How I Turned a Bob Ross Painting into a 3D World

okay donning the bob ross wig one last time we do it again guys and we're going all out this time we are turning a bob ross painting into a 3d world but this time we're taking it to the next level we're going to be going for as realistic as possible and making one of bob ross's classic paintings look like it's an actual place on earth so i've done this a few times in the past and if you haven't seen those videos you probably want to check them out [Music] well at least 20 of you guys enjoy my content anyways so this time we're going to be following one of bob ross's most advanced tutorials his hour-long special and i didn't want to cut any corners here bob ross always starts his paintings with a completely blank canvas and that's what i'm going to be doing here in my 3d software no using other people's assets or anything we're going to be creating everything from scratch so let's turn to bob ross real quick and see where he would start on a challenging scene like this we each see nature through different eyes and your painting should reflect your visions your personality well bob i think we will be doing just that by adding a whole other dimension to the scene instead of a 2d painting it's going to be a 3d animation so just really work it in is it just me to bob forget to put paint on his brush so if there's one thing i've learned after following a few bob ross tutorials is there's generally three components to a bob ross scene the first one is some cool mountains in the background the second one is some happy trees generally in the foreground and the background and the third one is bushes he's got basically bushes in every single one of his paintings just to kind of fill out the nature so with my camera in hand i went off hiking into the woods to find some cool nature to shoot some textures and 3d photo scan some objects to put into our scene so whenever i'd find some cool areas of rocks or ground i'd shoot about 30 or 40 pictures from different angles and from different distances then i grab those photos and just throw them into mushroom and it's literally just a few clicks before you have a finished photo scan oh and about an hour or so of waiting on a good computer if you guys want more detail on how to 3d photo scan stuff you can check out my beginner tutorial that i have probably up on the screen right now and i got kind of ambitious with my photo scanning i photoscan more than just rocks and ground i also tried photoscaling some flowers and as you can see flowers sometimes will work but sometimes you won't have enough detail to get that good result out of it so generally vegetation just won't photo scan very well you can sometimes get lucky and get some acceptable results but for the most part you're gonna be just better off photo scanning things like logs rocks ground so for the vegetation since photo scanning obviously wasn't gonna work for most of it i went about shooting a bunch of textures these textures i could then take into photoshop and cut out the background so i isolated just a blade of grass for example and then i could model around that blade of grass inside of blender project the texture right on that blade of grass do a little bit of work on that material giving it a roughness map just using the same texture as well as a bump map this just gives it a little bit more realism and once i had a few of those grass blades created i went about creating a few grass assets creating some stalks of grass using these blades and kind of modeling them together with a little bit of proportional editing this took me a while but i did everything from scratch because i didn't want to cheat because bob ross never cheats so i wasn't gonna cheat here you know with 2020 there's never been a better time to stay at home and learn something new and that's why i'm excited that this video is sponsored by skillshare as maybe you've already heard learning new skills is super easy with skillshare where millions of people are already taking the next steps in their creative journey by learning from thousands of professionals teaching exciting topics like 3d graphics for one but there's also many other cool ones like professional photography video and editing and that's just a few i was watching a bit of a cool course from chris burkhart and how to shoot outdoor photography and he has some great tips on capturing some of these more challenging shots when shooting in low lights outdoor nighttime photography so that was a good one to check out oh and did i mention that skillshare is super affordable with an annual subscription costing less than ten dollars a month and since skillshare is a sponsor i get to offer the first thousand viewers a free two-month trial of skillshare premium when you use my signup link in the video description so hop on that and start exploring your creativity so to get started in 3d we obviously need a bit of a base mesh terrain to start off of so what i did is i used what i usually use and that is blender's landscape generator this just uses textures to create different kind of patterns that work great for mountains and lakes and whatnot so playing around with the texture settings in this little add-on you can get some cool looking mountain shapes and then for the materials on that mountain i just used a few different materials one for snow one for rock and one for grass and then using a simple little node setup to isolate the geometry right along the z-axis i could use that as a mask to add in these different textures to get a nice looking pattern of snow rock and grass on our mountain it was just a matter of duplicating these mountains and kind of layering them in our scene to give it some depth generating another random terrain that we can start working off of for some ground then i just added a basic water mesh to the scene then i need a water material so this is just a simple water setup that i've used in a few of my tutorials it just fakes a little bit of a volumetric effect to the water and then just using two basic noise textures combined together i use this as a displacement map to add just a little bit of ripples on top of that water and then animating is super easy with a mapping node all you have to do is move the x or y axis a little bit to move these textures across the plane and you get an effect of moving water so now that i had some photoscanned assets and some 3d modeled vegetation it's time to add it all together with our generated meshes to start forming bob ross's scene so just taking chunks of earth out of 3d photo scan and dropping them into my scene in different locations rotations and scales it's actually pretty easy to kind of fill out your scene pretty quickly with some really great looking nature i mean you can't beat real life and that's kind of what photo scanning gives you the option to do take a little chunk of earth from something that really exists and put it in something virtual which is really cool and then it was basically the same process for trees you guys have seen me make trees a few times if you haven't what are you doing go watch some of those tree tutorials out there you basically create a spindle of a tree in 3d and then you can take some of these textures that you shot throw them on a plane and use them as particles across that tree and i found a cool technique of using the weight paint gradient brush tool to create a vertex paint for the size of the branches so it gets smaller at the peak and larger at the bottom so it was just about piling assets on top of assets i put a bunch of pine trees on all of the mountains in the background again using a weight paint map to control where they were and that was really fun to play around with these were a little bit lower quality pine trees because they're further from the camera so they don't need to be quite as detailed so obviously i had to create a few of these trees but once i had a little bit of variety i went about placing them across my scene using bob ross's image in the background as reference to line up these trees appropriately to capture the exact sort of scene that bob ross imagined i initially wanted to be able to render this finished scene in eevee but it kind of became apparent as i got further into it that it wasn't gonna work for everything so i was still going to have to use cycles but evie definitely helped get a visualization of how everything was looking much faster look at how sharp that is or that sono again it's just you could shave with it look at that i want to see somebody shave with the paintbrush i think it would have the opposite effect then yeah it was just about throwing all kinds of acids at the scene when you're creating a nature scene you really can't go wrong with just throwing more and more nature at it so starting off with some short grass as the particle system you can see this actually looks really cool right inside of eevee some of this grass turned out really cool and for these assets i would create some weight paint maps to kind of control where the density of these would be located it was basically like one of those level creators and games where you can just kind of paint in where you want things to be located once you have it set up it's really fun then i added a second particle system this time with some longer stockier grass and as you can see adding different heights of grass really adds a lot to the realism of a scene and then threw a little bit of dandelions in there for some variation just filling out sort of a forest grassy floor and then the bushes because bob ross is famous for his bushies so we put bushes all over the place so then i really wanted some moving water in the scene but i didn't want to do it with a fluid simulation inside of blender because that is just really slow it's going to slow down your viewport it's going to take longer to bake and render and you're not going to be able to view things in real time at all so what i did is i tried a technique that i saw ian hubert use the man the myth the legend himself shared this technique over on twitter so what i basically did with this is hike out into the woods with my camera and a tripod and capture some different waterfalls and little rivers capturing different types of waterfalls just the water kind of hitting the rocks anywhere you can get some of that white water so then what that video opened up in premiere i just created a simple mask around the isolated white water and then with an adjustment layer i just threw a luma key on it in premiere pro hero and this allowed me to just isolate basically the white water from the rocks going over to blender i imported that water movie clip as a plane now with a simple material set up mixing a little bit of diffuse and glossy together along with some transparent using the white and black as a mask to tell blender what should be transparent and what shouldn't be we had a simple water shader on a flat plane and then all you had to do was throw some loop cuts on this mesh use proportional editing to kind of distort the mesh a little bit make it a little less flat and then start placing it across your scene this actually turned out really well and this is kind of a technique that video game industries would typically use because obviously they can't have advanced fluid simulations in game engines yet anyways and then using a color ramp you can adjust the intensity of that white water depending on how much you want the water to be rushing and whatnot and i thought this just worked really well actually to get some animated water as long as you're not too close because you're obviously going to notice issues if you get the camera too close to it but it really worked well for like a medium distance shot so then i needed a technique for animating the nature in my scene and i didn't want to do this by rigging the tree with bones and armatures and all that complicated stuff because it really slows down your viewport again so the technique that i came up with for this is using shape keys shape keys basically allows you to add in a key edit the mesh a little bit and then adjust that with a slider and you can actually keyframe this slider then so then just throwing a keyframe on that shape key slider and adding a noise modifier to it in the graph editor i could have it randomly adjust that keyframe back and forth giving me the effect of some wind and it works great for slight subtle wind movement but you can take it even further by adding more keyframes onto the individual branches for example in a particle system so if i edit just the branch on this pine tree a little bit do the same thing by moving it a little bit and then adding a keyframe and a noise modifier to that slider you can get some wind movement in the individual branches and depending on how many shape keys you want to create then you can get some actually pretty cool looking wind results just using shape keys right inside of blender and this keeps your viewport performance nice and snappy still and i thought this actually worked pretty cool so this is the same thing that i went about doing for the grass and the bushes using this method i think i animated everything on the scene in less than an hour and it just gave you a subtle amount of animation that made the scene feel less stagnant when it was rendered okay so things are getting exciting the last thing was to add some fog pretty sure every one of bob ross's photos has a bit of fog added to it because it's something that's always there and any large mountain photo you'll ever see there's a bit of distant fog so for this i just made a little fluffy cloud with a simple gradient texture and noise texture and then i create a plane spanning the distance of my mountains and added a particle system to this plane for those little poofy clouds and that just worked to add the depth across my scene and actually render much faster than doing something like volumetrics which will really take a hit to your performance but this is the exciting point where the scene is pretty much finished and it's just now time to add some camera movement so what i did to get some realistic camera motion is just take a random video outdoors camera track it and once you have that camera tracking data i just baked it to some key frames took that camera then into my 3d bob ross scene and threw it into the bob ross scene to make it look like someone's standing there with a camera capturing the moment and then i thought it would be cool to throw a person into the scene so i just threw up a green screen outside stood in front of it filmed a little bit of video and with a simple mask and green screen note cut out the background around me and saved it out as a png image sequence then i just threw it on a plane and threw it into my bob ross scene and it actually worked really well as long as you keep in mind the sun angles and line them up with your footage and your 3d render you can get some pretty cool results at this point there's time to start rendering out the animation i think i had all the basses covered and i was way behind schedule with how long this video project was taking so it was time to start rendering each frame rendered in like five to six minutes so as you can tell something like this that was over 350 frames was gonna take a little bit of time after a few overnight renderings it was time to see what it looked like rendered in its full glory using a cycles render engine without further ado i won't make you guys wait any longer let's see what the finished bob ross scene in a 3d world looked like [Music] so that was it now hold up there was a bit of an easter egg in that last clip if you didn't see it you'll want to jump the video back and watch it again because it's a good one i'll be here waiting for you guys when you come back so go ahead watch it if you found it let me know with a comment in the comment section below alright you got it okay so what i actually did was i wanted to put bob ross inside his own painting because this is his world after all now we all know that bob ross really loved fishing so i found a funny picture of bob ross sitting in a canoe on the street i opened that up in photoshop and cut him out of the background and then i just put that image on a plane and dropped bob into the scene sticking him back in the corner of the lake just fishing there enjoying the summer afternoon in his own world if you guys spy that easter egg you guys have eagle eyes that was that was pretty impressive but that kind of wraps it up guys i'm going to be giving away this 3d scene over on patreon to some of my patreons so if you guys want to get your hands on this finished project it will be over on the patreon page so you can check that out with a link in the description down there that's why i'm doing this with my finger so thanks so much for watching all the way through the video hope you enjoyed it and i'll see you all in a future project i look forward to painting with you again on other instructional videos and until then from all of us here happy painting and god bless bob what a mad lad the best of the best

Channel: CG Geek

Views: 1,177,031

Rating: 4.9500818 out of 5

Keywords: Blender, Animation, 3D, Funny, Gamedev, Animated, CGI, How to, Bob Ross, Bob Ross Painting, Blender 2.9, Realistic, following a bob ross tutorial, hardest bob ross tutorial, anja bob ross, bob ross tutorial, blender tutorial

Id: 4b9PYIxmcNc

Length: 15min 2sec (902 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 04 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/g0f0]

This is really cool stuff. Thanks and subscribed, lol.

[u/mailjozo]

The camera tracking really sold the effect for me. Very cool touch.

[u/haptiK]

neat

[u/pastaMac]

Nice™