How To Create Amazing Cityscapes In Blender

all right what's up guys so um I'm just gonna go through all the tips that I could think of to create large scale cityscapes really easily without destroying your computer so here's some examples of some pieces that I've done that I've used all these techniques um so I'll just go through these and yeah let's just get into this so basically I'll just give you a few tips the last one I'll give you is a really like if you're super lazy this one is definitely for you it's a like a very easy way to basically instantly create this in like two seconds it requires a little bit of work beforehand but you'll see what I mean it's basically um just a cheat code so stick around for that one at the end but the first tip is keep everything low poly so I have this open here you can see if I zoom way in you can kind of tell that all of these buildings are pretty much just cubes the texture is carrying all of that detail and the actual model by itself is just a low poly Cube if not slightly more High poly than just a cube and when you have good textures and then Lighting on top of that volumetrics on top of that that that just it brings it all together and it doesn't look like just a bunch of Cubes okay um this tip is use this add-on called osm I use this a lot so I think I used it in all of these okay so this is blender osm it's free or you can just pay a little bit if you want or you just put zero and you can get it for free I use this all the time and basically what it does is it lets you select an area in the real world like on a map and then it Imports that geometry into blender and you just get a 3D model of whatever City you want basically so I'll show you how to use this uh osm and then I hit select at the top here it brings out a map and I can just go wherever I want let's just go um okay let's do Seattle okay so what you want to do is just hit this button here show selection rectangle and then if you select an area that's too big it won't import properly I actually just tried it twice before this and it didn't work and I think it's because it was just too much stuff that I selected so I'll try something a bit smaller we can always just take this geometry and duplicate it around as many times as we want but it's just importing it that's a bit slow sometimes so let's try this that should be fine I think maybe let's go a bit smaller just to make sure this works let's try that so I'll copy the coordinates here just press copy go back to blender and press paste paste on those coordinates and then I'll just uncheck everything except buildings that's all I all I care about and then let's hit import and just see if that works okay so it took about 30 seconds and then it imported this so let me just show you how to work with this because it's it's really big when you import it and it's kind of annoying so what I do is I just press n to bring out this menu the side menu go to view and then change the end a point basically the render distance up to like 10 000 or whatever works so that's good and then I also like to change the start distance from 0.01 sometimes if you have intersect like meshes that are close together it looks like they're intersecting and it gets weird if you have really large scale objects like this so if you change this to one that will probably just get rid of any weird issues that you run into with if it looks like it's glitching out from a distance just turn that to one and it'll fix that now this does not come with textures so we have to texture it ourselves the good news is it's super easy and the way you do this basically I learned this from I think CG geek did a tutorial using osm and what he did was he just went on textures.com got a bunch of or like not even a bunch like two or three building image textures from the uh like photo section they have there and you just put that over everything and then put a different texture on the roof so I'll show you exactly what to do um just to make this easy click use nodes to bring this in here so let me just show you I'll just go on to uh textures.com let's search for building let's just search for building and let's just see what comes up so I don't like using these textures like these PBR actual textures what I like using is the regular images of the sides of buildings because these are real actual buildings so I'll show you what this looks like so um I have a few downloaded already I'll just use those okay so I have a few of these downloaded already so here's what I got from textures.com this simple stuff like this okay so what you do here is um download any texture you want drag and drop it in as long as you have the node Wrangler add-on enabled you can drag and drop files in like this so then take this texture run it into the base color and then also run it into the roughness I'll deal with that more in a second but what we're doing is if I just cue project this so U on the keyboard uh Cube projection and a faster way to do that is just you and then a c you can see the C is highlighted so C so if I do this really fast you can see this is how I UV unwrap everything in two seconds tab AUC done um so that just Q projects everything okay great scale up the UV map so you can see what I did there it was like this and you just select all of this stuff a scale it up and just do like just pick a scale that looks like it belongs here another thing you can do is if you scale this up on the z-axis now if the buildings don't come in uh looking tall enough you just scale it up on the Zed let's re-q project that so that uh well actually let's apply the scale first then Q project now scale it up and now we have a bit a bit more taller buildings and the other thing I'm going to do here is use a color ramp run that between the roughness or like where the rough where this goes up to the roughness you put a color ramp and I'll just crank this up so that the buildings or so that the windows are really reflective but everything else is really not reflective let's look at that so yeah it's a bit hard to tell but having the windows run into the roughness like that it's subtle but it does definitely show up when you put it on every single building there's going to be some buildings here and there that do have little Reflections and stuff that just look really nice if you look here for example some buildings have some textures and some have other textures I think this texture is the one I just used actually um but you can see some of these have there's some variation in the textures so what you can do is download a few different uh textures from textures.com download a few different images of buildings and then go to edit mode if you press L on the keyboard it'll select all of the linked geometry that's underneath your mouse so anything that's linked underneath where your cursor is it'll select anything that's joined together basically so the easiest way to do this is either select random or just kind of move your mouse around and spam L while you're doing it repeat that process of assigning this building texture to it but use a different image from textures.com this time so if I go new assign to that selection create a new texture grab a different map so grab save this one drop it in run it into the base color it's already unwrapped so we don't even need to worry about that run it into the roughness color ramp I think I need to scale it up because it looks a bit small so let's hit S2 scale it up by two and you can see now we're getting a bit more variation in these buildings that's not all the exact same texture so I'd probably do that two or three more times just to switch it up a little bit more and then just put whatever materials you want on the roofs usually what I do here is I just put some random metal texture on the roof just some grunge map or whatever so let's try if I just select um all the yeah if I just select the roof material and everything like this go to a new thing assign it new texture and let's just grab some random roughness map so textures.com um even like some random concrete thing like this will work fine let's just put that into the base color and scale that up maybe scale it down even yeah that's like it's fine there's some buildings here which didn't get selected and I think it's because when I put the new texture on it I actually got rid of that roof material so make sure you don't uh override that material when you're assigning things you get the point though you can do anything to this so you can take this so you want a darker added curves make it darker um if you want to select any material you just go into face selection click on that material it'll bring you there in the Shader editor again let's try curves make it a bit darker not that dark something like that and cool okay the next one is I kind of mentioned this already but using lighting and volumetrics to get the look to just look nicer so you can see like paying attention to where the light is coming from and how it creates Shadows that's super important and throwing on volumetrics on top of that is also just gives it a nice atmosphere you can see one other thing with these is you'll notice in all of these daytime ones the light is coming from the side instead of like the front or the back so it's half of it is really bright intense sunlight and then the other half is really dark interesting Shadows that's my favorite way to light these kinds of scenes it just brings out all the detail in these buildings here sometimes it's cool to have the light behind like you get a sunset or something that's nice too um sometimes it's a bit harder to work with that because then all the Shadows are like you're just kind of dealing with silhouettes so this is my favorite lighting setup with this but um I think the one that I pretty much never do is having the sun coming from right behind the camera that basically gives you no Shadows because everything is in sunlight and it just looks uh anytime I do something like that it just looks bad so I never end up running with it but so this is my favorite way to light it is having light coming from the side if not the front like a sunset like with the sun in the picture the next step is I mentioned having like keep everything low poly but I think it works really well to bring in high high poly buildings like from kid bash or something you modeled that's a lot higher detail and then just Place those buildings in manually by yourself once in a while so you have all of these uh like low poly buildings that kind of fill out everything and make up the majority of the scene but then you manually take a few buildings that you made or that kit bash made or whoever that look really nice and you put those in the foreground you put them in places that are high visual interest places like the important places you put higher quality buildings in those places you can also just do this to cover up little flaws that you might get if you're using particles sometimes there's the majority of the landscape looks good but then you have some areas that are just kind of weird so you can manually Place high quality buildings in place of where things get a little bit bad okay so that's how you use osm now for the bonus tip say you're super lazy and you don't want to do you don't want to deal with this ever again you just want to set it up once and then you want to be able to just drag and drop this into any project file and just have it load instantly so what you can do is take this apply the scale apply the rotation right click this Mark as asset and then in your asset Library that'll show up and now you can just drag and drop it into any project you want and it's it'll come with all the textures all set up proper scale everything and you can just have an instant City so what you can do now is just drag and drop that in um alt D to create a linked duplicate of it and just Spam this around as much as you want rotate 90 you can scale it up scale it down uh just rotate it around and then you get you basically have an infinitely big city now you can just duplicate this so many times it's low poly but it looks high quality so you can see if I want a ginormous city I can just keep duplicating this as many times as I want and just get unlimited buildings and it runs you know super fast still there's not that many polygons here go and use all these tips that I just showed you um go make some cool stuff and yeah post it online and then tag me if you use these tips show me what you make and uh yeah I'll see you around peace

Channel: Max Hay

Views: 456,923

Keywords:

Id: IX2gOPm5YIA

Length: 12min 41sec (761 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 08 2022