Creating LANDSCAPES IN Blender with the Free ANT Landscapes Add-On

Oh what's up guys Justin here with the CG essentials comp back with another blender add-on tutorial for you so in today's video we're gonna talk about a free add-on that's already contained inside a blender that can help you create more realistic landscapes inside of your models so let's go ahead and just jump into it so this is a tool that's actually contained inside of blender you shouldn't have to download anything in order to enable this so in order to enable it you can just go up to edit preferences and under your add-ons you're gonna do a search for a dot n dot t-- landscape and so it's gonna look like this note that you need to put the periods in there for this to show up but basically this stands for another noise tool landscape so what this is is a tool that allows you to add a landscape mesh and then edit it inside of blender so once you've enabled this then we'll go ahead and delete out our default model you can add a landscape mesh by doing a shift a in object mode and under meshes you're now going to have the option for landscape and so when you add a landscape what its gonna do is it's basically gonna add in a landscape that's generated using noise inside of blender and so this has a ton of different options that you can use in order to create different kinds of landscapes and so the first thing I would recommend is I would recommend taking a look at some of the presets that are up above so these are really good for giving you something to kind of kind of build off of so like for example your default its using noise in order to create a mountain well if you click on these presets you can see how there's a ton of different options you can select so for example you can add things like canyons so if you look at this you can see how there's a preset in here for canyons and I'm gonna go ahead and turn my wireframe on just so you can see the geometry that's being created in here so that you can kind of see what this is doing but there's options in here for things like lakes so you can generate a landscape with a lake so it comes with an actual water plane as well as a landscape plane there's options in here for like sand dunes and other things yeah and these are all adjustable which we'll talk about in a minute there's also some more interesting ones like there's options in here to create things like planets and other things like that for right now though what I want to do is I want to take a look at the option for large terrain so I think that gives us a good idea of kind of what this can create so you can see how what this is doing is it's just generally creating a large terrain inside of blender and so one cool thing about this is as you change these they're gonna update in real time assuming you have the option in here for auto or automatic or flutter refresh selected I'm gonna skip over these first couple options you can set this to triangulate these faces and instead of creating quads if you want it to I personally don't want to do that but you do have the option in here to do that so you can also name the mesh that's created and apply a material to it and so this first section the main settings is going to adjust how large your mesh is as well as how many subdivisions are in here so we've talked about subdividing in the past but basically the number of subdivisions is going to set the amount of detail in here so for example if I was to drop this down to 64 subdivisions you can see how I get a lot less detail in here which can perform a lot better but it's also gonna look a bunch a lot chunkier so on the other hand if we were to go up higher so maybe like 500 by 500 you can see how I get a much more complex mesh in here but you can see how my performance is also being affected by that so you need to kind of find the balance in here between having enough detail that this looks good and but not so much that you've got a ton of geometry in here that's gonna slow everything down and so the second option is something we can use in order to adjust the size of the mesh that's created so for example and I'm gonna bring these subdivisions back to we'll start with 256 for right now the mesh size is gonna adjust the entire size of the whole mesh that's created so for example if I was to type in a value of 40 you can see how this is then gonna create a mesh that's 40 long instead of 20 so you can adjust how large this is by adjusting your mesh size option and notice that the noise that's being used to create this this landscape is being applied across this whole thing so this adjusts as we make our adjustments inside of our settings live so that's how you can adjust the size of the mesh that's being created now down below you can adjust the settings for the noise so the noise settings affect the way that noise is being applied in here so it's basically the pattern that's being applied in here in order to create your mesh now one thing that can get kind of annoying about this is if you ever like orbit around and then you click outside of this your menu is gonna go away and so that can get really frustrating because if you're making changes and you're not quite done it can be really frustrating because you can't really get that back now if you haven't done anything else so if you don't do anything else that's considered an action in blender you could try tapping the f9 key or by going up to edit adjust last operation and so if you do that this may pop this window back up so you may be able to get it back by doing that now if you can't do that you can tap the N key and over here in your menu there's an option for create and a lot of these tools are contained inside of this menu so you can come in here and make adjustments to that here so one thing to note about that though is let's say I was to adjust my mesh size so if I was to adjust this to 40 you have to click on the button 4 regenerate so it no longer live makes those changes in here so what you really want to do is you want to try to get everything created when your menu is active try not to click off of it no because then it can just get a little bit frustrating in order to get it to look the way that you want it to look so just be aware of that and try to make all of your changes before you go off clicking inside of your workspace so your noise settings are gonna adjust the way that the noise is creating this surface so notice there's a lot of different options in here a lot of the time what you're gonna do is you're gonna find yourself just kind of playing around with these in order to try to get the result that you want I will note that it's probably a little bit easier to try to find a preset and then adjust that rather than just randomly picking different noise different noise - what types in here but notice how there's a lot of different options in here that are going to generate a lot of different results so same thing with the second option you can see how there's just a lot of different mathematical formulas in here you can select to create different things but then note that down below this there's options for actually being able to adjust this so you can adjust the noise you can offset that noise by using the X&Y offset so you can adjust the way that this is being applied to your plane using these options and then the size x and y is going to kind of stretch these out a little bit so you can see how as I apply this X&Y sizing I'm getting different results in here as well so you can use this to kind of stretch and adjust these you need to be a little bit careful with those because things can start looking a little bit weird and distorted but a lot of it just depends on what you're trying to create so in addition you can adjust the size of that noise so if you turn your noise down you're gonna get a lot more ups and downs in here then if you were to turn it up stuff here to turn it up you you might use the up for more like hills and the down to lower noise size for more like mountain ranges and so you can use things like the depth to adjust how smooth this is so more depth is gonna equal more ups and downs and these other things in here are going to adjust other things like that as well so you can see how the dimension is also giving me more ups and downs so just kind of play around with these to see what kind of result you can create note that there's also a number of different effects in here that you can apply in order to get different things as well so the displacement settings are gonna have more to do with how high up and down so how tall things are going to go so for example if I adjust the height up you can see how my ups and downs of this noise are going to be a little bit more pronounced so you can use this in order to create taller Hills or taller mountains or other things like that you can also do a height invert and what that'll do is instead of these going up it's gonna invert these down to give you more like canyons and other things like that instead I'm one thing to note about this is you can also set a maximum height so let's say I was to adjust this to a height of or my let's say I was to adjust my first height to something like two and a half and then I could set my maximum to limit how high the highs go so if I was to bring this down to something like two what this would do this would cut off everything that goes up above two and it would give you some plateaus in here so you can use your maximum in here to adjust your plateaus you can do the same thing with your minimum so if you wanted to for example flatten everything out like this down below so you don't have a bunch of like way downs you can do that using the minimum one thing to note about that is it might be tempting to use this in order to create water I would say you probably don't want to do that because there's an option later on for adding a water plane and then these other two options the fall-off is going to adjust if this goes all the way to the edge or if you were to select like an X Y what it would do is it would keep your edge flat and it would have like a fall-off between what you have right here and your edges around the outside and then your strata can be useful if you're trying to create more like rocky or Canyon type things this will just adjust the way that this falls off between different points you can see how these are more vertical so you can use this in order to create more Canyon like things and things like that and then finally there's an option in here for a water plane so if you decide for example that you want to have water in here generally what you want to do is you want to apply a plane which this allows you to do that kind of shows through your mesh kind of like this and notice that you can adjust your level in here but what you can do is you can use this to apply a water really quickly to your landscapes and then you could apply like a water shader to this or something like that and we can talk about that in a future video if you guys are interested so all in all this is a pretty quick easy way to create landscapes inside a blender I will create a separate tutorial on how to apply Reles to these because this video is getting a little bit long but if you're looking for a way to Apple or create the meshes this is a great way to do that we can also talk about how to create and apply a water shader in the future as well I'll leave a comment below let me know what you thought did you like this video have you used this add-on I just love having that conversation with you guys if you like this video please remember to click that like button down below if you're new around here I'm gonna click that subscribe button for new blender content every week as always thank you so much for taking the time to watch this I really appreciate it not we'll catch you in the next video thanks guys

Channel: The CG Essentials

Views: 123,209

Keywords: blender, blender 2.82, blender 2.8, blender modifier tutorials, blender tool tutorial, the blender essentials, the cg essentials, thecgessentials.com, justin geis, justin geis blender, blender ANT landscapes, blender landscapes, blender landscape add on, blender environments, blender environment add-on, blender add on landscapes, blender ANT tutorial, blender ANT landscape tutorial

Id: y7bH2bXKyTk

Length: 11min 13sec (673 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 15 2020