Creating a Stylized Isometric City with Blender (from scratch)

asset libraries are very powerful for organizing and facilitating large-scale projects and in fact they're crucial for animation production pipelines thankfully blender's new asset browser is a big step forward for integrating libraries directly into the user interface there are several videos out there about how to use the asset browser and they usually start with a pre-made collection of assets but what's the process look like when building one from scratch hello my name is Kendra Mel and that's exactly what I'm going to be walking you through in this video the goal is an adorable simplistic isometric City that includes over 50 individual assets but don't let that scare you off they're actually quite simple and a lot of fun to build the starting point for this project is the default Cube actually yeah we won't be deleting it instead we will use it to establish a basic scale for everything which won't be real world scale by the way the only thing that really matters to me is that it establishes consistency with a scale set it's time to build models that belong in a city like lamp posts benches traffic lights water towers trees Vehicles signs and of course buildings all the lovely and plentiful Metropolitan details we know and love and again all pretty easy to create especially with this simplified low poly style these are the kinds of models a day one blender artist can achieve with everything being based on primitive shapes we're talking bread and butter polygon modeling meaning extruding faces Cutting Edge Loops along with simple mirror and array modifiers when applicable mirror being symmetry an array being repeating patterns like floors of a building like I said this style of modeling is a ton of fun because it's fast and low pressure shapes are basic hard surfaces and ingons are completely fine because there's no deformation nor UVS to worry about things do get a little more tricky with modular streets however since we have to ensure seamless tiling at the edges both geometrically and within the material speaking of materials I'm opting for 100 procedural methods as in no image textures procedural material design is probably Beyond most beginners but still these materials won't be that complex after all there's only so many materials when it comes to construction bricks concrete painted surfaces Windows metal to name a handful and what's optimal is that we can reuse them over and over meaning one brick material for any building that features brick one concrete material one window material Etc but of course we don't want the exact same brick concrete color or window color on every building right so how do we control colors on a per model basis using the same materials without image textures vertex colors is how or rather they were just renamed to color attributes in blender 3.2 this is a type of color data that's assigned directly to match components so there's no need for an external texture file the biggest drawback is that resolution of the color data is dependent on the model's poly count and we're using very low poly counts so there's no chance for any details but we don't care about details this way we just want broad colors thus color attributes work perfectly for this project all right so we have basic colors and basic texture patterns but this is not really enough to achieve an appealing result we want to introduce a couple more staple characteristics like an overlaid broad gradient darker at the bottom and lighter at the top as well as highlighting on convex edges these serve to further vary the tones of our underlying color and the result is a much Fuller much more interesting look now let's talk about buildings we need a whole lot more of them if we're going to pull off a believable City without noticeably repeating duplicates and there's two primary ways of identifying duplicates in this case color and shape so if we can randomize color and randomize shape we have a good chance of winning this battle against noticeable repetition and doing so with minimal effort first we can Implement color randomization with the geometry Shader nodes random socket as a foundation add some math to refine how it's calculated and then when buildings are duplicated the color is never the same for randomizing shape we can Implement geometry nodes that's right the hottest new tool in blender this allows us to design a parametric building with adjustable width and height as well as features that can be turned on or off this gives us a building duplicate that never has to look the same twice and it only costs us one asset at this point we're done with phase one in that we have a decent number of assets for respectable library but blender doesn't see these assets officially and they don't show up in the asset browser in Phase 2 we're going to acidize everything to do this we can simply right click on either an object or collection in the outliner and choose Mark asset okay so which one object or collection well it depends on how we want to use it without getting too much into the weeds there's several quirky things about the way assets are marked and connected into other blend files for this video I'm just going to explain the method I prefer for this project specifically for one I want to link all my assets rather than append them because this maintains a direct connection to a source file so if I want to modify an asset later I want those changes to propagate into every blender scene that sources these assets this function is an inherent benefit with linking but not with pending it also means that every duplicate is an automatic instance thus optimizing scene resources alright then again do we link object assets or collection assets well this is something I find a bit odd but linking objects requires us to apply a library override in order to move it around in the scene however linking collections does not so collections it is because fewer clicks except for our parametric building since this is a special object with a geometry node modifier we need to link it in as an object and apply a library override in order to access the modifier properties this is what will allow us to adjust each duplicate of the asset like I said there's a lot of quirky things to figure out about sharing assets with other blend files make sure you experiment before assuming the default settings are what you want another quirky thing about the asset browser is how the auto thumbnailer only captures solid viewport shading in my opinion it would be much more intuitive if it simply captured whatever the viewport showed like material preview or render preview but it doesn't and I'm a sucker for visuals I need to see a beautiful fully colored list of thumb nails so simply taking a screenshot of each asset works well enough once our thumbnails look pretty we can add information like author description tags and categories however organized we want to be now with our library fully acidized we can move on to phase three assembling our city remember I want this to be assembled entirely from linked assets so we will begin with a blank scene I just need to create an asset Library path in preferences pointing to the source file and all assets will appear in the new scenes asset browser make sure we set the import method to link instead of append then we can start dragging and dropping personally I like to start with Street segments to define a typical Urban grid pattern using shift d to duplicate is fine for Linked assets they will all be instances regardless next we will fill in the city blocks with buildings for this four block diorama I like to add smaller buildings in the center and push larger buildings to the outside keep in mind that we want to duplicate intelligently so that repetition Isn't So noticeable after buildings are placed it's time to add a layer of fine details positioning HVAC units and water towers on rooftops vehicles in the streets stop lights at intersections trees on sidewalks signs attached to buildings you get the idea and this is where our city really starts to feel alive and complete if you like what you've seen in this video there's much more in the full 10 hour course where each step of the workflow is covered in depth and in real time it's available with a CG cookie membership or as a standalone purchase on the blender Market one last thing to note we are inviting CD cookie members to contribute directly to the cubicity asset Library which we will release as public domain so if you want a chance to apply what you learned through the course and have your assets forever immortalized in this project consider investing in a membership links are in the description below my name is Kent tremel hopefully I'll be reviewing your asset submission soon thank you

Channel: CG Cookie

Views: 19,009

Keywords: Blender tutorial, learn blender, CG Cookie, blender beginner, isometric, library, asset, asset browser, cubicity, city, urban, environment, low poly, blender

Id: YvGfPzUu-Fw

Length: 9min 28sec (568 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 10 2023