint over seams without having the lines cut in between ah yeah I so I did forget something that brings up a great point by default whenever we paint in blender we go over to options we have this bleed option set to two pixels now in my experience that is far too low the bleed if we look if we zoom in it's it's how much paint just barely leads bleeds over the surface of the the border of the UV island right so we can see that here and it's stair-stepped because it's very it's a very small value so to be completely honest we might have an error where we see the UVs show up like the the seams show up I really should have changed this to like ten pixels that's my that's my standard default and then when you paint it's gonna bleed over much more and that's how you avoid the seams showing up in your in your your final result um so I don't know I could just go ahead and make those strokes again but anyway that's a lesson you should definitely do that I hate when I forget that it's so inconsistent in blender the bleed value is that is set to two but when you bake a texture it's set to like sixteen so I wish those were like consistent at ten but every time I reset my blender to default for the sake of like tutorials or streaming it resets those so anyway off topic but now that Tim isn't involved as much in the concept part of the site is the concept part of the site going to be getting any more love in the future you know we leave it there because we we see people use it and and at various times in the past since Tim has left like we'll get a random tutorial posted it's it's pretty infrequent but right now we don't have the resources to like hire a concept person nor do we have a ton of people looking at that stuff so it's kind of in this limbo period there is this desire at CG cookie to like simplify and streamline namely toward bent blender stuff and make that the focus but I don't know we're talking that stuff over like do we do we want to continue to pursue concept or not we're not we're not exactly sure we don't put a ton of effort into we just leave what's there because also the good thing about concept education is it doesn't really age very but it ages gracefully compared to blender the software updates so frequently that stuff is outdated tutorials are outdated very quickly concept painting doesn't really get outdated like the techniques of painting have been around for centuries Photoshop hardly ever changes so that's why it also can exist that we feel like it's valuable how it is now without getting new stuff necessarily so anyway that was kind of an explanation that's where we're at with the concept stuff but if if you guys make noise about it if our members make noise like hey where's more concept stuff where's more concept we do listen to that stuff so in the thread let me show you where that is real quick for anyone who doesn't already know this if we go to see you cookie calm community forum we have this this thread tag to the top suggestion for new courses and this is pretty active so if you have any ideas if you want more concept stuff put your suggestions in there and people will like we get to gauge like how popular that idea is by how many people love it do the heart situation so I think if we look at page 1 obviously these have been around the longest so you got 14 loves here so this this wants to be done anyway we pay attention to this so this is a great place to suggest courses including concept stuff save save save oh yeah that brings up a good point since we started texture painting we have to save the texture in addition to the blender file so I can save my blender file just fine but the image the texture itself is not saved so I need to go to image save as let's add it to that texture folder and palm tree color RGB a we do want to maintain the alpha for the leaves that's coming soon save as image holy cow its 3:42 already one thing for sure if I was doing this on my way on my own like and not not having to teach it this would go by much faster so if you're watching this thinking wow this this is a slow process it doesn't have to be this slow man I'm gonna try and I really thought I could finish a tree in two hours this might take longer than in three weeks but I'll do my best all right so save the texture we say the blender file what was I talking about the gradients that's right for the gradients what I'm going to do is select tab into edit mode and you can I'm going to hit the L key to hover over a vertex and hit L and then you have this option for select linked where you can limit the selection by the UV seam so if I click seam it only selects that first segment and then so on and so forth as we go up and you can use your selection as a mask for when you paint so let's deselect everything L to select the bottom segment go back to texture paint mode and then in the right beside the texture paint mode selection you can choose paint mask and this this uses your selection to mask what you paint so if I enable that you can see that the bottom is highlighted this means it will accept paint where nothing else will so I can do that gradient that I was talking about make sure it's white to black perfect and if I go to the front view click and drag you get this line and this represents the scope of the gradient starting at black and going to white so if we turn off our overlays you can see what that did before and after it's darker at the bottom and brighter at the top although I don't know about that overlay I kind of like it deadened the color a little bit okay I think that's gonna be good I switched to soft light just for a slightly more subtle effect all right now I will move turn back on overlays and then you can also select your mesh from within texture paint mode you don't have to jump to edit mode but I can hit a twice to deselect and then hover over the next segment hit L paint a gradient deselect L gradient L radiant all the way up since we remember we have a clue turned off there we go now you can see this slight gradient between each segment and I was saying that the occlude is turned off so that our our fill brush fills from front to back the whole the whole thing and once I do each segment individually I'll come back and do the entire thing let's turn off mask selection and then I can do a gradient from top to bottom for the whole thing maybe do it a couple times alright so these types of gradients I highly recommend in your painting workflow gradients just make for much more appealing color color situations it's also true for rendering lighting that has a lot of gradients is going to be more appealing lighting excellent alright so this is the trunk painted I think we can be happy with that let's save our image also notice that the bleed value is extending beyond our texture much our our UV island much further thanks to that that bleed value up to 10 let's save our file also save our texture at this point you know we're really not changing anything about the scene itself so like it doesn't really matter to save the scene but might as well get in the habit of doing both and I do want to in the last 10-15 minutes I think I will focus on painting the branch because that is probably the most interesting part of the texture painting process not for this for this particular asset so let's leave local view select our tree branches well we just really need to select one let's use our standard one right here you can't tell that I selected it but just trust me that well I guess I didn't now it's selected and we can tag we can leave it in local view we can go to local view and leave everything else out all right so the same situation I'm going to fill this with a gradient again texture paint mode I'm gonna switch to a mixture this time so that it's a pure like it's a the colors of the gradient that I select are what's going to go to the branch I'm not gonna use an overlay or soft light and the gradients gonna start at a dark green very saturated - right I'm gonna keep my colors very very saturated so that it you know that kind of caters to that stylistic appealing aesthetic and then the top end of the spectrum is gonna be a bright green bright sort of lime green maybe the dark color whoops the dark color can be more toward the blue spectrum there we go let's start with that oh jeez I didn't put okay so now it's confusing because these are my color swatches but that is not the gradient I get confusing that sometimes I'll select the lower flag copy that dark color control I just hover over the color control see hover over the other one control V to paste it and then select the light flag control copy control paste alright now I can paint Oh okay so since our UV czar on top of each other I need to mask out one of the leaves pass one of the leaf haves let's in edit mode I'll select everything and then shift alt to deselect one half alright and then I can enable selection masking and if I want to enable selection masking but I don't want to look at this sometimes obnoxious white outline white wireframe you can enable selection masking and then turn off your overlays and then you can paint a little more naturally oh we have a problem though I switched around the the mesh alright so the I want the gradient to be dark at the bottom and light at the top but that's just switched around here I'm a silly silly person let me try this again tab into edit mode turn back on our overlays and I need to switch this around so let me scale in why select everything scale and why negative one all right and then bring back the other half snap it how many times have I snapped these verts today I'm so thankful it wasn't a more complex mesh because that can get annoying very fast all right there we go now our gradient is consistent back to texture paint mode I need to mask off our selection again I can just select this leaf and then ctrl I to invert the selection always more than one way to skin a cat inside blender and I think I want to make that gradient a little more prominent oh so the strength was at point five I should just have made it one there we go all right so now we have this nice bright leaf I might paint a little bit of yellow like a yellow accents instead of overlay let's just do mix but then make the the strength of the brush pretty pretty light and then at the very top I guess what I really should have done for the gradient itself is just add another flag control clicking and then making this that yellow color that would have been a little more efficient way to do it there we go all right now we're ready to paint the the alpha map that I think is a fun part any more questions no cool I'm gonna switch to my tablet once again let's go ahead and save the image and for painting the Alpha it might also help so right now I'm rotating I'm orbiting around our 3d view using the default turntable method but we can go to edit preferences and under navigation we can change the orbit method to be trackball and now I can orbit kind of any way that I want like a free-form type orbit and this will be nice for texture painting and yeah so painting the Alpha I want to switch to the brush and then for the blend mode I want to choose erase alpha and then for the color I believe this is best if it's at white pure white all right now I paint a stroke and nothing happens partly because my strength is super low let's turn that all the way up turn off pin pressure sensitivity that way I know my stroke is going to be at one all right and now we start to get some some alpha we can really see it in the texture you can see that checker behind so I'm starting to paint the Alpha but the the fall-off type is not ideal let's go to the standard smooth fall-off all right that's going to be more what I want I want this strength all the way up okay so we see in the 2d editor that there is alpha distinctly but in the material we have to we have to tell it how to be an alpha the way you do that is go to the material properties under these settings you've got your blend mode and that's set to opaque which means no alpha transparency you need to switch that to be I'm going to use alpha clip in this example and oh that's right so we're we don't see that that's one of the things you need to do but also you need to tell the material to be to have transparency as well right now it does not so I need to plug this into the Alpha slot the Alpha socket of our principle be SDF that comes with the material by default then shift control click on that that plugs our principle be SDF in the material output and now you can see that we have alpha and you can even see on the other side so then plug in the color into the base color and now we've got a idea of what our material is going to look like we can while I'm at it I might as well change the roughness of the specularity down so that that looks a little more a little better anyway that's really not not something I want to deal with right now let's continue painting these streaks so that our palms are palm branch I just realized where's the other half of the branch what happened to the other half is it hidden alt H oh I have that enabled okay so I guess know what's going on here um why is half of the branch missing if anybody's got an idea the other ones have a blank alpha channel I'm guessing it would be a lot of fun if it was it was just working right now why is that not working okay let me yeah I'm confused it's almost like there's an alpha being used but all right no so this is the alpha channel oh I'll bet that's what it is I'll bet it's this the texture paint opacity is probably the issue let me turn that all the way down nope that's not the issue people-people what is this well okay maybe if I save the image and then reload it how would a terrible way to end the stream yeah I'm not sure what is happening what if I do this manually with a shader let's add a diffuse be SDF and then a shader transparent be SDF shader mix shader' think I got these in the wrong order Alpha clip what if we switch the Alpha okay so the changing the blend mode did something for us show back face alright there must be I wonder if there's just a slight bit of gray on the bottom alright let me just let me try and fix this real quick I'm gonna switch my color for my fill brush to be white and let's go to the mix type add alpha ok I'm filling the alpha with white the Alpha Channel with white what is happening Oh Omar you said does it take 40% of your brain it takes it takes more than that I think I'm and I'm a fool I was using the color information as the Alpha so it was using a gradient the gradient from this guy's y'all should just leave and never listen to me again Alpha clip plug this back up I can attest this does happen even when I'm not streaming these kind of like just silly things you forget but let's be honest this stuff is super complex there's so many settings in blender there's so many things to be aware of it's very easy not making excuses for me I should have should have been on this but for all of us like it's very easy to make simple silly mistakes like this okay now I can go back to painting and hopefully get this looking like a palm tree before we leave all right I want to go back to erase alpha and yeah it should be as simple as that make sure that my mask is still working all right perfect yeah let's just start painting there we go if you want to be smooth you know you don't want those jitters in there actually maybe it's better to come from the other side instead of start from the middle and work out I'll start from the outside and kind of just cut it in like that make a quick stroke I like how it's it's decreasing in size as I release sensitivity pressure sensitivity but I don't want that to be too obvious you know when we get that kind of there we go and yeah like I'm focusing on some big ones at first I just released the pressure so quickly and then I can come back with some smaller ones there we go alright that's looking okay awesome all right now the big reveal let's see how that looks on everything tada just like that we've got a tree I worked out fairly well let's see what it looks like smooth control one and yeah that still works out being smooth as well all right that's been two hours and that's pretty much all of it I just need to do the same treatment to the this what do you call it the the cluster from which the branches grow out I need to apply the same treatment that I did down here let's be sure to save our image save our texture excellent man I was so slow today I mean two hours for this is kind of that's kind of wild I didn't even get to create the rest of the material so yeah this might be a longer a longer stream series than I initially anticipated but well we'll see how it goes you know I'll try and maybe speed up you know maybe try not to treat it so beginner II but like I try to explain every single thing that I was doing today maybe I'll cut that back a little bit and and try and just do more of the work and make progress a little more quickly um cool yet so we save the file and then I'll pick this up next week we can easily create a fern from the from the branches that we've already created so that'll be easy a rock I sure surely in the next stream I can do a rock and a fern and then maybe a leafy Bush like a leafy midsize tree anyway alright I'll let you guys go we'll pick this up next week make sure my texture and my file are saved and yeah so someone asked when one of these made available usually twenty I try for 24 hours it takes a little while for the YouTube recording to be available for download and then I turn around and and cut out like the the ten minute countdown and and I'll definitely cut out where I had to restart the computer and we will you'll get that within 24 hours typically so I'll let you guys go thanks for watching sorry for the technical difficulties towards the beginning hopefully we'll be free from those next time but yeah have a great rest of your Tuesday happy blendering

Channel: CG Cookie

Views: 36,352

Keywords: blender, tutorial, plants, jungle, tropical, leaf, texturing, texture, painting, tools, image, brushes, modeling, UV, unwrapping, 3d, game, environment, eevee, blender 2.8, real time, beginner, simple

Id: oh2hF4EulAk

Length: 113min 20sec (6800 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 23 2019