Getting Started in Blender

hi there have you ever watched a movie or played a game that immersed you into a Fantastical world and have you ever wanted to make those kinds of worlds on your own well in this video I'm gonna show you an amazing way of creating such worlds using a handcrafted free kit from kit match 3D and blender a free 3D art software so actually get started we are going to download the kit we will be using I'm on kitbies3d.com kitbash has created some of the world's most versatile premium 3D asset libraries these kits have been used across the industry they have loads of awesome kits to explore different themes like Viking Villages mega cities Fallen battlefields pirate coves and so much more but for the purpose of this tutorial we are going to be using this kit mission to minera this kit is free and looks exciting kit bash supports lots of different software but since we're going to be using blender we select that one and hit download then we get the kit and it's ready to open in blender when you open the kit you will have to reattach all the texture files which is fine because it's super simple we just head to file external data and hit find missing files then we locate the texture folder in our case 2K is just fine and hit find missing files now we can check out all the assets with Textures in the material preview this kit is great if you want to create Advanced settlements in a distant Galaxy on a foreign world this kid is packed with everything from research facilities and refineries to Landing bays and drop ships I might do something with those drop ships always good to have something flying in the image it makes everything a bit more Dynamic what's also cool is that every kit match kit has a mix of hero buildings and smaller props which is great when we have to actually flesh out our world and if you're new to blender then let me guide you through the basics of the UI and navigation it's not very complicated and there's lots of resources to expand your knowledge online to get started with the basics let's get a clean scene luckily the kit mesh file already has one ready for us so we jump to the top here and select the scene called scene this scene is a basic blender setup with a cube a lamp and a camera so firstly a little bit about the UI of blender the big section in the middle here is the viewport this is where all the 3D scene building and modeling takes place over here on the right we have the outliner the outliner is a hierarchy of all the assets in our scene down here we have the properties panel that has all the information about our objects and our scene everything above this little Gap are scene properties and everything below are local object properties like the location rotation and scale of our object so to actually navigate the 3D viewport we will start off with the middle Mouse button holding it down and moving your mouse rotates the scene if you then hold shift and the middle Mouse button The View starts panning instead if you hold down control and the middle Mouse button you totally zoom in and out and if you simply scroll on the middle Mouse button you step zoom in and out pretty simple to select objects in your scene you simply left click them and to deselect them you just click into empty space and you can also box select items by holding down left click while dragging over the RPX to move our RPX in 3D space we work with location rotation and scale which we can see over here in the properties panel if you start changing these values by clicking and dragging you can see the cube move rotate and scale but we can also move the objects using hotkeys the best way to do this in blender is to select the object and hitting G for grab now the object follows the mouse As you move it around and if you click again you now confirm that movement but we can also use hotkeys to get more control let's select the cube again hit G and then press X now the cube moves only along the x-axis neat we could now also press y to change it to the y-axis instead or set for the set axis and then once you're happy with your move you just click to confirm this also works for rotation and scale click R for rotate and now the cube starts spinning when moving the mouse around and then again we can hit x y and set to switch between the different axes of rotation and the story is the same for scale just hit s for scale and now you can start scaling neat how that all works out and it has the same control with the axes if you potentially would like to add a new object to your scene you can come up here to the add menu then under mesh we see a bunch of Primitives cubes planes Etc but if we go out and then hover over the add menu button we get a shortcut hit shift a in blender this means that the shortcut for this menu is shift a let's try it out we press shift a and yeah we get that same menu and we could use that to create something like a plane and by the way this is our shortcuts are found throughout blender okay I think we got the basics down let's start building our scene using our awesome assets from kit Bash let's use the shift a menu to create a new plane and I want to use this plane to build out a whole terrain this kit comes with a couple of nice textures to help us make a Terrain for our Minerva scene so I'm going to scale Up This Plane a bit then head over to the material tab click this drop down and search terrain underscore C to actually see your material we can go up to the material preview tab here and switch over to that one which is this black rock material this material will be super awesome as the base for everything that we're making but we got one problem it's completely flat but kit bash actually comes with a displacement map so we can use that to get some height firstly we will have to give our plane some more resolution we can do this by selecting our plane and heading over to the modifiers tab here we will create a subdivision modifier set it to simple and set it to the max which is six then I will go up here and hit apply now if we switch to the wireframe view hitting set and dragging to the the left we can see all the topology but we need a bit more resolution so let's hit set again and drag down to enter material preview then let's create another subdivision modifier just set it to 2 this time and hit apply yeah that's exactly what I want okay now we can actually displace the mesh so let's create another modifier called a displace modifier on its own it doesn't do much because we need to give it a texture so I'm going to hit new texture and call it terrain underscore C to match our Black Rock texture then I will go down to the texture properties panel and in here I will go to this little drop down which looks through all the texture files in the scene here I will search for terrain underscore C and choose the one called height now we're getting somewhere this is much better it's a bit too strong so we just head back to the displace modifier and lower the strength boom okay I'm pretty happy with this I'm just gonna duplicate this and change out the file with terrain B the green stuff and terrain a the white stuff I'm planning on building some kind of Mining facility and I imagine the Black Rock to be the core bedrock and then the green rock to be the crystal-like structures they're mining now I can duplicate my dark Rock and start moving it around but to get a bit more variation I want to modify the plane itself so I will go ahead and apply the displacement modifier on this plane and now by clicking tab with the plane selected I can enter edit mode edit mode is the place where you can actually edit the vertices edges and faces of a mesh well what I want to do is very simple I want to turn on soft selection by pressing oh select a point of the mesh scaling up the radius by scrolling the mouse wheel and now I can press G to grab it and move it along an axis just like we did with the Optics this is a super fast way to give us a lot of variation to play with this simple soft selection technique and just moving stuff around I can iterate My Scene really fast I did exactly the same process for the green stuff to form it into crystal-like Rifts in the Rocks cool I'm more or less done with the environment for now let's start populating the scene with some assets from the kit I've been eyeing out this terraformer right here it looks quite striking and I think it would be really great for my scene so we could just copy the asset into the other scene but that would get very heavy quickly so instead I'm going to create instances for some of this stuff it's super simple and it also helps organize your scene so all the kit assets have this little transform below this is where everything is parented too by selecting it and heading over to the outliner we can right click it and choose select hierarchy this selects everything that is a child of this transform then we can press M to make a new collection basically a group for stuff and by right clicking on this collection and hitting instance to scene we then get a copy of the stuff in our scene but this copy is super fast and performant so then we can simply copy on Ctrl C head over to the other scene and paste with Ctrl V and now we got our generator in our new terrain awesome and then we could just do that with all the other stuff we also need I'm just starting with the big pieces from the kit to plan out the area and then I'm going to fill out the details later I think this is the time where you can really experiment with what you're trying to make in many ways I see this process more like playing than anything else and because the kits are so detailed they help kick-start the imagination I'm thinking for me I want some kind of circular base with a centerpiece in the middle and I think this Tower structure can be the focal point and then now my job is just to place smaller structures around to bring in some noise and really emphasize the terraformer in the middle to make your environment stand out it's generally good to have a sense of contrast having something big and impressive surrounded by smaller structures really makes it stand out from everything else I definitely think this part is the most fun and you can really just try out a bunch of different stuff in general I try to keep everything in a somewhat similar scale by this I mean that I always imagine people walking around in the space I make sure they can get to where they need to go and so on so if they need walk Bridges special buildings or vehicles I can place them in a way that fits my idea I think a good strategy for making your environment is making it almost like at a level in a game a place where you could walk around then when we have that down we can start filming it like a photographer go explore and find a good shot in our settlement I think a really awesome part of this kit is its modularity kit bash has packed a bunch of settlement pieces in it and you can essentially combine them to create even more elaborate structures okay so to give our scene some life I think it's time to start adding some lighting the best way to get a lot of Fidelity in lighting is through using an hdri hdri's are high resolution environment maps that can really light up are seen like nothing else they're usually captured from The Real World and they can really give some realistic illumination to our scene to get free hdris I recommend going over to polyhaven they have tons of awesome ones to pick from and I think I'm gonna get this one and then hit download then in blender I'm gonna jump over to the shading workspace here we have this new window with materials and then I'm gonna switch it over from object to world then inside the window I'm going to hit shift a and search for an environment texture node and plug it into the background Shader then I'm going to hit open and locate my hdri that I downloaded before and then I'm gonna switch over to the rendered view right up here also in blender when you want to render more realistic scenes you probably want to be using Cycles so let's go over to the render panel and switch over to using Cycles as our render engine instead and make sure to select GPU compute if you have a good GPU if that option isn't available just check your blender preferences under system now everything starts looking really interesting the light just Falls onto the scene in a totally different way the assets start looking real like you could actually grab them okay to get some variation on our hdri it would be great if we had the ability to rotate it so once again let's hit shift a and search for a texture coordinate node okay we got that one then let's hit shift a again and search for a mapping node then we plug the texture coordinate into the mapping nodes vector and then the mapping node into the vector of the environment texture node Now by going to the set rotation on the mapping node we can make the HDI spin around this is super awesome for quickly testing out different lighting for your shot just by using one hdri and you could always try other ones as well if you want even more control then a great thing to do is getting a light source specifically a sunlight so in our scene we can hit shift a and select a sunlight this will cast lots of light on our scene from One Direction and by rotating it around we get so much control over the shadows and the look of our scene ninety percent of the time my lighting is just a sunlight and an hdri the HDI fills up the color in the shadows and the sunlight is well you know the sun you can also change the color of the Sun by heading over to its light properties panel go to the color and just pick you know something for myself I'm looking for something in the afternoon so my color is going to be a bit warmer like you know an orange this is one of the best parts of the process seeing the scene come together and then lighting it all up is just so rewarding okay we have managed to bring some light into our scene but I think it's time to get an angle camera to shoot from so I will jump back to the normal viewport shading and then once again we'll use our trusty shift a menu but this time we're going to create a camera to actually see through the selected camera you can hit Ctrl plus numpad 0 and now we're looking through the camera and then you can start rotating the camera using your hotkeys and so on to get a different view but there's a much better way if you press n this little panel called the end panel opens up and over here there's a setting called lock camera to view when this is enabled you can control the camera as if though you were navigating in the scene like normal neat now we just gotta find a cool angle this is kind of like traveling through a world of your own making which is kind of fun I'm definitely getting that Explorer's Vibe now which is awesome and when you find a good spot you can just jump over to the render view again to see it if it doesn't look quite right then you might have to adjust your settings up here and make sure scene lines and scene world are both on this is starting to get really awesome having a camera also means we can play around with the focal length which gives us drastically different looks sometimes it does happen that you'll get this effect where the geometry starts cutting off through the camera this usually means that you have to adjust your clipping distance a tiny bit okay we have spent some time adjusting our cameras and our lights a tiny bit and I think now is a good time to get in some of that Last Detail the kit comes with all these smaller detailed assets like cargo and some kinds of storage and it also has this little truck that can help give some action to the scene okay I think I'm about Happy with my shot and my setup now and I think I'm ready to get out a final shot to actually render out a final image I think we can adjust the render settings a bit firstly let's adjust the samples and the denoise higher samples means higher quality but also means longer render times but this is where the denoiser can be really effectful I found that something like 128 samples and with denoiser turned on gives me quite good results then we could also adjust the actual output format of our image you could do something like a wide cinemascope or something like a square format for social media and to actually get your render out you can simply hit F12 and the render will start nice looks awesome but if you ever wanted to switch out the background with something else then it would be nice to have that separated luckily there is a really nice feature down here in the render settings under film called transparent when we turn that on and render we get it without the background awesome okay let's save out the image as a PNG and then we can bring it all into something like Photoshop where we can give it those final adjustments in Photoshop we can bring in a different background add some smoke and dust adjust the colors or add special effects like these ship boosters to Aid your process in Photoshop you can always log into some of the more advanced options like using render passes from blender they are a great way to give you some selections and quick masks I can especially recommend the missed pass it can really help create a sense of atmosphere and it's a really big part of getting scale looking right and here we have the final image and I think it all turned out pretty cool in the end well that's pretty much it for this tutorial hope you learned something and thanks for watching

Channel: KitBash3D

Views: 60,998

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Id: h37WbNyhuk4

Length: 17min 42sec (1062 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 11 2022