Creating realistic architecture and environments in Blender - Beginner tutorial

hello everyone how's it going so in this video I would like to show you how to make this exact scene this is targeted towards beginners in this video I will be showing you how to do this terrain how to do some of the texturing how to do the vegetation scattering and how to All Around have a very quick able to concept certain architectural designs right so I decided to go with this one precis L since it is extremely simple to follow and it does not require any advanced understanding so if you are a beginner you have around four to 5 hours inside of blender you would be able to follow through I will also be showing you how to do the lighting this scene is based on a another project of mine in which I have used ftor now I decided to use the same subject in order to save up on the time a little bit and I will be providing you with this model down in the comments inside of a drive folder now for this one as well I would like to also use publicly made assets so I won't be showing you how to make your the vegetation from scratch I will hopefully be doing that in the future however I would be doing that using speed tree which is why I decided to use add-ons such as the geoc scatter add-on with a couple of Scat packs and if you do not have access to that you could just use the regular particle system follow multiple tutorials through YouTube now hopefully get a couple of things out of this tutorial and I'll see you then so here I am adding a plane subdividing it by around 20 times playing around with the proportional editing in order to have a more interesting shape to the trrain I will also try to have a higher height in the in the area away from the camera and behind the house in order to emulate the mountainous area it's also wise to add a camera I want the camera to to catch the house from two sides right it's also wise for the position of the camera to have a realistic height for beginners obviously now it's best if you choose a height anywhere from 140 cm up to 190 now that's what the average human would be in between and you have a wigger room of around 20 cm plus and minus Ro setting the camera settings it's also wise to have the composition guides and we want to frame the house in the middle so we also do some shift on the Y AIS it's also important to have the lighting from the get-go right it's it's the lightning is crucial for the composition I will be using the simple Sky texture I will be getting it down since it is Overexposed I will also add some ozone and I will also have a bit of a higher altitude since this is after all set to be in a mountainous area you could always play around I chose 2,000 M right which is what might have made sense right now at this point I will be adding the texture that I have this is the a proc you just append the texture downloaded from poly Haven which I will be showing you in a s in in a moment you append the material you go ahead and find it on poly Haven website in the text category now why did I choose aiel right you might see it holds less details well I chose it for the fact that I don't have to tile it way too much right it is already very big so I can tile it only once for this train or twice or twice now it depends Pro on how it looks from the camera if it if it is realistic but it looks bad from the camera angle what's the point now here I am a bit struggling with the language you know with the with the hot Keys also playing around with a camera height I chose 1.6 M or 1.7 now as you can see I'm playing around with the UVS I won't be seeing any of the texture however it's it's still a decent practice now we also remove displacement since I won't be needed that will be only causing me headaches when I will be adding a path right which I will be showing you in a moment also make it interesting with some sculpting make it interesting with displacement textures make it interesting with default noise just anything to make the scene have a bit more interest to catch more light when once we add the vegetation Shadows are your friend now at this point I will be showing you beforehand I will be showing you how to add trees since it is very important to frame the camera using trees right it helps draw your eyes and it helps with with the lighting immensely you really need Shadows I will be speaking about this in the near future with higher with higher details and show you the theory behind everything that I'm doing however for now I just want you to follow what I am doing now for this I will be you doing a quick weight bank I do not want the camera to be obscured by any tree and I definitely do not want in trees inter or growing out of the house or the so here I am playing enough to this I still have a slightly lower resolution for the train to qualify me to change it a bit more freely you go to the coling masks in the geoc scatter addon and you choose your group that you just painted now playing around with the render I will also be playing around with the default scale which I will get down to probably by half and also play around with the in distances and not as you could see it's greatly improving our lighting know it's all about the values right so at this point I will be showing you how to add the path now for the path I decided to go for a more modular look right it is what's used mostly in games for path you could do it by the texturing techniques you know using masks or other technique you could do it with the sculpting you could do it with multiple ways or just use mishes and overlay them however I would like to show you this technique using the curve modifier now as you can see I added a plane scaled it to an appropriate bit of a modular scale piece right played around with a shape to give it a bit of a Extrusion towards the top added a mirror modifier with cliping on it's really important to have that also added an array on the y- axis it obviously depends on your case right you could play around with the count wherever you want you should also Press On in the option of the array however I will be doing that later on once I add the subdivision now as always add your curve I prefer the path in general for the path I prefer to have it in the same we should actually not prefer it's not optional you should have it in the same origin as your mesh it works really well that way which is why I like to keep it in the origin point right now after this you will have to test this out you using the curve modifier on your actual mesh and see if it deforms well sometimes you have to rotate it in order to fit so just play around usually with the Z Axis or the x-axis depending on how you modeled your mesh now it's for my case- 90° on the Zed AIS as you can see it's working as we expect it to work now it's also a smart way to conform it to our train is do a nice technique that I currently use I apply the I activate the vertex I I choose a starting point and the ending point and I could then later play around with all of the vertices or control points that are in between now as you could see it's it's very very modular you could play around you could the it's not too long will add more arrays you need more curve just play around you need more resolution as a subdivision surface uh for Conformity the train I do not want it to be in fact I want it to be extruded a little bit more in order to compensate for the amount of terrain that for the amount of grass that I will have if it does not conform well you probably do not have enough resolution which is why I add a bunch of control points in the segments of the curve right here as you could see here here I am just playing around I I do spend time to confirm it I do not have to I just don't not want it intersecting with our ground right now you could also alternatively try to conform your mesh your terrain to the path that you have which is what I'm going to do as well here it all depends on your preference you want to conform the path or conform the mesh sometimes it's easier to conform your mesh of your terrain which is what I'm doing here now as you can see I'm trying to make it look relatively useful I could go obviously very slow in here since trees and grass hide a lot of mistakes here I am also coming back to the weight painting in order to to not have any trees intersecting with our B so again F and dra to play around with this with the radius and also you could do that from the up top panel right so I'm just playing around from the camera view also make sure to be always view through the camera view and through the render view as you can see it's really improving lighting the the Shadows are really interesting here I am playing around with lighting a little bit more and at this point I will be extending our terrain as ice as you could see me do I I duplicated and separated the boundaries to create a certain mountainous area without needed to add a Terrain I did X dissolve right I also did M by distance in order to simplify the shape so I can manipulate it a lot better later on as you can see I'm just playing around with it I will subdivide it a couple of times in order to have more geometry to work with I want this to have a certain shape to help me with the composition as always I also added a bit of height I want look like a montane area I want the size of the frame of the image to have more trees and I want the sky to be obvious from the front right so giving me kind of an noal shape I'm also using the forestation pack right I will be playing with the settings again this default scale and the density no this is just trial of or error you know it greatly helps to have cycle being this fast in these sorts of uh changements right it greatly helps to visualize you don't not have to take r the image that you are doing all right I'm just playing with it from different views make sure that it holds up from afar right I do not want to see The Horizon I do not want to see anything there is not trees in the background right or grass so here I am doing again that playing around I will also play around with the scale get it a bit smaller or higher now I'm reverting back I will also add a little bit more instances which totally hides the the issues behind Okay now as you could see I will also be adding some spruce trees right to have more variations now for this one I will be doing the exact same thing playing around adding the coling mask and just play around with a seed in order to have a relatively decent look I also am looking at the lighting of the scene more so if it does give the lighting of the scene a really positive look you know I could I could go on and on and on just playing around with this to see a decent dampling light right I want a decent pattern of the light and the also it will help the light light R you know when we add volumetrics here I am just playing around with the lighting angles playing around with the seed right going back and forth until I find a decent port and always just playing around with the with the mask that I have added at the weight map playing with the elevation playing with the rotation playing with the intensity now at this point I am happy with the way the trees look however I would prefer to add a different group in order to add the grass now I added a group did not name it at all since I do not have many and I will be painting over our path I do not want any grass growing out of the path I want to see the path so here I I'm playing around I will always go back and play around with this it's really easy to go back to right so I will be also using the grass blade pack which is a Scat Pack right I will be using one of any of these I I have already made the same PR so I know that I want the mow I it took me like around 20 minutes just trying round the pr seeing what I like the most idea you want something not as vibrant right it is a forest it's not a garden so here I am just trying to optimize the way it looks you know it adds these you could add camera uh camera limitations I also like to change the way this looks in views right I'm showing you just the options that are available if you do purchase this addon now you could do a lot of things you could could do you could try the repulse right property in this Arrow which is very useful in this case I did not want to show you how to do that I will also do the same for all of the other layers that I have checking one by one to see if they hold up or if the scale is correct now what I really like about it is it's already layered in a decent is manner you could always go back to like for example here I don't want as much grass right the grass is way too big so here I am just playing around doing my coling mask again doing the same thing I do believe that there is a better way than to do this for each object however I'm not sure how to do that right I am not as experienced in Joc scatter as much as I am in Forest pack here I am again going back to the weight map right now at this point I will be visualizing a lot going to the render view a lot in order to see how this all looks so at this point I would like to add a texture to the path now I use bridge but since I do have access to that you could use anything that you want you could use blender kit you could use ambient CG all of these have really great textures for me personally I like the ones I like the ones from bridge right from quick so they are very easy to work with you should always go back to them spend some time improving them right uh it comes up a little bit crooked now I will be doing the UVS now for the UVS I have a quick tip for you I am I will rotate the whole thing by 45° now I want this to be straight you could do that by using an add-on however I would prefer to do this now Rectify one quad right like I am doing here s y0 s x0 again press the active quad and write follow active quad and it will straighten it out for you now we have a great UV map that we could use I will I will be also adding some more subdivisions to add some displacement you don't have to do that you could add actual this actual scatter geometry right using using the grass blade back in itself however I did not want to do that could always add could do that in the Shader editor right or you could do that in the textures in the shading panel so here I am just SP around with it I should choose the UV like you can see me here and here we have a relatively good terrain which will look substantially better once we have our light is set up now at this point I want to have in front of the camera for the sake of composition a big Shadow right I added a plane for that you could play around with the plane right I'm playing around with how it's position from the camera you should always through look through your camera view rotating it a bit playing around with the way it looks right I do not want any light in front of the camera since I want the light to be focused on the house to draw your eyes there better I will be talking about that later on more I also like to give it a realistic type of color I do not want white since it does reflect I also want a little bit of light seeping through right so this is why I'm adding a noise texture for the next noise texture you could play around with it so also add a color ramp to Crunch the values in order to have a decent Alpha map now as you could see here I'm playing around with how crushed it is right it is you can't really predict how it's how it works right we don't really judge values as well as they really are and as you could see here once it's as if it doesn't exist so I have to crunch it even more so right here I am just playing around I want just some tiny tiny light SE through our uh our plane with the noise texture right and here I relatively look love the way it looks especially with the grass on to look great right so this is optional you could add some trees or some additional rocks I did that using bridge I also have my own Rock library however like I mentioned earlier using publicly available assets I will be providing my my custom made trees using speed tree or made in the gro at on later on however they are not as organized which isn't why I'm not sharing them until now they will be free hopefully in the future so here I am just playing around you know spending a little bit of time to add some details this is you this is where you really have a lot of time to spend right the first 80% should come easily when building a scene and really fast which is why I'm showing you these really simple techniques I could go around and do this the hard way however was the point point the last 20% is what takes time is what makes the image different from the rest now obviously for this image I myself you know without teaching it I made it in around 55 minutes right up to 1 hour the one that I made in if storm took me around six to seven hours where so it took a lot more time which is why it is a lot more polished now here I am adding some displacement to this you don't really have to do that right however I wanted to have a slightly more realistic Rock in front of the camera I really love the way these rocks look especially when you have the the origin of the scan it looks great right also plan around with the with the with the snapping tool right helps me position these things a bit play around with r if you want an unconstrained rotation you could press r twice I'm just going around playing around I also think about how the light interacts here I am I'm positioning this rock to have a bit of a decent Tree Shadow right again now I will be adding my volumetrics volumetrics are very important now as you can see I'm just playing around with it I like to scale it down on the Z access so it does not change the way my sky looks I still want a vibrant sky I'm adding a principal volumetric Shader I set the density to 0.003 the anistropy to around 0.7 0.6 and added some very very slight emission with a slight bluish tone also playing around with lighting you should always experiment with multiple lighting I will be showing you a different lighting setup next of this exact scene which is one lighting that I really like to do also again I want to have a sky texture you could do that with planes however I want to show you this technique but it's very known however why not just show it again add an environment texture right from poly Haven again for this one I have used the rural asphalt road right I apply it I play around with this rotation right play around with the he saturation I want to be very saturated especially when we see the volume trick it makes it very dull per se so here I am playing with how realistic it is playing with the value plane with a lot of things now we don't want it for the lighting we want it only to be visible to the camera so what I did is a mixed Shader add our sky right and then add a light bth node for the light bth node we won't use the in cam Ray which is only shows to the camera right but it does not affect the lighting or does anything other than just show the pixels right so it does not affect the reflection you could do that if you want the reflections like I did in my previous project that you could see the breakdown of I wanted the reflections of the lighting with the hdri and I wanted the lighting so here I am just playing around seeing how it looks right you could always go around and polish it you know it looks a bit empty since I did not want to spend a lot of time and wanted to keep it all the more relatively beginner friendly right so the best way to learn is not follow this step by step but just as a general guideline right so watch multiple tutorials while watching this one please make something with the model that I give you it will greatly help you this is my final result that I made in around 1 hour and hopefully you have gotten one thing or two things from this scene and as I mentioned I will be showing how to make the lighting so take care for now that will be it

Channel: AlternaVision Studio

Views: 10,216

Keywords: blender tutorial, blender 3d, environment tutorial, midjourney, AI, blender introduction, blender modeling, game design, unreal engine, 3d, for beginners, blender architecture, Ghibli style, cinema 4D, how to make volumetric light in blender, Blender terrain, blender house, blender cabin

Id: Pi2MChia-ig

Length: 24min 9sec (1449 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 30 2023