Easily Create Photorealistic Grass in Blender 2.93.5 (Quixel Bridge)

g'day guys and welcome back to the latest tutorial from just the basics today we're going to take a look at how to create a realistic grass scene or grass hill inside of the latest version of blender to accomplish this we will be using one third-party add-on which is quixil bridge now we're only going to use two materials or assets from qixel bridge and both of these are completely cc0 or free to use inside of blender or any 3d program without purchasing a license so this tutorial is completely free with all that being said let's jump into the latest version of blender which of recording this is blender version 2.93.5 and change a few of the startup settings so that we're ready to begin making our project the first one i'm going to change is in my render properties i want to make sure that my render engine is set to cycles not ev which it will be by default so click evie and change it to cycles if you haven't already and make sure your device is set to gpu compute if you have a graphics card if this box is blanked out and you're not sure how to enable it we can do that by heading to edit in the top left hand corner then down to preferences and under system just select cuda or optics render engine this will then give you the ability to put a tick next to your graphics card on your computer and then you'll be able to use gpu compute or your graphics card for rendering which is much more efficient than just using a cpu while we're here in the preferences menu let's also go to the add-on section and we're going to enable one particular add-on for this tutorial that's a landscape add-on or another noise train or ant landscape add-on put a tick next to that to enable it and then just make sure in this little box here you have auto save preferences or you can even click save preferences that way you won't have to continue enabling this every time you open up blender with that being done we can close out of preferences and begin creating our hill environment i've already deleted the default cube i'm sorry to report that but i didn't want to make this video too emotional so i haven't recorded that part of it but with that done let's go ahead and hit shift a and add in a landscape so i'm going to select landscape and down here in the bottom left-hand corner i have a little box with an arrow if i click that arrow it opens up all my settings now all these settings you can fully customize until you click on something else inside of blender or click away from the box once you've done that you will no longer be able to edit or modify your mesh so it's important to finalize all these settings before clicking away make sure you're happy with how your landscape looks because once you've done that the only way to readjust these settings is to add in a new landscape which is a bit painful i know but unfortunately that's just how blender works with this at this time so what i'm going to do is i'm going to select one of the operator presets and for our hills i'm going to select cauliflower hills if i zoom in you can see that this looks like a pretty vast landscape i want something a bit smaller so i'm going to scroll down until i see size on the x just down a little bit i'm going to change that from 1 to 4 and i'm also going to change size on the y from 1 to 4 as well so it's nice and symmetrical the other thing i'm going to do is scroll down to height just under display settings and i'm going to just turn that up a little bit because i want to have a bit of a hill scene now this is already looking pretty good for a hill environment i don't mind playing around with the random seat as well because this can give us a few random variations in our hills and some of them can actually look pretty good so if i just have a quick flick through here until i see if there's one i like i think this one's pretty good to be honest so i'm going to use this which is random seed 865 and that's it that's all my settings that i want to change so i can click away and you'll see now i can no longer adjust my landscape settings but that's fine because i'm happy with this for this tutorial let's next go ahead and scale this up so i'm going to hit s and then 1 0 so scaling it up 10 times larger than what it is with that being done i'll hit enter to confirm my selection and now it's time to begin adding in some materials and some assets so jumping over to qixel bridge you should see this screen or something similar to this depending on when you're watching the tutorial we're going to head to this little gift icon which is where we can access all the free assets so there's 50 free assets that are completely free to use with any 3d program that bridge supports and we're going to scroll down and we're looking for two in particular the first one is this ribbon grass asset this is really good for creating grass and adding it into a scene it saves a lot of time because i know there's a lot of tutorials that discuss how to make custom grass but for this one i just wanted to look at a quick and easy way to do it because often grass isn't the main render that you're creating when building up a scene it might be something featured in the background but it's not the focus so it's good to know how to create these background things quickly and easily without having to spend many hours because time is precious and we don't all have a lot of it this is getting a bit too deep for a tutorial so let's keep moving the other asset we're going to use is this nordic moss so if you click on any of these you'll see that by default it might be set to ak resolution i've changed that down to 4k but of course you can set it to 2k if you want it to render a bit quicker on your workstation but with that being done make sure to just go ahead and download that and then you can head to your local files and they should show up there so i'm using this nordic moss texture and this ribbon grass what i'll do is i'll hit the blue blue export button on both of them and it tells me it's exported successfully to blender with that being done i can jump back into blender and nothing's changed well if i zoom in underneath my mesh i can see it's imported this grass what i'll do then is i'll just go click and drag to select all that grass there and just make sure i've selected all by hitting g and then right click to deselect that option now that i've got all my graphs selected i want to cluster or group this all together so that when i apply this grass to my hill it's going to use all these different variations of which there are six all up so let's group them together by hitting ctrl g or command g if you're on a mac look at that getting all sophisticated so ctrl g stands for group but now it will come up as collection and let's call this grass underscore hill and that's now saved my selection as a new collection what does that mean well if i go ahead and select my hill now i can head to my particle property which is indicated by this little particle emitting other particles symbol and i can hit this plus icon to add in a new particle system now in blender if you're unfamiliar with the particle systems there's essentially two different types there's an emitter or a hair the easiest way to differentiate is to remember that an emitter is something that emits things or drops things whereas a hair is something that grows things so in this case grass is something that would grow from the ground so we're going to use the hair settings wow look at that doesn't that already look fantastic thanks for watching this tutorial guys i'm kidding that's not our finished product at all what we're going to do is we're going to head down to our render settings and currently it's rendering paths as the hair strands we don't want that as we have some grass assets we want to have grow out from this hill so let's change from render as path to render as collection and you probably recall at this point that we made a collection so if we go here to this little box we can access the collections we have in this project and you'll see our one grass hill is there available for us to use and there we have it grass starting to appear on our hill already but this grass is very small and it makes the scene look very big what i'm going to do is i'm going to turn the scale up from 0.05 to 0.3 that's much better for our scene i'm also going to turn the scale randomness up from 0 to 0.3 to give a bit of variety now you can see that our grass hill is looking pretty well populated if we go to render though it doesn't quite look so good it looks maybe like a sand dune somewhere out near the beach perhaps there's two things we're going to do to improve on this the first is we're going to change the number of grass that's being projected from our plane from 1000 up to 20 000 and we're also going to apply our material to our mesh so if i just go here to material preview what i can do is i can turn off this hair particle system for a moment and just go to my material properties and hit this little material drop down and look for my nordic moss material i'm just going to select that from the list and that will apply that material to my plane although it doesn't really look that good that's because we need to unwrap it first to do that let's hit tab to switch into edit mode on our plane and here we can unwrap our plane or in other words tell the computer how to interpret this 2d image onto a 3d object so let's hit u and then select cue projection for this and now if i tab out of edit mode you'll see it's applied it pretty nicely it might be a little too big so i might need to zoom out my texture a little bit to do that let's just head to the uv editing tab and over here on the left hand side i've got my uv map and it appears as just a static representation of our 3d mesh on a 2d image so what i'm going to do is i'm going to hit s and then two to scale that up two times bigger than what it was i'll hit enter to confirm that selection if i head back to layout now it's zoomed out my grass material a little bit which is fantastic let's go ahead back to our particle properties and turn back on our hair system by hitting this little computer icon and now let's switch to render mode and see how that's looking with our material beneath that's looking really good the only complaint i have at this point is that all the grass in here looks more like pineapples because of how neatly they're planted so let's go ahead and add a bit of more variety or randomness to this scene by checking advanced options and checking rotation and what i'm going to do is i'm going to turn the phase up a little bit and i'm going to turn the phase randomness up a little bit and this will just add a bit of variety and rotation to the grass in our scene and you can see now that's looking much better for a grass scene let's head over to our camera to preview what our camera is seeing so if you hit zero on your number pad it should take you to your camera view the next thing i want to do is go over here to output properties and i'm just going to select render only to the region that my camera is viewing with that being done now it's only going to render whatever my camera is looking at which will be much more efficient well our scenes nearly finished the only thing left to do is perhaps zoom in a little bit so we can see it better and maybe add a couple of subtle camera effects what do we mean by camera effects well one thing that can go a long way in selling a scene like this is some depth of field or focus and blur now that's a realistic aspect of any camera and if we go to our camera settings by just selecting this box or selecting our camera from the scene collection menu we can then see this camera icon and go into there and we have a little checkbox next to depth of field if we enable that it's now going to allow our camera to focus on certain objects so to determine what it's focusing on sometimes it's easiest to turn the f-stop all the way down to 0.1 and then you can see what part of your scene is actually in focus so right now it's not really anything close to the camera because the distance is set to 10 meters what i'm going to do is i'm going to just pull that back a little bit and now you could render a scene just like this and it'll look pretty good but from my scene i'm going to turn my f-stop back down a little bit to something more like 2 looks pretty good for my scene and what i'm going to do is i'm also going to change one other setting in my render properties that's down here under color management if we hit this little down arrow you'll see that we have this option for look and we can change the contrast level of our scene so i like to set this to very high contrast as i think it looks much nicer for a scene like this now we're ready to render our scene to do that let's change a few of our render settings i'm going to turn the sample render from 128 to 50 and i'm going to enable adaptive sampling i'm also going to enable denoising and i'm going to set that to optics instead of nlm and i'm also going to go down and i'm going to head to performance and change my render tiles from 64 by 64 to 256 by two five sixes this is the fastest way to render i think when you're using a graphics card but there could be better options i'm not sure then i'm going to go to apple properties i'm going to set the resolution on my scene from 1920 by 1080 to 3840 by 2160 and confirm that selection now my scene's all ready to render out if i want to change anything else i can head back to my camera and maybe adjust the focal length if i want to zoom in on my scene more sometimes i like to do this as it can look a bit more cinematic changing it up from the standard 50 mil to something like 100 mil but i think for this scene i'm just going to leave it at 50 mil with that all being done i'll just turn it back to solid mode so i'm not rendering or previewing the render while rendering and then all that's left to do is hit f12 to render the final product that's all it takes to add in grass and create a realistic grass scene of course there's many variables you can play with and experiment with you can head back to the particle properties and change the number down if that's too much or too little and you can also change the size and scale randomness to add even more variety i hope you learned something from this tutorial and i hope you're able to use it in some of your own projects please feel free to tag me on any of the socials that links below the video if you want to share some of your work that you've created following any of these tutorials i'd love to see what you guys are able to make but thanks so much for all your support i hope you enjoyed the video i'll see you guys all in the next tutorial until then this has been just the basics of how to create a grass scene inside of blender version 2.93.5 oh [Music] you

Channel: Just The Basics

Views: 1,284

Keywords: Just the Basics

Id: 3-L6ry5snDk

Length: 14min 22sec (862 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 16 2021