How I Created an Epic 3D Fantasy World in only 3 Days

hey cg geek i challenge you personally i challenge you a challenge well consider your challenge accepted clinton jones so here's what's going on there's an epic 3d contest going on right now it's called alternate realities and it's being hosted by clint former member of quarter additionally he does his own channel with all kinds of cool 3d stuff and this is involving all 3d artists across the world using any different platform all you have to do is create an epic 3d world using a very simple template so most people have 30 days to complete this render challenge you might call it but the problem is i have a lot of projects going on right now and so i have approximately well maybe three days to complete this but i'll do my best and we'll see what the coolest thing i can create within a few days is now for this video project i've partnered with origin pc and nvidia studio they've built an incredible pc custom tailored for this kind of heavy advanced 3d workflow as you can see the people over at origin pc really know what they're doing and they built one of the coolest pcs i've ever seen with a ton of attention put to detail i know for a lot of you building your own custom pc can be really scary because you need a lot of know-how plus you need to keep up to date on all the latest hardware so if you want to focus more on the skills that you love doing with art and creativity or gaming leave it to the professionals at origin pc to build you an nvidia studio desktop custom tailored for your specific workflows and to fit your budget the pc i have here is perfect for what i do on the channel they've equipped it with the latest gen threadripper 3970x a 32 core processor along with nvidia's rtx 3090 with the studio drivers already installed so it's ready to go in blender it's gonna render super fast with optics so i can immediately jump into my 3d workflows now and know that i'm going to have a stable fast experience if you're in need of a new pc and want something custom built exactly for your workflows check out origin pc with the link in the description and just a quick note i'm removing myself from being eligible to win this contest there's a lot of incredible prizes that i'm already lucky enough to have access to so i don't want to take those from someone that could benefit from them more not that i would win anyways because there's going to be some amazing entries that i probably can't compete with but just putting that out there i won't be winning so now that we know that we don't have like any time at all we have to jump right straight into it my idea for this project was sort of a fantasy whoa lighting's getting kind of dark kind of spooky come on turn the lights back on god so my idea for this project was sort of a fantasy world with a bunch of floating islands just like with their own gravity in the background of the scene thought that would be pretty cool so as always what i first did is jumped on the internet and grabbed a reference from everywhere i could find it thrown it all into one file so i could reference it easily on a separate screen as i'm creating my world and then i just started blocking out the shapes of where i sort of imagined these being before i put much detail into it i want to make sure that the layout is going to kind of work the way i imagined it so once i was happy with some of the placements for these floating islands i need to start actually creating some high resolution geometry so my idea for this was actually to use blender's mountain landscape generator by enabling that in the add-ons and then i tweaked these settings to kind of be the inverse of a mountain so i had a chunk of earth more or less hanging down than coming up i was able to play around with these settings and make a preset that looked pretty cool for some random chunks of earth so i started creating variations of these chunks of earth until i had a variety of them to choose from and then i started placing them in my scene as floating islands i also had to generate a second landscape then for the top of the island and then do my best to sort of just cut them out roughly to match the same shape it's not very pretty if you get close but these are distant islands and i don't have time to be pretty so we just went ahead with whatever worked then i needed some materials for these mountains i wanted a material that was really sort of earthy with like rocks and roots and stuff that was just like pulled out of the ground and it's now its own floating planet with its own gravity so what i did is i started using pbr materials from ccotextures.com an awesome place for free textures by the way and i would just combine these different pvr materials using the pointiness node as a mix factor between two of them this would allow me to have rocks on the edges more sharp points of the mesh and dirt sort of tucked away in the crevices more or less i also then used the ambient occlusion node in cycles to create another mask to add in another layer of rock just for some more variation on these hanging planets but now i was going to need a lot of detail in this scene and i wasn't going to have the time to model it by hand so i turned to photo scanning something i've done a few times on the channel and what some of you guys might not know is with the latest iphone there is a lidar scanner on the back of it and using this it's really easy to create 3d scans with just your phone in a matter of seconds so with my phone and camera in hand i set out on a quick journey to find some cool vegetation and rocks to photo scan for this scene so i used the free 3d scanner app off the app store and essentially all you have to do is slowly walk around your object while basically recording a video in the app and it's capturing all of the geometry data along with the textures and stuff for you and processes it all right on the phone so it's really handy for those quick and dirty scans i also brought my dslr camera though for the higher resolution photo scans that would be used in the foreground closer to the camera where i need more detail in these but after a while of photo scanning weird rocks and tree thingies i started getting eaten alive by bugs and started questioning my sanity yeah it was not pretty so something had to happen and it was no more photo scanning but all in all i think it was a successful trip as i got some good data that would work well for photo scanning and day two was to process all of that data that we got now so i was using multiple pieces of software to process these photo scans starting with mushroom the free open source option for photo scanning it's really just as simple as dragging your images into the photo scanning app and clicking go if you just want the default settings which are actually quite good now for scanning is quite resource heavy on a computer so luckily with the 32 core threadripper cpu there and the rtx 3090 it was gonna process these things really fast and actually because you have a super computer you might as well put it to the test so i also fired up reality capture and started photo scanning assets through that application at the same time so i was processing two photo scans at once and of course a screen through these and processed them extremely fast so after a little bit of cleanup data though you can see that we actually got some pretty cool photo scans here now in blender the ones captured with the iphone should work well for the distant models and maybe particle systems and the more high resolution ones captured with the dslr are definitely going to be the ones i put close to the camera but with these photo scans now i can start placing objects in my scene kind of seeing where they fit well to frame the shot the way i sort of imagined it and just going about placing these photo scans and rotating them at different angles to try and make it seem like i'm not using the same photo scanned assets over and over again which i totally was until i felt like i had a pretty cool rocky looking terrain that would work well for a floating island ground some of the roots then that a photoscan that looked actually really cool and i was impressed with how well reality capture photoscan is i'm going to have to say that as good as mushroom is for free it's amazing i think reality capture is about 10 to maybe 15 better at processing photo scans like this we just captured way more detail than i even expected it to so it was pretty cool i was able to use some of the tree roots that i photo scanned as a particle system on some of these floating islands adding this particle system along with some weight painting to put them right in the crevices it just gave it more of an organic look where it actually looked like a chunk of dirt that was just hanging there in the sky with like roots hanging out and thought it was kind of cool i guess so starting with particles on literally everything i don't think you could ever overdo particle systems when you're creating a nature scene because the more assets you keep throwing at your scene the better it's gonna look i'm starting with some grass assets that i made actually back in my bob ross 3d world where i just modeled some grass blades and created a few assets for grass i added a particle system to my ground using these grass assets and then i just painted in with the weight paint mode where i wanted them i was kind of using the grass actually to hide all of the mistakes that you can see in certain areas on the photo scans just making it blend better into the ground mesh so i went ahead and i used some of the rock photo scans then that i captured with my phone as another particle system to give it sort of that real rocky mountainous looking landscape now at this point i needed my lighting i ended up trying a million different hdrs for lighting on the scene just until i finally found that one that i felt like fit the mood for the scene and i was getting these from hdr haven the coolest place online for hdrs by the way so if you're ever creating a scene in 3d and you're having difficulties with it try a different hdr because it might sort of change the entire perspective you have on the scene it's really important [Music] now day three was pretty much just pure panic because there was a lot to get done not a lot of time to do it now we needed some trees and because this was a fantasy world i didn't want just all basic trees so i created some pink and purple trees because that's fantasy right right that's that's fantasy right to create these trees i use the sapling add-on built into blender tweet being tweaking not twerking tweaking some of the settings in the add-on to even more of a fantasy sort of hanging tree that maybe isn't blossom or maybe it just has purple leaves who really knows and then i added some really big leaves and the reason i added really big leaves is because i was actually going to use a branch as a texture because this will render a whole lot faster than individual leaves and and then i uh just put it in the scene as you can see like right there i don't know what i'm saying now i'm on my like last day that i have to spend on this project i still have a naked character so i'm not panicking but i definitely don't have time to create a complete character from scratch at this point so luckily i was able to do a little searching online and find a miximo character that would work okay for the scene sort of like a tomb raider like looking character that would kind of fit in a fantasy world so i was able to take that model and adjust the rig that came with the scene to fit the new character and mapped the new data to that messing with the animation just a little bit with the arms and a little head glance to check out those cool islands in the background then i wanted to add a little extra life to the character so using some weight prints i created a new group for a cloth simulation which i was able to then use the fabric simulator and blender to add a little bit of extra movement to the character's clothing and hair to make it seem a little bit more alive and like there was maybe higher winds up here on this epic fantasy island chunk of ground but at this point i was thinking would it be like really cool if there was like an epic waterfall coming down off one of these floating islands in the background and so i thought maybe i could like somehow simulate that or do some advanced smoke stimulation and then i realized i was on my last day and i had not a chance of doing that so i turned to a method that i used in the past it actually works really great and it's super cheaty but i love it so i did it anyways and that's fine some epic video footage of one of the coolest waterfalls in the world this one is angel falls and then taking that into premiere and crushing the black so i can create a mask of just that falling water then i could just import that into blender as an animated sequence on a plane and i just use that as a mask to mix some translucency and diffuse materials together along with a little glossy to get what looks like some falling water also a little bit of bump mapping to make it look less flat and it was actually pretty cool looking then in the background of my scene and now we needed some volume metrics now volumetrics are really slow to render in 3d graphics unless you have a super computer as we happen to have here and with the nvidia rtx 3090 volumetric rendering is accelerated greatly making a render like this possible in a short amount of time which is awesome because i wanted a lot of volume metrics in this scene so i created some fluffy little clouds using a simple shader node setup i actually copied this material from a youtuber that i saw online i think it was like cg don't matter or something i don't remember but just creating these fluffy little clouds in a basic cube i was able to then create variations of this cube and just duplicate a million of them across my scene putting them around the base of the islands to give them more of a sense of scale i also wanted some higher resolution clouds though so i used another cheating method that i've used in the past and that's find some alpha masked clouds online and i use these again as a mask similar to the water material on a plane so i was able to use this as a black and white image to mix in some translucency along with transparency to make such a fading sort of more detailed cloud that i could then add a little bit of geometry to using a displacement modifier and then placing these on a plane with a particle system i could just duplicate that plane and add more of these sort of distant more detailed clouds in front of the islands to add a little bit of extra spice to the sand i then wanted some blossoms sort of flying around the scene and sitting on the floor to add more that fantasy aspect to the scene so what i did is i found a flower texture from textures.com this is really cool because all the geometry is using just a displacement map so i was able to just cut out these flowers off of this plane and with the material slapped on it with a little bit of displacement in cycles i was able to add the geometry right to it without having to do any modeling then you guessed it was just another particle system to throw these all around the trees and on some of my photo scan assets to make it look more organic and blend everything together and then i also did sort of a cool curvature windy thing of floating blossom leaves because fantasy so then i started thinking what can i do to really just push this scene over the edge for extra detail because clint said that detail is important in this contest so of course i grabbed a texture of a fly and i created a 3d model of this fly i zoomed in real close on my floating island and i stuck that fly right on one of those hanging roots cause you know details and then i was just tweaking and throwing more details and more tweaking and throwing more details and adding little sort of hanging vines here and there and a little bit of a hanging bridge connecting two of the different islands and uh basically as much as i could fit in in as short amount of time as possible now i was thinking like what is it missing that's it more bugs so i'd comp in a little bit of extra bug footage around the character's head because we all know that bugs exist but then i really need some extra atmospheric fog for a sense of scale to the scene so i created a cube that i fit all the assets into the scene with and i gave it a very small amount of volumetric density along with some anastrophe and astrophy this just gave it that extra sense of depth and scale and is really important for a scene like this volumetrics can be slow but when you have a stupid computer with optics rendering you just throw all of the stuff at it and it can handle it but now it was time to render so i enabled a little bit of subtle motion blur not going too crazy with this but just as the camera is moving a little bit of motion blur adds a little bit of realism along with a little bit of depth of field to the camera not too much again because you don't want the scene to seem small but as long as you have it there just a touch it will seem a little bit more realistic now 1080 hd is the minimum requirement for rendering the scene for the contest but we kind of have a super computer so 4k maybe you know what forget it go big and go home we're rendering this at 8k with some optics denoising and we can only get away with this because of course we're rendering it on that nvidia studio rdx 3090. a quick tip that i learned a while ago is when you're using denoising like optics denoising in blender it is better to go more resolution and less samples because you get a lot more detail in your scene as the ai denoiser has more information to work with so cut your samples in half if you have to and boost the resolution up higher for the best results so rendering this at 8k took about 13 and a half minutes or so per scene but after slapping on a sick looking color grade in adobe premiere the scene was the finally was finally completed the scene was finally completed we were finally finished it was done it was ready to go and so here is what we did this is a really fun project to do i've already been seeing a ton of incredible entries but these contests are amazing and actually something i've thought about doing on the channel if you guys think i should host one myself let me know because these things really encourage artists to do things out of their comfort zone create something really cool and like this is something i would have probably never created if it wasn't for the contest so thanks clint for hosting the contest i love seeing the whole 3d community coming together online to create something awesome and thanks again to origin pc for building an nvidia studio custom built pc super epic looking is going to look amazing on my desk back there and it's going to create projects so much faster so i'm excited to continue using it but that's gonna do it for me guys hope you enjoyed the video subscribe for more fun and i'll see you when i'm done [Music] you

Channel: CG Geek

Views: 1,052,666

Keywords: Blender, fantasy, Pwnisher, Alternate Realities, Challenge, Animation, 3D world, Unreal 5, Realistic, 3D graphics, 3D software, How to, Tutorial

Id: kQ0x0R_yHrs

Length: 16min 11sec (971 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 05 2021