How I created this fantasy artwork using Blender

welcome back everyone to a new video on this channel in today's tutorial i'll be showing you how to create this epic fantasy landscape in blender yeah it's all about quickly visualizing your ideas in blender especially landscapes we'll take a look at the lighting and shading phase especially which are very important and the post-production will be done in photoshop it is packed full to the top with tips you might never have heard about so stay tuned have fun and let's get started approaching such a complex project um with your idea in your mind and the reference gathered um the first thing i would do is block out the scene with primitive topology with cubes spheres planes and to really get a feeling for the scene you will create to simply get the rough perspective the camera placement the placement of different objects and i even go so far and add a bit of lighting in the scene to get the rough composition and where i want everything to be in the final image before i focus in too much on the details and that's exactly what i'm doing here i'm adding in a camera changing its aspect ratio placing a floor and changing the camera placement in proportion to that at this stage it's a bit difficult to get a right sense of scale and proportion which is why i'm adding this image of a hiker i found online and extracted from this image and i'm using the images as planes add-on i add a new images as plain and choose my transparent um png in this case and let's have a look at this in the rendered view i'm gonna place this transparent image of this um hiker right in the center of the scene and this will set my scale with that i now am able to see right how large should all the other elements be in relation to my um hiker and that's very important because especially in the beginning stages it's important to focus purely on proportion and not on um not on any details whatsoever and that's what i'm gonna do here i have um this idea of these pillars in my head and i want to create these ancient old pillars and i'm placing uh simply a few boxes um which i scaled up on the z-axis right in the scene yeah now i'm placing them where it feels right um i'm carrying only on the placement of these boxes i'm not worrying about any details whatsoever i like to um yeah work a bit on the camera um next uh i change the aspect ratio and work a bit with the focal length which is an important tool to change a perspective with these settings i try to stay as close to reality as possible to get the best image out of camera now the idea is that there should be a large entrance right behind the last two pillars right in the center and there should be a large bright light shining in from behind i'm doing that by adding a plane scaling it up on the z-axis and placing it right behind these last two pillars and this will be my light emitter later on as i'm now going to edit it in the shader editor let's um have a look at it in rendered view and create a new material i call it emission and simply remove the default principle shader and replace it with a simple emission shader and increase its strength to really illuminate the scene since this is our main light i like to play around with the color management in blender and add in a bit more contrast right from the start since renders right out of the box lack a bit of contrast most of the time and i changed the world background to nearly black but not totally so you can see a bit of detail right in the front so now that we've blocked out our scene let's look at the details there's a lot a lot to talk about there and let's first have a look at our floor which is basically kind of like this rocky sea landscape and this was created by simply enabling the ant landscape add-on and shift a let's add in a landscape and now let's choose right out of the presets the large terrain preset which creates this very large large rocky surface i would recommend to increase the resolution of this surface to get a higher higher quality and as you see me doing here i'm rotating scaling and transforming the floor i even duplicate it and place it so that it looks good in the final image with proportional editing i submerge some of it under the water and these little lakes are created by that let's join these these geometries together and now i'm gonna show you a little trick to reduce topology let's select with box select everything that's visible in our camera view press ctrl i invert it and delete everything that is selected in this case this is an easy way to get rid of everything you do not see in your final image and this reduces render times by a bit now let's select our lake um and give it a new material in this material i'm gonna reduce is its roughness since it's a lake and should be a bit more reflective and i also turn on transmission with a bit of transmission roughness get kind of this water like material next up are these rocky mountain-like structures which are placed between our pillars um as you might have guessed these are a and t landscapes as well so let's shift a and add in a landscape and there's already a built-in preset for a use case like this which is the cliff preset simply added in play a bit with resolution and now it's just the same as with our floor let's go right into the camera view and now it's just placing them creatively to get a good looking composition i place two of them right in front um to frame the image these will be hidden in darkness later on and this will really lead the eye into the center i added in a structure right between the light and the last two pillars to give it a sense of depth and this really enhances this feeling um now let's add an and yet another landscape um you already know that process by now uh which will be a rock yes there is a rock preset in ant landscapes didn't know that um uh yeah i would uh reduce the resolution to a lower number like 100 for example because it is not necessary that this rock has such many details because it's just place around the scene to break up break up some of these details and um yeah that's exactly what i'm gonna do now let's scale it down uh always have a look at it from the camera perspective because this is what you will be seeing in the final image and place it around your scene um you could of course use different uh different rocks to get a bit more variation but i think that's not really necessary um just rotate it scale it up and nobody will ever notice so now let's have a look at these larger stone pillars because they are not simply cubes they are indeed um rocks like structures or at least something in this case i'm not very good at sculpting but i think it is enough for this effect let's have a look at how to create this kind of effect let's pick out one of these pillars right here and have a look at it in isolated view first thing before you're sculpting anything is you need to add in the necessary topology and that's what i'm gonna do with edge loops right from all three sides and uh yeah apply the changes and the the scaling for very important so you get the right proportions let's add in a multi-resolution modifier and subdivide your mesh a lot of times and of course shaded smooth and then let's start sculpting by firstly making these edges a bit sharper with the pinch tool and i try to do this with this line drawing option which gives me this cool opportunity to draw them a bit irregular and now let's add in a few layers and a bit of texture to our own mesh and i have really no idea what i'm doing here yeah of course you could orient yourself at the real references of stone you can use even stone brushes but i'm adding creases i'm sharpening the edges i'm adding layers with the clay strips tool and yeah i'm playing a bit around just to get a basic texture these objects are not highlighted in any way you won't be able to see the details and a lot of it is achieved by a good shading yeah and that's it yeah and now i'm finalizing this piece and you go as you see here it kind of did the job quite nicely let's use this one pillar and distribute it and replace the others in the scene of course you could put in the time to make individual ones for each pillar but i get away with rotating and mirroring them and moving them on the z-axis to get a bit of variation this works in my case so now let's have a look at lighting to see in the scene this is something very important you can see here there are a lot of lights placed around the scene one spot particularly around our main character let's switch to our sample scene right here and add in a new point light which i'll be placing between the pillars have a look at it in rendered view and play a bit around with the strength and position this is only there to add a bit of highlights on these pillars because if i wouldn't have added this to the scene they would completely vanish in the blackness of the void of this scene yeah and now i'm gonna place a spotlight right around our main character to highlight it yeah it's not physically possible that there is a light there maybe it is but nobody cares it is really to highlight a bit of the main character now i'm adding in a cube which i scale to the to fit the entire scene this will be a volume and i will use this volume shader to really enhance the depth the feeling of depth in this environment and this will be enhanced in post-product production later on a bit more so let's add in a volume principle volume material connected to the volume output play a bit around with the density you have to find the right value here you can always change that and play around with the nsatopperty um to really change the way the light scatters through the scene a lot of times this makes it seem a lot darker and i combat that not with increasing our lights but with playing around with the color management right in in the scene to increase the exposure here for example and you see this adds really adds this volumetric hazy looking effect which is kind of cool now let's talk about shading where there are not a lot of textures in the scene because it's not necessary um we do most of it by the geometry and the interaction with the lights um let's have a look at the lake because um this is not only this reflective surface we created earlier on but there are these uh water ripples and this is effect is created by adding in a water texture like this one playing around with its size detail and distortion to get these kind of waves um and feeding it in right into a bump node which is set to a very very low value to really get just a hint of of water ripples on the surface and which is put into the normals normal input of our principal shader and combined with this reflective surface it gives really this impression of water a larger water body and yeah this is of course just fake and um there are no real water ripples there you could go over and do this with with displacement add in a hint of a blue uh toning right to get the this kind of yeah underwater um underwater look uh going now for our rocky surfaces i used a texture you could do this with procedural texturing i think but i use this one from textures.com which is a simple grunge texture i applied it to our mesh and connected it with a mapping node and um yeah that is that is what it looks like i used a generated output here and this is fed into multiple sockets for once there is again a bump mapping node with a larger value this time to get cool light reflections and then i used it to feed it into our main albedo color and i mixed that with a musgrave texture which got a bit of coloring with a layer ramp ramp node and i ovulate that on top of our grunge texture to give this a bit of color and this is fed right into the base color of our shader which is um yeah this final rock effect and this is used all over the place for these smaller rocks as well as for the larger mountain surfaces so pretty easy shading right there and it's a similar thing for a similar story for our pillars i used uv mapping in this case and used a similar but a different slightly different texture a grunge texture as well also from textures.com which is put again into a bump mapping node um and into our base color as well i've reduced the contrast a bit um right there and a very additional additional thing is i added in a color ramp node and connected it to the roughness input to give it kind of this wet look which is done by lifting the blacks a bit and giving this a bit more contrast um to make it kind of looking like it uh there's water dripping dripping from these old ancient pillars yeah for the render settings i'm using a blender 3.0 alpha which contains cycles x which makes it very fast to render and i yeah decrease the noise a threshold to really get a clean image you can enable denoising as well and applied a bit around with them yeah with the color management in the scene um to give it a color profile which i can work with more easily right from the start and to get a better sense of what the final image looks like and now let's render it for me at least post processing is one of the most interesting and creative parts of this whole process because it really brings your image to life let's look at each layer from the bottom below here i've created given it some glow and this glow especially is created by a very simple technique for that let's add in a new layer and combine all layers to this one convert it to a smart object object and press ctrl l to adjust the levels and increase the blacks a bit to only limit our effects to our lightest parts with a gaussian blur now gonna blur out this image change its blending mode to screen or lighten or soft light whatever fits your scene and change the settings afterwards and with that you can see you can really give this a cool glowing effect which you wouldn't be able to achieve in a blender otherwise i just remove it from the parts where i don't want it to appear and yeah that's how you can create such a cool glow effect i added a few more glows right here by simply drawing them on the screen like this with a white foreground color of course and i gave it a bit of variation made some smaller ones some larger to give it some sense of volume and texture and then again reduce the opacity quite a bit now there i added in a few details because i was feeling like there this image is a bit lacking a bit of detail right around this bottom floor i grabbed this stock photo from elements.envato.com and placed it right on the scene i did some changes to it for example i changed the mode from normal to overlay and added a few adjustments for example i increased the contrast quite a bit and removed all colors from the image to make it fit better into the scene and with a layer mask i masked out everything that i didn't want to ex appear and yeah this is what i added there i tweaked some um coloring and lighting issues um uh right around there and as you can see here i added in a lot of haze and if you focus on the bottom part of the image i drew a black spot right where this water surface was now here i added in some cloud effects some volumetric haze which i did by using a cloud brush and i'm now going to show you how to get kind of this effect which is pretty cool it adds a lot of depth and volume this is basically the story i'm telling all over again it's all about creating depth and um i simply drew um again a circle um with a brush and i changed this to overlay added in a layer mask and removed it um where it is obstructed by the pillars in this case this is very important that you do that to really um get this these layers these layers of smoke or dust or haze whatever this is and you can do this with a simple simple brush like this one simple circular brush but i did some with a cloud brush i found online and there a lot of them for free just google for it and you find some let's um place such a brush right here and you can do the same trick as we did earlier with that change its overlay mode change the opacity and draw with a layer mask wherever you want it to appear you can even use it for some haze on the floor by um simply transforming it so that it looks kind of more like it is in this perspective and yeah here i added in some more contrast and right here a bit more of haze variation especially a bit smaller details in this case i drew a darker spot around this pillar to um because i felt it like it was a bit too prominent in this case in this layer i added in some color which i simply drew on with a brush and changed its overlay and opacity um and added a bit of blue and yeah kind of a yellow orange color to get a bit of color contrast which are now going to enhance with the color grading i do this with color lookup tables i place a lot of them right up top each other and change their blending modes opacities and their main settings and this is a very cool and quick way to get very quickly get a cool looks in blender in photoshop which is very easy because i really like this look i'm now going to add in some micro contrast with a high pass filter let me show you how to do this create a new layer and combine everything onto this layer go to filter other and high pass choose a rather low value like this one change the blend mode to soft light or to overlay whatever fits your needs reduce the opacity and this will give your image a bit of micro contrast which is really cool now in this curves adjustments i gave it a kind of a filmic looks with a lid by lifting the blacks a bit but keeping the midpoint where it is and this creates this very cool filmic look which i enjoy in these kind of renders next layer i used camera raw filter to bring out really the details and the colors in this image um let me show you what i did there let's again create a new new layer go to camera raw filter and play a bit round with the settings i felt like this scene is a bit warmer because um there's this warm light coming right around from the outside and um i played around with the lightness lighting shadows with the contrast in fact which works really cool here is to reduce the clarity um to give it a kind of a softer look and to remove this digital edge as it's often called from these images play a bit around with the vibrance and saturation and let's do a bit of noise reduction and sharpness because i use the un-denoised render noisy render right out of blender and now let's add in a bit more blue to the shadows and a bit more orange to the highlights to really get this color contrast of these complementary colors going maybe add in a slight vignette but not overdo it with that that's that's a step i oftentimes do right before the end of my final composition to give it really the last little bit of a little bit of kick now in the next step i added in a bit of lightness right around this center part here to give it a bit more bit brighter appearance since i thought this was it was a bit too too dim and in this case i drew a shadow right around our main character because i felt like this was missing a bit as well since there is a such a strong light coming right from the front um you can't really see the shadows so i painted in it in manually just create a new layer choose a brush and paint with black colors something that kind of looks like a shadow it doesn't need to be exact right here since we're gonna since we're gonna make this a lot less visible change its overlay mode to multiply multiply reduce its strength and with a with a black brush paint a layer mask to remove to remove the last part of it so it's just right beneath him standing there and yeah um i did some final adjustments to the light right in our exit and added in a bit of haze um especially depth haze so the deeper you go in an image the hazier it normally gets i did this by adding in a new adjustment layer and in this levels adjustment i increased the blacks and you can decrease the highlights as well to remove the contrast basically in the in this part of the image and with a layer mask i inverted it and painted it in wherever i wanted it to be be aware that you need to reduce the opacity of our layer mask as you get closer to the camera since it's a lot less stronger right there and to hide any parts that should be occluded by the pillars and that was a bit strong for my taste so i changed it a bit later on and reduced its opacity and this really got again a feeling up of depth which wasn't there before and i finally added in back uh some detail of these rocks right in the background just overlaid the original rock texture right here with a layer mask with a set to luminosity and since it's it was missing some color i drew in a bit of orange on top of that and changed its overlay mode to color and this blended beautifully into final image since i thought um this was very important because it's a very cool effect yeah and that's everything i did to the image yeah and let's have a look again at the before and after it's amazing what you can do with just a few few minutes of work yeah that's it thanks for watching i hope you enjoyed it and have learned something um if you want to download the project finds you can do so in the description below and leave a like and maybe consider subscribing this would really help me out thanks for watching and see you next time [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Rescan

Views: 93,822

Keywords: blender, blender tutorial, blender environment, blender fantasy, blender quick, how to create fantasy art in blender, fantasy artwork, 3D matte painting, 3D landscape blender, blender 3.0, blender cycles x, blender how to, blender create, blender art, blender ancient, blender concept art, blender fantasy concept

Id: PwjMWaCe5Rs

Length: 26min 41sec (1601 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 21 2021