HDRi Ground Projection with a Free Blender Add-On!

welcome to this new tutorial today i want to show you a really cool technique i came across a few days ago that allows you to project any hdri onto a ground let me show you okay so the first thing we need to do is go to github and download the lilly surface scrapper add-on this is free and you can just download it from this site i leave the link to it in the video description and just go to code download zip and save the zip file on your computer then you can go into blender edit open the preferences go to the add-ons tab and click on install to install the add-on search for your zip file select it and click on install add-on i've already done this so um i'm just gonna search for the lilly surface scrapper add-on here i have it and then you need to check this little checkbox next to the name in order to enable it so we can use it now it is also important that you go to those add-on settings and enable use ground hdri since that's a feature that we're gonna use in this tutorial once you have that we are ready to go so we can close the preferences delete everything in here let me also close the timeline and the side panel and enable the screencast keys so in the bottom left corner you can now see all the shortcuts that i press all right then it's time to import in hdri let's go to the world panel and here we now have the lily surface scrapper add-on that we can use to import an hdri but as you can see we first need to save our file in order to be able to use the add-on so press ctrl s give it a name tutorial and save it anywhere on your computer now let's just close this up and open it again to refresh and lilly surface grabber is a really cool add-on to import textures and in this case also hdris from the internet really quickly so i want to download an hdri from hdrihaven.com so i just click on hdri haven and it opens the website for us you probably also already know this website here you can get a lot of high quality 360 degree hdris for free so for this i'm gonna go with this white street and all we have to do to import this with the lily surface scrapper add-on is copy this url go back into blender and click on import from clipboard now we can choose the resolution for this tutorial i'm gonna go with 4k but of course you can also go higher to 8k or 60k and you will get a higher resolution result in the end so let's click ok and now it already downloaded and imported the hdri that we selected and in order to see it i'm going to switch the viewport shading menu and enable scene world so we can see it in the background and as you can see this doesn't look like a regular hdri because it made this ground projection and it actually looks as if the ground of this hdri was in the ground of the world and this happened because in the edge in the lily surface grappler setting we enabled use ground hdri and it did this in the world node settings so let's go to the shader editor switch this to the world node and here you can see the node setup that he created and responsible for this ground projection is this node group we can tap into it and you can see that this is really complex but you can see the difference if i disable this node group this is what the hdri usually would look like and if we enable the ground projection it really looks as if this hdri had a ground all right so let's bring in a 3d object i'm gonna add a car from the traffic add-on this is a paid add-on but i think it's a really great car car library you can get all of those high quality models uh bicycles motorcycles and a lot of other vehicles i leave a link to it in the description but you you really don't need this add-on for this tutorial you could do this with any other 3d object and it would work just just as fine yeah so i'm gonna go with this one click on ok and import it and now you can see that it really looks as if this car was placed on the street and if we compare this with uh with what the normal hdri looks like here it doesn't look at all as if the car was on the street but once we use this ground projection um this looks really realistic i want to have this side in the background so i rotate the car and we also need to scale it up a bit more yeah i think that's better better then let's also bring in the camera shift a choose the camera and i use the shortcut ctrl alt 0 to place the camera on the view bring it down a bit r x x to rotate it along the local x axis so i can move it up and down then i want to press g and the middle mouse button to move back a bit and then go to the camera settings and increase the focal length maybe bring the camera up a bit and rotate it down yeah i think that looks pretty good so i want to render this in cycles so make sure that your render engine is set to cycles and let's also enable adaptive sampling and switch to the render preview now the really cool thing about this method is that we have a realistic background a realistic round and also get the correct reflections in the car itself as you can see on the side here in the windshield and in the windows but what is missing are the realistic shadows so let's add a plane shift a mesh plane scale this up and now as you can see we have the shadows on the plane but we don't want the plane to be visible so let's go to the object properties and under visibility enable the shadow catcher so now we can only see the shadow of the plane but not the plane itself the only problem left is that that the plane is visible in the what's it called in the reflections of the car so in order to get rid of this we also need to disable the array visibility for the glossy channel and now this looks perfect so i think this is pretty good so we are ready to render let's go to the render settings um i'm gonna render this with let's say 500 samples so let's go to the rendering tab and press f12 to start the render and so here is our final result i think it came out really good and i'm pretty happy with it but as you can see the background hdri is really pixelated this is because i only use the 4k version if you would use the 8k or 16k version this would look much better so you can do this if you are using this technique for any of your projects otherwise i think this is extremely cool and i'm a big fan of this technique and i highly recommend you to check out the lily surface grappler add-on and as i already mentioned the link to it is in the video description that's it for this video thank you for watching until the end if you like the videos i produce please consider supporting blender daily on patreon and enable me to further create content like this i am nick from blender daily see you in the next one

Channel: Nik Kottmann

Views: 72,603

Keywords: HDRi Ground Projection with a Free Blender Add-On!, BLENDER DAILY, blender, blender 3d, blender tutorial, tutorial, ground projection, hdri projection, ground, shadow, realistic, reflection, hdri, 360, lily surface scraper, add-on, free add on, hdrihaven, free, hdri maker 2.0, hdri maker, hdr, project hdri on ground, how to, ground plane, plane, shadow catcher, traffiq, blender add-on, ground projection blender, projection, panorama, backplate, render, blender projection, floor, floor projection

Id: xMR8_p_bb_E

Length: 9min 22sec (562 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 25 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/blenderdaily]

The free Lily Surface Scraper add-on for Blender has a really interesting feature to make ground projections with HDR environment maps. In this video I'll demonstrate step by step how to use this technique to create stunning renders!