Creating an Ancient Temple - Blender Tutorial

okay so in this video right here I basically just took this old render here and then just remade the whole thing in like a new more Modern Way the old ones from two years ago and then the new one that you know just made in this video so if you want to see me just make this from scratch this is what this video is and um yeah this is going to be a bit more like just me having fun less of just a step-by-step here's exactly what I'm clicking each button tutorial so um yeah it's more just like just watch me make something so if that's what you're interested in yeah this is the video but the main idea is what I just described here some structure with light and water and yeah whatever okay um let's just go and start and see what happens so the first thing I want to do is start modeling and I'm going to open up quicksil bridge for this one I think I'm going to be using some textures from Mega skins I think that'll just make it a bit easier so I'll just have that open and let's just get to it straight in [Music] um okay so this one will be a little bit faster paced than just me having fun and less like here's every single button that I'm clicking and how to follow along with it it's more of just like yeah I just want to have fun and make something and you can watch and if it's too fast that's kind of what the course is for anyways here let's see it's kind of like beveled a little bit on the side so if I take these oh is that bad yeah that's kind of bad okay let's undo the door and then maybe I can like figure this out first so let's get the main shape kind of boxed out a bit and then I'll do the door after so if something like this and like I don't know that maybe this is a better way to do that door maybe I don't know like that and then maybe we can have like a little thing sticking out here does that look good I don't know this doesn't really make sense it looks like a villager's house or something and do we bevel this I believe that yeah that's kind of like not really the shape I wanted actually I think this is supposed to be like in here more I never know exactly what it's going to look like or what exactly I should be doing whenever I start something like this but it just takes a little bit of you know uh just messing around with stuff and like I don't know I don't I don't like where this is going very much right now in fact I might stop using that as a reference to just kind of like go with whatever ideas my brain kind of generates right now so let's actually delete that still need these vertices because I just I don't know I don't like where that was going let's try something else uh yeah even that might be fine honestly like maybe we could just do like another one of those like let's um just bring this in you see how when I when I inset I can't go past here if I inset it and I just click and then just scale then you can like go as small as you want and destroy it just a little tip and I think maybe this kind of shape will be better and then we could actually bevel these maybe like with a custom bevel so just bring this up here boom boom boom boom something like that segments up maybe not 80 but like 20. and make this a little more curved yeah sure that's fine and let's take these boom boom boom take these bevel one segment okay extrude that in whatever yeah cool and I guess I could double that again like take this boom boom boom boom boom bevel yeah whatever I don't know like maybe I could put some ornaments or some kind of thing in there to like make it tap it nicer like array some I don't know something like Cube or something just kind of put that there okay let's take all of those actually and let's actually just duplicate it up and let's just turn on effect only locations and scale it in shift dead yeah and then again cool it looks like a texture from here so let's just get like a stone texture from quixel surfaces so let's export this one and there we go and now quixel bridge is kind of still broken and not really working properly so when you export the texture it's all messed up but it does come with all the right stuff you just have to put the uh normal map into the right socket turn off the clear coat put the this is the roughness map going in here I went to the wrong one so just put it to roughness and I think it's good now and let's just Q project that and let's just go to the UB editor and scale it up so boom it's a bit too much I might just take this and just kind of duplicate it around and make a couple variations there we go and it got all that okay cool and I need some other detail in here so maybe I can just take I don't know I'll figure it out later I just want to get an idea and not worry too much about like what looks good on the texture and model and stuff just kind of get like lighting and just a basic idea set up for now so I always like to set up the camera as quickly as possible and lighting and for this one I know I don't want to Sky texture I'm just going to delete that go back here let's add a spotlight because I want light coming from up here amount doesn't matter just something bright radius up this up this up maybe this on up actually and a little brighter would be nice and I'm just going to have that there we'd make it bigger and softer just so it's like quite bright and let's see what is the lighting doing in here what direction is it coming from it kind of looks like just almost straight down so I might try and do that like it's okay if this is in Shadow a little bit uh something like this is very dark here so to help that maybe I can take a cube display as bounds and then add a new texture delete this add a volume scatter density 0.0 or like 0.05 or something to start scroll to refresh that and I thought should be up and then turn on the end of the under the light paths section here my default on zero volumetric bounces if I turn it up a little bit might help just illuminate everything else around it a little bit a little more Softly and it still looks too bright it might just be light but it could be the volume so maybe let's take that down a little and slightly blue I think is going to be nice here and there we go and let's also take this down to like 0.002 maybe and that's looking pretty nice that's a good atmosphere for now yeah I don't like these pieces but I'm just gonna block this out anyways with them and just uh just to get a structure even though I'll probably swap them out later but I just want to get an idea of the direction I need to be going in for this artwork something like this maybe something here maybe something around here like rotates negative 90 or 180 so the doors in the front it looks nice and scale them down a little bit here and there it doesn't really matter and let's see it's giving me like Mario Vibes like I don't know that if you know I remember that thing from like the really old Mario it was like um like those things in the background is that what I'm thinking of I don't know this looks very video gaming right now so I don't really want that vibe but again I'm not I'm not gonna worry too much about that right now I just want to get an idea of what I need to do I guess I already have an idea maybe I'm just kind of coping and just wanting to go somewhere but maybe maybe not I don't know let's take this stuff and maybe scale it up and I don't know what I'm doing right now just so you know if that wasn't clear like I haven't like practiced this render or anything I'm just kind of going into this blind um so if it seems like I'm kind of struggling it's probably because I actually am and sometimes the best thing to do is just duplicate more not always but sometimes so is this bad to like just duplicate the same three pieces a hundred times to make a big Temple maybe it might be bad um but maybe it's fine and I might honestly just do that for all of them just delete that it was adding some nice detail but it's just like not doing what I wanted this is maybe a good point where it's uh it makes sense to like take I don't know some some other models that I just have in here so maybe like I have this uh fantasy Temple pack that I bought on our station I might just use that I've been using that more recently for some reason I bought it a long time ago but it's just like a nice thing that I've been using I've been really tired of the uh the fantasy asset pack that I put in the course just because like I've been using this so much that like I need a break from that even though it's good uh so here let's take this and just kind of put in here and this will be nice to add some extra just random detail and spice up the uh the variation a little bit so it's not just the same exact model like over and over again and also these models are kind of rough in a weird way they're like they almost seem like they're decimated and that actually adds a nice like uh like dilapidated Vibe like it makes it feel like worn down almost it's a it's kind of like a weird benefit of having like a kind of low quality model is it looks destroyed and old and I thought might be nicer just to add a little bit of flavor to this just so it's not so like video gamey and boxy because uh my models that I just put on here that I just made are not like they're not very uh should I keep hitting the wrong button control material please they're not very destroyed like they're very clean hard edges boxy uh not very like worn down looking and I would would be nice to have a little bit of that maybe taking the specular down to zero people say you shouldn't do that but I think it looks cool sometimes that might help okay I wonder if I take the displacement map and use it in a weird way where I could like have fake um here let's try this run like this into here and this out and then if I turn on displacement maybe this will kind of add some variation to the geometry so it's not like so clean cut along these straight lines so displacement and bump and yeah it's doing what I wanted but like horribly so let's turn that way down and let's see if we can get this to work and how I wanted it to like and honestly maybe a noise uh noise displacement would work better and just run that into the height still looking pretty um clapped as you would say so the main thing right now is you can clearly see the difference between those models I throw in there and the ones I didn't and the ones I threw on there are like very I think the displacement is just wrecking them so what I might do is take all of those models that are that I layered on top all these things and luckily they're all labeled as numbers so they're easy to find in the lender here just move that to a new collection whoops test and hide that for a sec or just take it and isolate it and here's what I'm going to do to fix the texture uh click this button right here to make this one a unique texture so any change I'd make to this one won't affect the other models with this texture on it now and then I can hit Ctrl L material now all these things have that new material and I can take off displacement for this one so just unplug that and it should stay on all the old ones and all the new ones it will be gone so I want to blend the amount of displacement in the old ones to the new one if possible and I think it's going to be fine and there's other ways of like making us feel more destroyed that don't require weird displacement like that that's just kind of a cheaty way to like get like fake uh everything not being so perfect I could also just rotate models here and there to like make it feel a little bit like more collapsing and run down that might do the trick a little bit I think that would be a good time to mention the course yeah like if you don't know what this is basically I just make three different renders from like zero percent start all the way through explain the whole way every decision why I'm doing everything three different times yeah it also comes with a bunch of asset packs 3D models uh just other various packs of stuff there's a whole growing community on Discord we're all just hanging out there sharing our work giving feedback so here's some of my favorites of some of the renders people have made with the course but I suggest you go to the page and look at a bunch of them that I put up there of stuff other people are making with it uh yeah if you don't want to spend any money that's probably not for you but if you're looking for a bunch of 3D models and by full process and join a community of people who are all interested in the same stuff go and check that out because it's sick okay back to the video anyways let's build the rest of this scene so I want water let's drop that in if you haven't seen my video on water this is just that here's the Shader it's just a glass Shader lining into like noise running into the bump of a glass like roughness down transmission up getting mixed with a transparent the mixed Factor on there is this node right here light path the is camera ray top one is going into the mixed Factor on there and then the principal volume is just going into the volume socket that just adds all this murkiness so I guess we'll start with a circle goes 64 on the vertices and I'll just scale this up so that it's the right size ish I don't really know exactly how big this needs to be but this seems about right uh so let's fill that with a face inset delete the interface now we have this extrude that up and I guess I don't want to do this I think an array of pillars would be nice so let's just take sort of the fantasy asset pack take a pillar so I don't know uh let's just search there's a bunch of duplicates for me because I accidentally put it in here twice um I have another I haven't deleted the old one but let's take something like this just let that load in and do I need to decimate this I might decimate by 0.1 uh it's fine already I think it's good yeah okay so to array this in a circle here's how we do it uh let's find that pillar take this uh turn off correct face attributes because I'm going to move it in edit mode out here taking empty take us any any shape of empty doesn't matter make sure this shares the same origin point the pillar as the empty doesn't really matter where as long as the origin point is the same we'll just apply the scale and rotation really quick too and then array turn off this turn on this select this as the object offset and how many do I want I think like 18 or something maybe that would probably seem right and I'm going to spin the empty around and there we go so that's how that works and let's see let's just pair the empty to this so that if I move this around it won't get destroyed get out of here uh alt G the circle scale this up and just increase the or uh take the inner side of this just to increase the thickness of this thing and let's just decrease the thickness vertically so scale it down on the Zed pull this down here shade Auto smooth let's take this and um isolate that and then we can pull this out slightly so that it's like a little bit of overlap here with these pillars and then I think what might be cool is just pulling it down and making it a bit thicker let's take this add a little bevel here extrude that in and then these we'll just do a little bevel and up on top on those top edges again bevel but maybe just one segment this time it's just so it's a little bit softened but not anything crazy and I think that's going to be nice for now and let's just duplicate that upwards and just put it right there and now we have something we can kind of Stack vertically I guess that's fine for now okay texture select all these things and we'll just take the same material that's on everything else so control material and I think I should probably unwrap this so we'll just Cube reject I could do a better job but I don't think you'll see it well you might actually see it on here so let's take this the way you unwrap circular thing for the easiest just hit U for unwramp and then f for follow active quads keep it on length average hit okay and you actually need to reset the UV map first so U just reset R for reset UF length average done and now it should be working properly what I try to do is see the square I have selected I'll try to make the selected Square in the UV map the same aspect ratio as that so it's kind of like a rectangle so I could just scale that in like this and it should be all lining up now I think if I just click this and that's how it's going to be laid out here I think that's going to be fine if you want to see what that's doing if I'm just going to take a preview um give it a sec yeah there we go so it'll just wrap it around the circular object and you do it that way which is really nice sweet so we have that now let's see do I need to do anything else here I might convert to mesh and join this all together into one thing set the origin to geometry and now I can really just easily manipulate the shape of this thing could even duplicate it scale it up again so there's like a little bit of depth going on in the background don't know if I need that but it's fine and I'm going to display these as bounds because that is really annoying to work within the viewport so just displays bounce for now what I want to do right now is work on these waterfalls that are supposed to be coming down in the middle I think that's going to be a really important effect to get right uh it's going to be a little tricky with this because it's really complex just to like make the water kind of look like it's dripping and like folding over the mesh here so let's see if I can do that I don't I might just scratch that but it would look really cool if I could so the way I like to do these waterfalls I've showed this before but it's a little bit different what I do now so let's just take a plane scale it up like this we're just going to put that there and I'll just move it closer to the camera for now so I can see what's going on but I'll for the final thing I'll like move it to the proper location so that is gonna be fine the basic material is going to be like this or maybe a translucent in fact let's just start by adding this Shader to a translucent and then there we go so now it's we're getting the base color and it's also getting translucency so we get light like direct light and translucency which is really nice now what I want to do is take a transparent so transparent is going to be if I plug this in completely invisible right disappears what I want to do is mix between these so mix Shader and this will be one of the things transparent and opaque so just zero to one right now what I want to do is use a waterfall image to drive the mixed factor between the transparent and the principled or the mixer principle the end translucent if that's confusing we're just basically saying okay an image or something is going to drive the opacity like how if it's if it's transparent or not will be determined by an image so let me find an image and use that one second okay so here's an image I found from unsplash of a waterfall so unsplash is just a stock photo website so I just went on there searched for a waterfall found this this will work totally fine for what we're doing here so here's how this is gonna work I just dropped the image right into this texture and let's plug that into the mix factor between these two things it's probably not going to work right at first but we will fix that so let's just scale this down again this is not the image editor this is the UV editor um it's just showing the image I'm using and let's just take a color ramp and just increase the contrast so I can actually see what's going on so let's let's see okay so it's working it's just I think these need to be flipped around because right now it's just making some of it a little tiny bit here and they're transparent and the rest is that translucent Shader I'm going to flip that around so that it's mostly transparent and just a little bit of that other Shader we made why is that black oh because this isn't plugged in whoops there we go so the tricky part now is like manipulating this shape and moving it over top of the uh this like structure I've made in a way that looks convincing I want like in in my old one here I had the water like coming down and then like going down over all these steps so I'll see if I can do that again because I looked really nice so let's let's just give that a try so it's gonna be a bit tricky but I think since most of these are very similar shapes it shouldn't be too bad if I just make it one or two times and then reuse that same template that I make over and over again that should work if not uh we'll probably just scratch this but let's give it a try so here's what I want to do I don't know if correct face attributes is on I should turn that on so correct face attributes on so when I move this around the texture won't stretch it should just extend might have a rough time over all these little bombs but we'll see so let's just pull that down in there if you can't really see what I'm doing um I know it's kind of hard to see in a wireframe hopefully you can just see that this thing is like getting extruded down and kind of across here so just pull that down like this I don't need to go like crazy into detail because I'm going to be shading this smooth anyways but you know I want to do the best job I can and I'm just hovering over this a little bit um I don't need to go crazy because uh like this is not gonna be uh super visible I just need it to look roughly like it's following the same shape as all these little steps here and yeah I'm literally just dragging it kind of over over everything like this this kind of reminds me of using like the pen tool in Photoshop a little bit where it's like it doesn't need to be super precise it just needs to be like if you zoom in and then just kind of follow the rough shape when you zoom back out it should look fine and I'm not going to worry too much about adding too much geometry because this is like not like like it's not very many vertices in here the plane is like it's a very um low poly thing so even if I extrude it a ton of times it's really not going to be a huge deal I'm a huge deal yeah so this can just kind of come like this not worrying too much about what this looks like just kind of do what I can to make it uh roughly follow the shape and what's going on here yeah that's that's fine thick and look at that okay so that's kind of the effect I wanted this is not like a that doesn't look that realistic I could uh this you know probably more I could do where like I drink the edge Fade Out a bit more like kindness to ease and then make it so it's not such a defined Edge that would actually be a lot better like this looks a lot nicer Okay cool so yeah I'm just gonna move this out of the way for now you can use that later but the main thing is can I get this mostly this chunk right here um well I guess not that this chunk right here so would be from here upwards can this get duplicated a bunch of times that's really what I want so let's just deselect everything below here and then duplicate this separate by selection just P to separate by selection cool then we have this set the origin to geometry and then this I could just reuse on a bunch of these other pieces here and uh you know like it's already kind of matching the shape somewhat I guess I need to stretch this out this way you scale it on the Y but like I said I can easily uh manipulate the shape without ruining the texture and just scale it right in object mode and it should be fine and then just kind of bring pieces down like this yes this is at the point where it's like there's not that much I really need to it's this is like kind of just annoying but you just kind of do it and get it done and then it looks good at the end so you know whatever yeah I'm probably gonna cut this part out of the video because you don't need to see me like doing the same thing like a hundred times and here I'm just selecting all the waterfalls and that empty and then just seeing if I just scale everything up or down this way does it look better or worse and not it's I don't think it's it's a little different and kind of cool a little bit either way but I don't I don't know if it's better or worse and uh let's just see she's gonna keep messing with the lighting until something just clicks okay I'm switching things up a little here so I moved the entire thing back a little bit it was kind of in the center before I just kind of put it back against the edge of this uh structure over here so if you see here it's used to be in the middle now it's just on the back and I also scaled up the whole thing and then the lighting I just deleted all the other lights I just didn't like them and we're just running with one Spotlight now here's the settings nothing crazy and that's doing all the work here and I think it looks a bit better just having it bigger in the back and uh yeah I think I also stretched out the entire thing vertically a little bit so it looked like bad before and just did that and that's what's really nice about having it all parented to one empty is you can really easily just kind of manipulate the whole shape of things sometimes obviously if you stretch it too much it's going to look stretched and bad but in this case I think it looks it looks fine let me let me see if I can turn this on um let's save enable this and let's see if this works okay so inside geoscatter here I just picked somebody just pick that Moss layer scattered it on here adjusted the density a little bit and there we go in one couple of clicks a bit of lag later because this scene is really not uh optimized I've got some moss on here looks like this and yeah it's running fine now so there we go um yeah I think the only other thing I want to do in this scene is maybe some stuff in the foreground or on the ground itself like it might be cool to have this really shallow water instead of just deep water I think I might be more sick so I'll try to add some sort of surface intersecting with that maybe so I think let's grab something like this might work just some rocky ground I'll just download this one right here Zoom that out to 24 millimeters again and uh yeah we just need something more in the foreground maybe just some pillars to be good just some Fallen pillars I think and I think we're good at that point I'm ready to stop working on this so let's just lean this over kind of just make it something falling over and put the same material on just so it matches I think I'm going to stop there I think we are good once I want to zoom this out nah 24 is fine all right so here are the settings uh 3000 by 3750 100 percent and we'll just do I don't know 256 samples I don't think it's that noisy right now here's a light pass this is kind of weird but that's what I'm using reflective refractive caustics uh do I need to enable here let's turn on depth of field just focus on here I don't want this to be very noticeable so I'll go like up to F7 even just for a little bit in the foreground but not very much and we should be good and let's just render this okay so this is finally at a point where I'm actually starting to be happy with it usually when I'm working on a render there's like a point you know half an hour in an hour in it uh it starts making sense and things just kind of flow and it's fun today was just like pain and uh not good just not not fun all the way through and up until the very end so you know just just how it is sometimes anyways here's the edits I'm doing in Photoshop so we've just got this is straight out of blender just a bit of Curves to darken the edges a little bit not really that necessary I might even take that down a bit and just brightening up the middle a little bit again I'm going to take that down just a little bit because it's a bit much some dust particles and now I'm just going to run that through the camera raw filter so if I just bring that onto here let's just convert that one for smart filters drop this one on the camera raw filter I just the edits I just did in there and I'll show you what's in here actually if I open this up and this is the benefit of using smart filters you can actually go in and change whatever you did before you might just undo this uh so here's the settings I'm messing with Clarity is adding a lot to this you can see that a bit of saturation you know a bit of contrast not too much else in the color grading section I'm adding a bit of blue into the Shadows but I think it's a bit much honestly I might yeah maybe it's fine I think it's not a big deal what is interesting here is the calibration section this is doing a bit of work so there's before after with this the green Hues I'm taking it up quite a lot I'm actually going to drop that down a little bit because it's a bit much and then in the color mixer here I might just take the uh the greens actually this way or which one what is it yellows yeah one of these is just a bit uh a little bit much maybe it's not a big deal I don't know yeah I think that's a good place to stop here so I'm gonna hit okay and then let's just do one last thing which is a color lookup table so if I just hit uh new like the the menu here and then hit color lookup table the half circle and then just scroll through one of these so the way you work the way this works to scroll through them you just click one of the options and then it'll be highlighted and you just hover over it and scroll and I might just drop the fill on this just so it's not full blast and just pick one that looks good actually kind of like that and let's drop a curves over top of this uh nothing crazy just a little bit of that maybe not even boosted here and I'm not happy with the color so I might just drop a hue saturation over top of this before because it doesn't matter where you put it but just above the camera and let's see if I can tweak these yellows to be that's nicer a little bit more orange maybe increase the uh the lightness liquid saturation where it is Maybe not maybe just drop this I don't know just finding a balance of whatever maybe another Hue saturation above that and just crank it a little bit right there that's kind of cool yeah I don't know I like that I think I'm gonna take a break and uh coming back come back later but I think this is at a good point to uh to stop one thing I just realized which somehow I didn't notice till now was in my original one the uh it's like rotated at a 45 degree angle and then in this one I've done like head-on I think that's fine I don't really need to change it but um if I was gonna go back I probably would have rotated it but oh well yeah I know so in this video I didn't go too much into detail about exactly which buttons I'm clicking and why I'm doing certain things and I'm kind of just showing you the flow of things if that makes sense so um if if that's what you're interested in and just want to see me explain every single decision and why I'm doing certain things in certain orders and how I put things together in a very strategic way uh that would be I would suggest you go and check out the course I have available I think that's all I need to say okay that's it see you around bye

Channel: Max Hay

Views: 42,264

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Id: UOdUtxrs1yU

Length: 32min 23sec (1943 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 29 2023