How To Create Beautiful Environments In Blender

right so getting good at this one thing which is creating cool environments in blender has completely transformed my life and what I do so this has basically just given me the freedom to be able to get up and do whatever the hell I want all day any day of the week that most of the time that happens to be just working on this because this is what I like doing but yeah having the freedom to choose whatever I want to do all day any day is is pretty insane all right so in this one I just want to talk about how to get really good at creating environments in blender all the stuff that's helped me over the past couple years how I've learned all this and what you can do to start making better environments as quickly as possible and yeah basically just all the advice that I can think of to help you out so let's go so before I discovered lender I was about 17 or 18 I can't remember exactly but I was about to graduate high school and I was in this situation where I had I didn't have a job I wasn't making any money I was not going to go to school I just I knew that like University just wasn't for me and I didn't have any like followers or anything I pretty much had no Direction it was you know when you're in that situation it's not a great feeling when family and friends ask what you're going to do with your life because everyone else is going to school and working and stuff you know I never had an answer it was I always kind of just mumbled and stumbled through it and it was you know it's embarrassing when you're in that situation and this is right around the time that I discovered blender and honestly I got pretty obsessed with it so you know I spent a few years getting good at it getting advice from other artists from other successful artists on like how to actually make this work watching endless tutorials but you know most importantly just putting in the Reps of actually sitting down and using the software and creating stuff and making art and doing that is What's led me to where I am now where I can I can charge a lot of money for what I do this is my full-time income it's just doing this pretty much most of my income comes from client work so for example I think most you guys have seen this like the illenium album cover for example or like my art was on the Asus website for the pro art Awards like I'm not bringing the stuff up to try and like Flex or something I'm just showing you like I want to like hopefully Inspire some of you guys and show you what's possible if you get really good at this and so I cannot tell you how to become successful but I can't tell you what's worked for me and what's worked for me is literally just getting as good as possible at this and then sharing that as much as possible I pretty much only do environments and so in this one I'll just talk about you know some of the best tips and advice that I can give you to start making better environments and all the stuff that's helped me over the last couple years so I've got three major points I want to cover so the first one is prioritize getting good at lighting and camera angles above everything else the reason I'm saying that is because when you start learning this there's so many different areas you need to cover like there's modeling you'll be unwrapping geometry nodes particle systems sculpting the time like there's there's so many different areas that you could focus on and learn and put your time and energy into but none of it none of that stuff really matters at all if you can't capture what you're looking at in a pleasing way and that's what lighting and camera angles do is it allows you to capture things in a nice good like pleasing to look at way so you can imagine you could have like the best Geometry nodes most amazing geometry notes setup ever combined with like the most intricate sculpting you've ever done combined with the best UV unwrapping combined with the best models if you don't capture that in a way that's nice to actually look at it doesn't matter what's in there it's not going to look good and you know the opposite of that is true as well like if you only are good at the lighting and camera angle part the rest of like the technical stuff can kind of suffer a little bit even like you can have stuff that's technically bad and light it and capture it well and it will look good and so that's why I think that's the most important skill to learn first like that's the biggest bottleneck you have to get through to where things will start looking good is like can you present it nicely and that's exactly what lighting and camera angles do just one tip for lighting really quick is just keep it as simple as possible most of the time my scenes generally have like one or two maybe three lights in them you know once in a while you'll have one that goes like way over that and there's way more but like almost all my renders most of the time have one or two lights at most and when you when you keep it simple like that it's so much easier to deal with because you're not like you're not dealing with 50 lights and trying to make 50 lights all look good and fit together so you don't have to worry about that it's just like easier to deal with less lights because there's less problems to go wrong but it also just happens to look much cleaner most of the time and much better you might be surprised if you've never tried this like keep the lighting as simple as possible I like to minimize the number of Lights as much as I can and that just makes it much easier to get good results um one tip for getting good with camera angles is literally just use a camera so you can use your phone too like your phone has a camera it it's the same thing just practice going out into real life and getting trying to get good photos um I would also recommend just following photographers online and just trying like looking look at what they do watch photography tutorials and listen to how photographers talk about the angles they choose and the settings they use and all that type of stuff and that applies directly to what we're doing here with environments and like I said capturing things in a pleasing way that's all photography is so I'd recommend learning at least a little bit about that and that'll translate super well into 3D okay the second thing I want to cover here is get access to good models and good textures so I'll talk about Textures in a second but models um this could mean just get good ad modeling I think that's a really important skill I've seen a lot of artists who don't know how to model and it looks like a pain in the ass and it's it's it's very convenient to know how to model something like you need some little structure you don't have to spend an hour going to find it you just quickly make it and it's done and you don't have to worry about it it's super super handy knowing how to model it's also valuable having a big asset library and having places where you can go and just buy models too so some places that I use to get my models are when I model it myself but also CG Trader and turbo squid are going to be the biggest just general marketplaces for 3D sketchfab is pretty good uh this it's hard to find free stuff and also you've got to watch out for like a lot of the free stuff is actually not cc0 so it's required on their site that you have to give attribution to a lot of the models so just watch over that but there is some cool good free cc0 stuff if you look for it the next place that I used to get models myself is quicksil Mega scans so there it's a great service but there is one caveat is that with the latest versions of blender this is not really fully compatible I'm not really sure why they haven't fixed it I've asked them about it they haven't told me why or when it's going to be fixed so it works it's just janky you just have to kind of rearrange a few things and it's kind of annoying but it still works uh so quickly makes sense is pretty good same for textures kid bash 3D is pretty good if you don't have a really good computer though it is pretty heavy the main point here is just get like organized models and get a collection of good models that you can use that's going to make it much easier to build good looking scenes okay for textures uh yeah ambient CGS probably the best free site because you can get free 4K textures textures.com is also pretty good um depends what you need just both those websites are just free Texture websites texturing isn't really something you need to get that good at as a skill in itself because like there's so many free textures that are really good online that you can just use that are done that you just download and apply that are finished that you don't need to like there's not that much you need to learn about doing that other than how to set it up once and you know like the most you'll have to do is like maybe make a thing darker here and there or like adjust the roughness a little bit or like turn down the normal map slightly like there's not that much you have to learn with texturing it's just like a very simple system that you have to learn to set up once and then you know how to do it from there at least that's true with the kind of stuff that I do like if you're working on like really up close models and you need to like really dive in uh adjust and like mix together different textures and edgeware and uh apply like really intricate grunge and that kind of stuff then yeah maybe you need to dive into that a little bit more and uh you can't just get away with slapping on a free texture and calling it done for the kind of environments that I do uh it's you really don't need to know that much about texturing it'll kind of just come naturally as you get good at 3D in general so a lot of people have been asking me about my asset library and also about showing my full creation process of making an artwork like start to finish so I actually have a new course available where I show you the creation process the full creation process of three entirely different artworks made from like zero percent start all the way through to 100 finish explain the whole way through as easy as I can it also comes with three different asset packs so the first one is the fantasy asset pack so it comes with like arches intricate pillars treasure chests barrels pots Etc the next one is the Sci-Fi slash industrial asset pack that one comes with rooftop antennas wires just industrial pieces buildings and then the last one is the photo scans asset pack which comes with like rocks Roots uh just terrain just stuff to add life to your renders all these packs are very easy to set up you just download the blend file select all the objects right click mark his asset and then just save the blend file and then you're pretty much done and you can just instantly use them in any project you want if you're not familiar with how to use the acid browser there's also a tutorial included in them showing exactly how to set it up that's just in case you know how to use it there's a lot more that I didn't mention here that's included with this if you want to check that out just it's the first link in the description of this video the third tip is work efficiently so this is not a video on productivity but you know this is a video on how to make the best renders possible the thing is one of the key things to make the best renders possible is actually being productive staying focused being organized all that type of stuff I'll just give you some quick tips here but the first thing is stay focused and if you're not good at that get good at being focused when you go to create a render have like an hour or two chunk of time even if you don't use the full two hours just have a chunk of time that you are just purely doing work and you're not distracted at all at all so like don't have any videos in the background don't have any podcast don't have the TV on don't be checking your phone especially this is something I struggled with a lot while I was trying to get good and as soon as I cut all that stuff out like I realized it's so much easier to get much more high quality work done without any distractions so please trust me when I say that like you will destroy the people who are not doing this if you start doing this the next thing is stay organized so this means like files on your computer like all the textures image files whatever other you know organize the blend files in a way that makes sense just be organized with all that but also like keep the asset browser organized um keep your blender windows and your default file organized all that type of stuff like just have a workflow that's as efficient for you as possible and that helps with like you know the days when you're not motivated it's so much easier to just get into this and just start making something and turn that into like just get into the flow really fast that's one thing the other thing too is like while you're working it's just faster so you'll just save time and you know that adds up a lot over time too one more thing under this category of work efficiently is whenever you start a render start with a scene blockout or like whatever thing is going to have the biggest effect on what the overall image looks like in the end so like I've made this mistake plenty of times too where you start working on something and then you like what you do straight away is you start modeling some intricate little piece that's not going to be the main focus and then you spend all this time on it and then you zoom out after like 40 minutes and then in the frame it's like this tiny piece that is like not an important part of the picture and then you look at that and you're like you just realized you've just spent 40 minutes on like one percent of what you need to do and it's just very depressing and not motivating at that point what you're looking at and it's very easy to lose all hope at that point because you know you zoom out and you see the frame is still like empty still except for this one little thing I've done that a lot I think it's much more efficient to just start with the things that have the biggest overall effect on what the picture looks like so this could be like I said some people do this with a scene blockout where they just take like cubes and like cylinders and they literally just add these basic shapes around and like map out where all the objects are going to be and then you can add like basic lighting and a basic camera angle from there that way you have something to look at straight away the other thing you can do is just use pre-made models like Drop in kit bash models or drop-in models you downloaded somewhere and that will be like your starting point for like blocking it out just as fast as adding the basic shapes but these things are actually finished objects so I do that a lot you could also just start with the object that has like the most importance in the image like the focal point of the image so for example like in this one here I started making this with the fan itself and then everything else I kind of built around that so I didn't start with a scene blockout necessarily but I started with the main object that takes up like the most space in the frame and so that that's what allowed me to you know continue working on it and have actually stay motivated throughout the entire thing and have a clear sense of direction right from the beginning all right if you made it this far in this video you might want to go check out that course I mentioned earlier like I said it comes with um three I create three different artworks start to finish you get access to all those blend files there's also those three asset packs that it comes with that you can use in literally any project you want you just drag and drop any of those things in there um it also comes with a bunch of other stuff too like a couple other packs and there's also sections on like inspiration staying motivated how to get ideas how I optimize my workflow and how I get all done extremely fast yeah honestly I know there's something like I am selling but I'm honestly like very very excited about this I think it's it's actually sick so if you want to go check it out it's the first link in the description and uh yeah hopefully this video was useful and I'll see you around

Channel: Max Hay

Views: 480,827

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Id: Y1bOokHzEAk

Length: 13min 58sec (838 seconds)

Published: Wed May 10 2023