How I Easily Made a Castle + Landscape in Blender

okay so in this one I'm just going to do my best to break down this render here that I made a few days ago and just kind of show you how I put this together in as simple of a way as I can and kind of break things down into their individual pieces and show you some tools that made this super easy and um yeah it looks pretty complex when you look at it all at once but I'll do my best to just make everything easy to understand and easy to follow so just a quick disclaimer this one like most of my videos have focused around topics that are you know easy to follow if even if you don't have a good computer and even if you don't have expensive add-ons or tools or software but in this one like especially for the the landscape and the scattering there are some pricier add-ons that I've used that I've just they've made the process so much easier and faster and you do kind of need a good computer for this kind of stuff so it's a bit more of an advanced one but I even if you can't use all that stuff I still think there's uh lots of cool tips you can follow and pick up on and use in this video so let me start with the castle because this is like the main focus here this big ginormous Castle so I'll try to break that down um and that you know anyone can follow this this is just simple stuff when I break it down to its core fundamental level so what I've done here is I've just taken that castle from that scene I'll show you the actual blend file later but what I've done is just taking that castle I pended it so like taking the model moved it all over to a new empty file and that'll just make it really easy to break this down so this looks kind of crazy at first because it's just chaos and hectic and like a lot of stuff happening but let's look at what's actually going on here so this is the castle and if I wrote it to the back side the first thing you'll notice is it doesn't hold up from any angle at all except for where the camera sees it from the render so that right there uh just that one thing actually makes this you know might make this a lot easier um like I think your perception of how hard this is a lot like easier to deal with because you don't actually have to make a fully functional thing it's just like there's pieces there's things that are like floating in here and like there's no floor and like it's just super messy from all angles except for right where the camera happens to be seeing it so that's one thing that immediately makes this way easier and then the nice thing is I didn't model all of this in this file what I did to make this was from an old artwork I'll find the down showed right here this one I actually modeled all these pieces of a castle underground put them together here what I did for this one is I just took that just appended that entire thing into the new file and then rearranged and kind of took chunks of those pieces and stacked them on top of each other to create an even bigger castle and I kind of just rearranged the pieces and added them kind of like use them as Lego pieces almost and created like a new Lego thing based off of those old pieces if that makes sense so right here let me just break this down even further so this is like a lot of stuff happening let's just go a level deeper and a level simpler I mean and like really break this down to its like core fundamental pieces so this right here if you notice if I click around the main Castle there are these chunks of stuff that are getting highlighted are all just um like pieces that I've kind of slapped together from that other project and so if I look at one of these here it's all kind of duplicates of mostly this there's a few other pieces of like variations and a couple other models I threw on top but most of it is just this piece right here so I don't even this right here might seem like overwhelming for some people like it might seem very complex so I'll break this down even further but I just want to show you what this is first of all it's kind of if you notice here the same couple of pieces just duplicated a bunch of times so like if you look on the corner right here this thing like this side pillar is duplicated like a ton of like one two three four five like a a bunch of times around the edge of this thing it's duplicated um it's even like this piece right here is duplicated again onto the inside like four times and then it's kind of just a variation of it duplicate it again onto the bigger one just scaled up it's kind of the same piece but it's just got like I swapped a couple different components at the top just for you know a bit more variation but really it's that same almost the exact same fundamental piece duplicated a ton of times um you can see one's floating here I'm not sure what's going on there just the same fundamental piece duplicated a ton of times with a little bit of variation added here and there and that is giving kind of the illusion of all this complexity and then what I did is just added Walls by just adding a cube and like stretching that out and then slapping on some more archways I didn't even really do a great job like there's two here there's only one here and it doesn't even go all the way down and like it's pretty messy um but you know it works for something far away and so this is my strategy a lot of the time for creating complex structures like this is you take the same like singular piece that you've made or found you duplicate it a bunch of times and then you take like basic geometry and kind of connect things up kind of connect things up with like adding in models here and there or like throw on uh just different variations different variations in the in the geometry so like this wall is kind of like breaking up the pattern and adding an interesting layer on top of things so it doesn't look the exact same but really if you look closely it's kind of just the same pillar duplicated 18 times you know let's go a level even simpler and break down one of those individual pillars that's kind of used a ton of times here so I've uh I can do this for crashing uh okay we're good so let's look at yeah let's look at one of those pillars so this is that main pillar that kind of got duplicated a ton of times around here um or actually it's not it's one of the variations of it but it's pretty similar so it's going to work here so this is it right here I'll just isolate this and you can see if I go to solid it's just you know it still looks somewhat complex um so let's I'm going to keep breaking the sound to a very fundamental shapes here but it's this right here um yeah not much to say about this just like you know this these sections down here I like made one floor and duplicated it a bunch of times upwards I made one like variation roof thing at the top and then let's go a level even simpler so I split that into two just for this is all just for this demonstration I didn't do this in the actual render so I split that into two where it's like you can see the top and bottom here so this bottom section um what I did is I took this chunk right here and I just kind of exploded it into its individual pieces this is really not like an optimized way to work because it's uh you know when you have this many pieces that go into this little piece and then that gets duplicated 100 times that starts to get laggy pretty quick but I just didn't care so I went ahead and did that anyways um but yeah this is not something I would like yeah this is not one of the ones I would like sell but it works for this so if you look at here it looks like a lot again but what I did is I just took um all of the all the individual pieces uh that went into this and just took them over here so they're duplicated a bunch of times but really it's just made out of these simple shapes it's like basic archways don't ask me what's going on with the texture here I'm not really sure if that is terrible but it doesn't really matter um so basic archways this thing like I don't really know what this is It's kind of just a stretched out cube with like some insets and extrusions literally just a basic rectangle and then like some slab and if you look through here all of these things that make up this thing right here that's all like kind of just those pieces duplicated a bunch of times it's not it's not that much more than those simple fundamental shapes that I just showed there's a couple extra things like some more circles and like little things to add more complexity and variation but really it's all the same shape like repeated over and over again with like variations in scale and rotation and um just the order things are placed in and that's what creates one of these pieces like this so hopefully that gives you a clearer idea of how I put you know one of these pieces together and then that piece that you put together out of those smaller shapes you can take that and duplicate it into an even bigger structure and then that structure you take even and you duplicate that into an even bigger structure and really you could just kind of keep doing that over and over and over again um so yeah that's that's usually my approach to making something as complex as a big castle like this so then once you have that and you've kind of like if we go in reverse order take some simple pieces slant them together into the shape of something that looks kind of like a piece of a castle do that a couple times for variation get like a few different models combine them into an even bigger shape even if you want and then take that and then duplicate that shape around a bunch of times then you know once you once you have a fundamental outline of the thing you've met you you're trying to make then you add like you know um some some like more customized pieces and like spend a bit more time like um making a few more unique pieces here and there to just break up the pattern so it doesn't look like the exact same thing repeated so many times like you can see in here there's some of these like uh fancier like side pieces that are coming down this way or circular ones um if I look at like there's like stuff like this but it's just all kind of the same thing just done in like a different shape or used in a different way and yeah so that's that's how I made this and then the one in the background here's the same exact thing just duplicate it out and removed a couple pieces um again does not hold up except for facing the camera looks fine and yeah that's that's that like yeah anyways hopefully that gives you a a clearer idea of like how to make something as complex as a big castle so it's I want to make it very clear it's not like I wanted to go and model the castle and I just started making like started modeling the entire Castle in edit mode that would be terrifying what I did instead is I just modeled like some very basic pieces like I'm not that good at modeling I just kind of slap together basic shapes into the shape that seemed like a castle or like a piece of a castle and then took that and used it as like like I said kind of a Lego piece in an even bigger section of pieces and then use that to kind of create something even more complex on top okay let's talk about the terrain and everything else one thing I just want to mention too is I do have a video that's like an hour or two long where I just went and modeled a bunch of stuff it wasn't a castle but it was like pieces of a temple if you want to see my exact process for modeling just go and watch that okay let's talk about this terrain right here so what this is is like I said I was going to be talking about some more pricey add-ons this was using World creator and basically what I've done here is if I turn off the subdivisions you can start to see all this detail will come out here in a second yeah so this is what world creative does it's kind of like ant Landscapes that free add-on that comes with blender if you've ever used that or seen anyone use it it's like that but kind of its own dedicated software meant just for making Landscapes and it works a lot better than the anti landscapes and it also generates like texture maps and masks you can use to like fill in your own textures so this is that if you look really close the detail isn't crazy this is actually using not the textures that generated I'm using quixel textures on top of this but let me show you kind of what I did with this so this is World creator and this is one of its default presets so I haven't done anything I just opened it up and clicked one of the random presets this lets you do a lot I usually don't go super in depth of it I just kind of take one of the presets and like add something here and there and just kind of switch it up but basically it lets you run through all these different types of filters and like um basically it's like stages of erosion and stuff like that so you can see if you start with something like this you can go through all these different effects of like what it's doing to the landscape you can go very very in depth with this and I honestly don't know too much about it but sometimes I just go in and like literally choose one of the random presets and like hit hit the randomized seed and then you just get a random variation of one of these and that looks actually really nice so that's kind of what I did here if I go back to home and choose I think it was Mountain sediment uh something like this I chose probably literally one of these I just chose a different seed and then this actually generates textures with it so you can see it's actually generating its own landscape texture that you could use the problem with that though for something like what I'm using it for is that I want to be able to zoom in a little bit more than this and it's just generating like a 4K at most an 8K texture and even that you know if you zoom in on one mesh close enough you can't get that much detail out of it so what I like to do is just use it to generate what they call Splat Maps which is just essentially um like a map to like mask out different areas of the terrain so if I look at the presets over here I'll just add a Splat map preset and I kind of go through the layers it'll kind of isolate the different layers of either textures or filters or things that are happening and give you a like a a map that is just based off of that what I've done is I've just used that Splat map to mix between a rock texture and like some Mossy ground type texture so the rock textures from qixel and I think that Mossy I called it landscape but it's just Mossy rock or something like that from quixel as well and what that means is this map right here if I take a Splat map and look at what's going on here when you run it through a color ramp it's just a black and white image of like different I don't even know what's going on but like I guess different stuff through the texture it made or different like whatever's going on with the filters but that gives you a really nice balance between if you just literally use that to mix between two textures so you can see the Rock and that other like if I preview just the landscape only versus just the Rock Only it's just these two textures that are getting mixed together by that Splat map or that you know that mask essentially and then that means like in all the hills and stuff those will be Rocky and then the flat parts will be like more green and then I think I'm taking like one of the textures that World creator generated for the mesh itself and I'm kind of just layering that on top a little bit it's not doing that much though like if I look inside here I think that that color map that World creator generated is getting multiplied in a little bit or like I have this mixed node set to color so that is influencing the color a little bit but it's mostly just those two like that Mossy texture and then the rocky texture and uh that way you can scale it way up and have a ton of detail but it it kind of breaks up the pattern to where you can't really tell that it's repeating too much um so yeah for more for more information on how to use World creator I just go to their YouTube channel they have like there's just go on YouTube and type from World creator tutorial but like I said I'm not doing anything Advanced here I'm just using one of the presets and like mixing two textures with it so um yeah one more thing is the way I set this up is it's just a plane subdivided 80 times so like this and then I have a subdivision surface over top of that so I like I did like the method where you like select it right click subdivide and then set the subdivisions in that box like when you hit subdivide in this box here set the number of cuts to 80. um and then throw a subdivision surface on top of that and then set it to like three for three port two or three for the viewport and then five for the render that just seems to be like the most optimal settings to where it looks good in the viewport and still looks good in the render but it still runs fast um obviously it doesn't have to be those exact settings that's just what I found works best but do whatever you want and then after that it's just a displaced modifier and that's what's giving it the actual height here um and then that you just make sure the coordinates are set to UV and then in here you just choose the height map that World creator exports as the uh map that's running into this displace modifier so I'm not actually using any displacement in the Shader editor here it's all being done in the modifiers just with the displace modifier and then subdivision here I've tried using adaptive subdivision with this but I just I haven't got it to work well but I found this just works better doing it this way and then yeah you can see all these boxes here I just duplicated that and set it as bounds but it's the same mesh just duplicated a bunch of times throughout this entire project and so it's that's honestly really it's really bogging this down quite a bit like this is where I imagine you need a good computer for this because like I have a an RTX 3090 my CPU isn't amazing it's a 10 I don't even know what it is like a regular gaming PC CPU it's struggling a bit here so just you know do this with caution I don't know why these ones in the back are so big but you can see that's just what I did from the camera view this is what it looks like so it's this right here and then I just kind of duplicated that a bunch of times in uh places that just looked good there's no like special way of doing this you just take it duplicate it and then like kind of intersect it in a way that kind of looks like it matches up with the other ones and then some of the geometry from the castle is kind of hiding the borders between these these uh just flat or these Square sections of land so I wouldn't say you need World creator for something like that like you could probably just sculpt um your own landscape or just use a t Landscapes and then kind of just do some weight painting to mix between textures or I think a and t Landscapes actually can generate its own um like flow Maps so that you could use that to mix between textures I don't know too much about it but through our videos on that if you want to go and search for that one thing I do want to talk about here is the scattering that I did for all the plants and trees at the bottom like if I just bring this up let's see so yeah all this stuff at the bottom this is something that is um hard to do without any add-ons basically I'll talk about the clouds in a second but just kind of ignore this foggy stuff down here and let's just talk about like the rocks and trees and just stuff that's kind of growing out of the ground here what that is is this add-on called scatter five I guess it's not called scatter five anymore it's called geoscatter they renamed it let me show you what this thing could do so okay so for a demo I'm going to take one of those World creator uh meshes and just export it and use this as kind of a demo for scatter and just so I have a surface to put things on I'm just going to take this it's pretty small right now I'm just going to scale it like way up so it's just big and let me just turn up the view distance so you can see all the way across the sort of floor okay I'm gonna apply the scale and then I have to change this to UV coordinates and then also increase the strength to something that's a bit much let's do 30. okay let me show you scatter because this is actually awesome so if I open this up and just click this the eyedropper click this thing basically what this add-on does is it's just all about scattering it's mostly plants but you can actually use it for anything but it comes within a library of plants so um if I just click on this button right here biome scatter I'll just hit open up open biomes and I'll just kind of look through here and show you what this thing can do if I just pull this open and Let's do let's say I want like a forest on here or like trees kind of scattered like I had in my the other render um it's let's just go to the forest section and let's just choose any one of these so this one for us two this one was kind of cool so I'll just literally click this plus button it'll do its thing and then it'll just take a bunch of miles from its own like browser scatter it all on here um it's giving me a warning since it's like a huge mesh that I like it it would have crashed if it didn't like lower the settings so it even if you go way over the limit of what it can do it'll automatically tell you like it's not uh it's gonna like do some stuff to like save your PC anyways okay so here's how I deal with this usually I usually have a viewport that has overlays turned off for some reason if you have it on things just get laggy pretty quick so I just have this turned off in one viewport in rendered view usually that's like over here but in this demo file I'm not gonna do that and then if you turn that off it just it's very Snappy and then one down here it's all it's already automatically set this to display as bounds but if you want you can just go into this collection right here and just manually un undo the display as bounds anyways being able to scatter objects onto a mesh is not special that's not what makes this add-on awesome what's awesome is that it comes with a full browser of things you can use and then also like the elevation and like abiotic tools so let me just show you for example in in mine what I did was I just took the um this slope control is really nice so if I just click this box anywhere that's too steep it will just not place any particles and that a lot of the times for this kind of stuff gives you like a really natural uh distribution of where things just get planted so I just click this on you can see yeah that's just really nice to have so it's not like growing on like the cliff side or something and if I turn this up to like really steep you can see um yeah and see what that's doing really nice if I turn it way down I think that will automatically fill in so the higher that slope the um the less stuff is going to like grow on the side of it that's really handy so that's exactly what I had in mind so I've actually been using scatter from like a long time and then just recently they just randomly reached out to me and gave me an affiliate link so if you do want to get this there is an affiliate link somewhere below that just means if you buy it through that link it costs the same for you but just I get a kickback um you don't have to use that you can just go and find it on your own if you want but it is there so I wouldn't say you have to use this add-on for something like this like you just go and find like a free model of a tree and then use geometry nodes or a particle system to scatter it it's just that this tool like makes it so much easier it makes you basically have to do zero work like you just you saw me click a button and then it's pretty much done and then there's tons of different presets it's like it's it's actually awesome so if you can afford it definitely get it but if you can't spend any money and you just want to do it for free there are ways to do it for free too it just takes a little bit longer the point is just if you can get a way to get like plants um scattered over a landscape in a convincing way that'll help a lot with the sense of scale and just epicness and like how big everything else looks like if you have like a bunch of small plants and small rocks all over here in like clusters all of a sudden it gives a sense of like how big this actual landscape actually is it just makes it feel so much more alive and detailed and just cool um yeah so that's that's scatter so yeah for this one I pretty much did very little work at all with the scattering I literally just took one of the presets like the one of the forest presets hit scatter did another one for the rocks and then just turn on that slope control so that like you can see on the cliffs and stuff over here there's no trees growing like over the rock it's all growing out of where like where it makes sense that it would grow like flat flatter kind of surfaces you know that works really nice with World creator because World creator already generated I'm I'm like a map for like it already made the slope surfaces like rock or like it gave me a mask to do that already so that works really well with with this because you can just click a button and have this line up really nicely um those two add-ons go actually hand in hand quite well let's look at the sky this is literally just um like if you ever watched my video on just making skies and blender this is exactly the same thing just a picture of a sky slapped onto a big plane running into the emission so if I just go to render view well you can see this in a second so yeah it's a picture of a sky in the background that's what's creating this guy there's some fancy nodes and stuff to like make the colors slightly more like warm uh some curves to make it a little darker really it's just like running into the mission strength and Alpha and I could have made the color like black and the speculars down you could do that and you end up with like pretty much the same result if you want to go more in depth into like exactly how I set up skies I do have a video on that um just going through exactly what I do but it's really it's just a picture of a sky on a plane not too crazy the volumetrics here are kind of interesting it's if I look at this large scale volumetrics are always kind of hard to deal with because it's hard to get the density low enough sometimes it just kind of cuts off at a certain point um so what I've done is I turn off the anisotropy to 0.7 that made most of it a little less dense so it's not as thick also the color is actually lowered way down to the value is actually at 0.13 or 0.113 and that makes it seem a lot less dense so you can see that makes a pretty big difference and then the density is at 0.0001 if for some reason it's glitching out and you can't get the density to be low enough at all no matter what you can actually just scale the entire scale of everything way down and then just have the density look lower that way um but in this case I just had it big still and just did this and it was fine the other thing I'm doing is the the volumetrics is just oh that's laggy the volumetrics in this one is just a thin like layer over everything so it actually cuts off right above the camera like if I pull this down you can see that's right where the volumetric is cut off so it's just going right above the camera and then stopping right there if you do that sometimes you get like a line in the distance just be careful in this case it looked fine and then I can still see the sky and it looks kind of cool so that was fine there let's look at the lighting it's just the sky textures if I take this out it's pitch black except for the sky in the back which is emissive the sky texture is doing all of the work of the Sun and everything um just here's the settings the sun's pretty low to the ground uh eight 8.7 degrees elevation and then coming from the side it's coming from the side so that the light just creates nice like pleasing Shadows on this Castle um so I tried like a bunch of different rotations it just seemed this worked the best like you probably don't want to do something like this where the sun's behind the camera and it's just getting rid of all the Shadows having a nice amount of Shadows where it's like lights hitting it from the side and then getting like half of it in Shadow that seems to just look really pleasing so that's what I did if you want to copy these settings just go for it uh but yeah Sun from the side always looks good um so I know this video has been like pretty messy of just jumping around all these different places and like it's just kind of chaotic but I did just want to do like a full breakdown of like everything in kind of a quick ish video so sorry if that was confusing but I hope there was some stuff in here that you know you'll find useful for your own stuff so yeah there was nothing that was like insanely complex or um took like a ton of like mental effort and like it was like super insanely difficult to make it was all kind of simple stuff at the very end like I hope you could see that when I break it down into the individual tools and individual pieces that I used there's nothing that's that different from what you're probably already doing right now it's just like taking these simple things and like you know making something that's more complex and intricate out of all the sin together and like combining all these different things in a way that makes sense and that that was really the hard part is taking all these things that are kind of simple on their own like the castle on its own is kind of simple if I you know the way I modeled it was pretty simple like the the landscape on its own was pretty simple like I just exported the preset from World creator the scattering was pretty simple on its own the sky is similar sound the lighting is simple it's just a sky texture with a sun you know uh like or not even to sell that but just the sky texture alone but it's like figuring out a way to combine to combine all those different things into one cohesive thing that all makes sense together that's that's what took time and that's just what took trial and error and just trying things and moving things around and like just trying to figure out how these pieces are supposed to fit together um and that's really what I spent the most time on it's just whatever that was um yeah I hope that makes sense I will quickly plug the new course there's a bunch of people in the Discord we're all just hanging out making cool stuff um so that's been it's actually been going awesome so if you want to check out my course I create three different vendors from start to finish it's not as like messy and crazy as this written as this video like all over the place it's just very structured here's what we're doing make it from start to finish three of them there's three asset packs so if you want models there's tons of those they're super easy to set up to and then also um yeah other modules on like inspiration getting ideas yeah I think that's it I don't think I need to mention anything else I am selling it to you with no shame right now so if you click the link in the description that will take you to a sales page if you want to check that out I don't think I need to say anything else um yeah there's gonna be more videos soon so subscribe or whatever and yeah okay I will see you around bye

Channel: Max Hay

Views: 30,793

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Id: Nd03TEGts5w

Length: 31min 13sec (1873 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 06 2023