Environment Concept Art In Blender - TUTORIAL

hello there in this video we're going to learn a little bit about making environments in blender for concept art like this one also a quick disclaimer this video is a shortened version of the full course available over on gumroad with that out of the way let's get started first i think we need to establish what really is environment concept art because it really becomes this umbrella term for a whole bunch of things but the way i like to break it down is into illustrations key shots and overviews where illustrations are for marketing or public use t-shirts is the environment shown from potentially different angles in a rougher state to use in-house to develop the environment further and overviews includes maps and the general layout of the area where composition and storage selling is less important and for the purpose of this tutorial we'll be doing something like a keyshot like always you need to have some sort of idea of what it is you're doing and for me i am building something sci-fi but then i've also added these additional words to the build just to give it some flavor and those are exotic luxurious and corrupt so it's going to be this high-class society with a little bit of gangster vibes to it maybe some casino vibes which probably won't be able to see too much but that's at least what i'm imagining and it will help inform that decision making and also it's super key to gather good reference i've gathered both some architectural reference for the architecture and the piece and some environmental reference for the nature and then overall just some mood pieces to help guide in the right direction and as always i am using purif to gather all my reference jumping into blender the first thing i do is actually start sketching using the grease pencil this is of course something you could do in photoshop or a different software but there's something nice about just getting into blender and just using grease pencil then quickly switching over to doing the modeling afterwards and here i'm sketching out the preliminary architecture so i have some ideas for the architecture based on my reference and there's sort of these rounded structures with kind of domed tops and i'm imagining a little bit of middle eastern reference and some ottoman reference and i'm trying to weave all these things together and i'm trying out different things and i'm not trying too many different types of structures as i really want to explore the architectural style and and all this could very much change in the 3d and i don't always do this process but uh for here i was doing multiple buildings it just kind of made sense to to do these architectural design and it actually ended up being really helpful quite like starting out with the architecture first because it gives me the confidence that the architecture is interesting in itself so once i put into the environment i can kind of take that off to the side and just trust that it works and also it fits in with my narrative that this alien civilization has come to this area and put down their architectural style in this environment sometimes you have the opposite happen right where you're designing something to fit the environment but here wants a strong cultural style for the architecture so it became this way and here i've created a little assortment of architectural sketches something else i tried while doing this project was drawing out a sort of map for the environment so this is before starting to block out the 3d itself and it's just sort of put in to a perspective what i had in mind for the area and i continued to grab some of the little grease pencil strokes and move them into three-dimensional space to to fill out the volume a little bit to help guide when i then start going into 3d so jumping into 3d what i started doing there was grabbing you know cylinders and started to block out the architecture itself and this took a little bit of time because i had to get the first volume mass right and just figure out the divisions and i think i ended up using some pretty standard ideas in architecture especially this concept of rising detail which you see a lot in sort of classical architecture in roman classical architecture where things will get smaller and more detailed when you go towards the top it also helps emphasize uh scale because it kind of it's almost a trigger perspective right you're you're going higher and higher and up and suddenly the details are getting smaller and smaller smaller than they should be so their building appears a little bit bigger and more grandiose i think that fits quite well with this idea of these luxurious uh gangsters maybe trying to over to each other with you know who can build the biggest building or something like that in terms of ornamentation and materials and all these things i definitely thought the buildings should be white and they should have these domed uh copper roofs uh as we see in sort of a european classical architecture and then sort of ornate with these gold things which was a little bit of a mix between some middle eastern references and some european influences and i think this merging of architectures worked quite well the difficult part was making it more sci-fi and i think i left that to the ornamentation and some of the decoration just making everything a little bit more angled here and there and then the auto rotation should almost look like a 3d printer make it and not follow any sort of conventional patterns but a more futuristic pattern or something i also wanted a sense of life in the building so i create these little strips of light that i placed around the different heights of the building to simulate light uh it was really easy way to to add that sense of life and i really want to create an assortment of different structures and then the idea was that i would then combine them in the city so we feel like they have a similar cultural architectural style but still different architects maybe are involved and i think this really helps sells the believability of the the area my general technique for these things is actually just to build what i think is interesting and then when i start blocking them out then maybe some things work and some things don't and that's totally fine but i tend to use you know 75 percent of it but sometimes there's a building that just doesn't fit here for example you can see all the buildings laid out and we had this more organic very strange building and it was based on the sketches that i really liked but i didn't really hit it in 3d and i decided i didn't have enough time to continue and i liked the other building so much more so it never ended up getting used but it was worth the exploration then i started building some forest patches uh little nature assets for the more organic and natural parts of the environment so i created these little balls uh of kind of foresty things uh they're not actually trees they're just supposed to represent trees right um but i combined them together in these little patches and from afar they ended up really looking like little forest patches so that was quite neat and then i combined them with these hill areas and the idea here was really just to create some different assets for the environment to use afterwards i also grabbed some scan data from online these are really really useful because they just give you so much uh information variation and natural feel for free i highly recommend looking for scan data online or you know grabbing things like from the mega scans library when i finally got around to doing the blockout i looked at my map reference especially and i had all my assets that i prepared over on the left side here in the new asset browser and then i just started blocking everything out i started with the big kind of water land masses i knew i wanted a lot of water to make everything very exotic and the overall idea for this environment was to have a sort of uh castle city or like a little you know luxurious city sitting at the edge of a waterfall and it would kind of be in that like crevice of the waterfall and all this water would come down from the sides and they would have this amazing view from the waterfall and to really block everything out to begin with i created a quick water shader and then i grabbed some of my hill assets that i had built just simple assets and then i kind of supplied that and supported that with some scan data especially this little patch with a variation of fields and forests that helped create a lot of organic shapes and lines and the nice thing about this specific patch was that it had a little bit of a road on it uh some you know human-made road and that gave it a sense that you know like sentient beings have been here and kind of you know manipulated some of the area around uh which we see quite often you know in our own world right we have these unnatural straight lines we're certainly in this field when i was done with that and i started pulling in the city assets and there pulled in the main tower first and then i created this little block shape by this little wedge shape and that one i used to just you know scatter throughout the environment i generally think it's a really nice technique to create very few assets and then reuse those assets as much as possible because they create a sense of coherency in the architecture if that's what you're going for in your design for me that was but even just taking those little architectural pieces and placing them kind of asymmetrically along each other gives a lot of dynamicness to the levels of the city and makes the city feel more organic but still the architecture kind of fits together so i really like this technique that was super useful and here i was after having done most of the block out i blocked out the entirety of the city just using the same techniques that that we talked about before i ended up really liking looking around the city and already at this point i started imagining the different shots of the different angles i wanted to capture the city from this is really the level of detail i would want to push the city to before starting getting into the next segment which is finding those angles so when your environment is ready and you have the detail you want and you're ready for the next step that's when you can start creating a camera and then start to find those key shots that we're looking for and i think a really useful technique here is trying to think of uh the key shots as a set of cinematic shots right so how would you see these shots in a film for me i imagine kind of how would it be like to approach this environment in a film you know so probably would see maybe you know an establishing shot first you know big wide shots would see the entire city and then we start getting closer so the technique i used here was creating little keys on the cameras and then i'm slowly moving in towards the city and i'm creating several keys and several different options for each of those types you know so there's a landing shot quite a big open shot and then maybe something a bit more close but more intimate with the city and then something really close where we even start seeing the people and we're moving to where the action is so i'm creating several versions of these shots in my keys here and it just helps me keep track of what i have and i can go back and forth really quick and see what works for me and what doesn't work so i think it's a really useful technique for those things it obviously depends on what kind of environment are you doing if you're doing something maybe more for a game and you're not super interested in showing the cinematic approach to your city then perhaps you want to find those key areas right and i will still use the same technique you know you may be saying okay i want to show off where the bank is you know or where the main tower is then create different keys with different shots of where you can show off that environment because every environment is different and there's a unique angle for every environment that works there's always the standard ones you know like having a low camera and then pointing slightly up and then showing the grandiosity of the environment or you can have something more above where you see everything very clear for me personally i really found that this technique opens up doing environment concept art so much more because i really get to act like a photographer which i find a lot more intuitive with environments especially after this step finding your angles that's when you could then bring in you know the secondary steps for for the cinematography here and that is you know the big strokes of light so what i do here is just add a directional light and then exactly the same thing with the camera i established those keyframes for the direction light also so i'm stepping through all my cameras and then i'm you know adjusting the direction light for each so i can make those big transitions between light and dark and it's just a really fun way because you've established so many things and you just get to light these nice angles you already made and because it's so fast then even if i created you know 16 key shots then it's super fast to just you know rotate the direction light on on all of them and then once i have can see all of them in the end then i can make a really informed decision uh you know based on those 16 if i just need to choose four or something then i have all this information with the light and the camera angles uh and so on and here was definitely trying to create some kind of evening light with a little bit more of an orangey sun and these more purplish kind of shadows i also added some clouds uh because they also really help add and shape the light um in conjunction with the direction light there so that worked really well with just having a transparent plane and some cloud texture on it there and it was just super fun seeing the environment come to life with the shadows as well all right after kind of having established the cinematography on all you know 16 shots then i thought okay i want to start choosing some things so i'll go over everything with the grease pencil once again and just very roughly sketch out what could be better what could i add and which shots do i really like so starting nailing down the decision process and planning some things ahead for what i might do in photoshop and this technique was really really helpful it made the decision process so much easier because i had all that info that i might uh would have to explore in photoshop afterwards but having it already there uh in the 3d environment kind of so close to where everything is i just it just made it so much faster and it was super fun and helped connect everything to the final image after i had done the sketch over for all the key shots i had to you know do a little bit of a selection process and that was quite difficult because i ended up liking a lot of the shots but it really did come down to those initial statements of what's the story what am i trying to do with this you know environment what needs to be framed and here the hypothetical scenario was that we need to show off this environment sort of pitch the environment like this should be the overall feel of the place um so i'm looking for those shots that not show the specific buildings because those things would have been selected yet um but showing off what does it feel like you know this environment is this the right fit for this culture after having picked the final roster of uh p shots then i went in to do some of the render settings and i was working in eevee here so i was definitely turning on stuff like ambient occlusion and screen sprays reflections there's also some other settings that i was playing around with in eevee um but those are really the main tools that can do a lot i was also trying out uh rendering cycles which definitely makes everything look a lot better especially with those little lights i had in the different towers they look really good in cycles and the sense of global illumination is just a lot more powerful in cycles but i was rendering out multiple images and the result i got from eb was pretty good and it's really you know you end up picking your battles here what you know takes longer to change in 3d and what is faster to do in 2d and for me i really wanted fast renders because i was doing several and and i those little you know details in the lights i could always easily add those in in 2d and working in eevee is also quite nice because everything feels quite uh cg and that means i'm forced a little bit to paint when i get into photoshop and actually like that i have to give everything a pass with the brushstroke before it kind of works so it's a nice little compromise there and the final things i prepared from blender before moving into photoshop was really the render passes if you don't know about render passes render presses are really more used for cg and compositing but they can actually be used as nice utility passes in photoshop for selecting things and you can get some really nice render passes that can help you with atmospheres selecting the different areas ambient occlusion and big differences between light and shadow and i definitely found those really really really useful in photoshop and i highly recommend you to look into those and how to use those and experiment with using also the compositor and what you can get out of blender for me personally i created a little automatic workflow where i always get out these compositing render passes for me to use in photoshop because i just it's there i'm so dependent on them now they just they're so useful and it's almost a a need to have at this point and also with my setup then i get all those render passes for each of the different camera angles and so when i'm processing everything in photoshop i get a really consistent you know workflow for each of the shots to make them all feel a little bit more coherent once i'm actually in photoshop then i start processing all of my render passes and by processing i mean i put them into a sort of structure uh similar to sort of foreground middle ground and background i also have some layers for specifically the atmosphere and some for the big light and shadow parts of the image this is super helpful to keep my process clean after that then i really want to start focusing on these more cg looking parts of the image like especially the red left and right banks here the cliffs i want to start filling them out with some photo bashing so i find images in photo libraries or online and start building out those areas my plan is really to have you know waterfall to come over but building this nice base of stone and cliff really helps with that afterwards i also really want to tackle the big sky up there that's a big part of the overall impression of the image and there we try to find something that is as close to final as possible and here you can see me start building in those big waterfalls and i'm also adding some lights and this is really where those render passes come in super handy because they help establish the different areas and lets me keep everything super separated and i'm also building out some foliage and just adding details to the image to make it feel exotic and the way i want it and overall just bringing the final touches to the image and here we have the final image a bit more romantic than what i thought first but i think it's pretty close to what i was envisioning now that is pretty much the end for this tutorial if you wish to learn more you can check out our full course over on gumroad environment concept art in blender there we go through the entirety of everything you just saw just in 14 chapters and in much much more detail check it out over on gumroad if you like this video leave a like if you want to see more from us subscribe otherwise i thank you guys so much for watching and bye

Channel: Critical Giants

Views: 22,682

Keywords: tutorial, concept art, blender, howto, visual development, concept, art, critical, eevee, cycles, learn, design, 3d, visdev, environment, environemtn art, landscape

Id: dy6GyS9XC2g

Length: 20min 34sec (1234 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 28 2021