How to Create Ghibli Trees in 3D - Blender Tutorial

[Music] everyone i'm david from my invoice studio and in today's tutorial i want to show you how to make stylized trees in blender 2.83 so i've been obsessed with trees from the ghibli movies for a long time now and i've studied for hours screenshots from princess mononoke and my neighbor totoro just to try to understand what makes them look so good so i know how hard it is to try to replicate that star in 3d but after a lot of trial and error i think i finally cracked it i'm going to show you how to do that step by step it's going to be a lot of fun you guys just have to grab a seat and we'll get started all right let's get started so as you can see i have a freshen with blender with the default cube so it'll be very easy for you to follow along first thing i want to do is subdivide this cube so i'm going to click on it press tab to enter edit mode and then right click subdivide if you go to the lower left panel here you can bump up the smoothness add a couple of iterations and if i jump back from edit mode by pressing tab again you can change the shade smooth by right clicking here clicking on change mode so i'm going to rename this to particle emitter and i'm going to duplicate it with shift d and call this one foliage the reason i need two is because on this one i'm going to add the particle system to it but i'm actually going to instance it on the foliage here so i'm going to add a particle system hide this one and then add a particle in tensor on this one and the reason we want to do that is because this way you can add more modifiers stacked on top of it you could displace everything you could decimate it do whatever you want which would not be possible if you were just using the particle system itself so i'm going to hide foliage for now go back to particle emitter and if you go to particle properties here i can add a new system by clicking on the plus button and i'm going to rename this first step there's going to be two steps for this but i'm just going to do the first one for now so you can change the emitter type to hair type in a low number for now so 20 would be good you can change the hair length to zero and then the only settings you need to play with is the render render as and change this to object that way you have this new input called scale randomness and it will help us vary the size of our leaves on the trees so uh that's it for parliamentary for now you can hide it go back to foliage and so this one has no particle system to it but if you use the modifier panel you can add a particle instance and then you can pick a particle system so i'm going to pick my emitter and then the particle system first step is here and as you can see i i can see this particle system happening but the cool thing is i could add anything on top so i could decimate this i could as i told you there's no limit it's it's sort of a it's become a mesh i can deform further so i'm going to click on size here so that it's it's going to be using the size settings from my particle system and so if i go here i can change the scale and the scale randomness that way so i'm gonna add some randomness make this pretty big like this just to have just so that i have um sort of a um weird looking blob and then i'm going to add a second step so i'm going to duplicate this one you can click on little arrow down duplicate particle system and we can call this one second step now when you duplicate a system by default it's going to be using it's sort of a duplicate copy and if i change setting on one it's going to change the settings on the other one too so you want to click on this little number here and it's going to be making it a single user so these have now become different and on the second step i'm going to type a much higher number so i'm going to type in 200 to start with and then if you go back to your foliage which has a particle instance i'm going to add another particle instance on top so what it does is it's going to be using this new blob as a base for the second particle sensor and the the thing that it it it seeks from parallelometer is just the position of the particles but that means that i'm using the first particle instance to generate this weird blob and then i can use this new blob as the new building block of this new particle system so it can create some interesting results i'm going to pick the particle limiter again this time i'm going to take first second step and uh click on size again make sure that you can control the size from the particle system settings and then if you go to second step you can change the size of it now as you can see it's already starting to be pretty slow there's a lot of sphere here so i'm going to go back to foliage on the modifier panel and add a decimate operator i'm going to move it all the way to the top so that it's being applied on the first sphere before it's even starting to be duplicated a bunch of times and we're typing in the low number like 0.1 so now it should be much more responsive so if i start playing with the size yeah you see it's it's much better now so if i were to change the number down you could see what i was telling you that it's it's duplicating the first the first blob a couple of times so i'm going to change this to 200 and oh one thing i might want to do is on both of these systems on the source i'm going to change this to uh volume instead of faces that way it's going to be generating the particles inside the sphere instead of on the outside so change this to volume and then on the second step change this to volume 2. so now it's nicely filled up inside now i still feel like this is too uniform and so the way to fix this is going to be changing the shape of the sphere so uh it's going to be casting particles in different places instead of in in this very uniform sphere so i'm going to do this by going to uh scalp mold actually i probably need to add a couple more um polys to this so i'm going to subdivide this again a couple of times and so this should be enough and then i'll go to sculpt mode and i'm going to use the inflate brush you can turn off mirror because we don't want to be painting something symmetrical and i'm going to change the strength to 2 and now if you click a couple of times you can start making these blobs on your sphere and it can be pretty random i mean it can be really anything all you want is just to make this this shape that's not totally a perfect sphere and you really need to click a couple times with the inflate brush to have a good result because uh it's it's only going to start to uh make this blob once it's it start to um extrude out but the first few clicks you're not going to be seeing much so you need to click a few more times that's why i was increasing the strength to uh to two so you can smooth things out with shift if you need okay so it's lighting starting to look pretty good um just make sure it's sort of some spherical still so maybe i'm going to use the grab tool with g and just move this a bit all right perfect so can jump out from the scope mode in object mode and now if you look at this emission here you can see that it's it generated um the blobs inside those new um those new blobs that we sculpted and so you have a more uh interesting shape that looks more like a tree um now obviously this still doesn't look like a tree at all it looks weird with all these spheres and the way we're going to be making this look a bit more like a tree is by adding custom normals to it so to do that i'm going to add a modifier called data transfer so we're going to be transferring normals from another object and in our case the best object to do this would be this new shape that we've built because it sort of has the shape that we want but without all the extra little spheres that make it look weird so i'm going to duplicate this particle emitter and i'm going to call it custom normals and you can hide the emitter for now in the foliage and i'm going to delete the particle systems because we don't need them and i will add a decimate operator just to make sure that the the operation of transferring normals is not too hard on your computer and then i'm going to add a smooth operator just to make it it's just just a bit smoother than that was yeah um all right so you can hide it go back to foliage and now in data transfer you can see it's red because it's missing the source object to transfer to the normal from so i'm going to pick the custom normals object that we made and you need to click on face custom normals and um not sure no you can't see it right now but it says here enable auto smooth in object data properties for it to work so you need to go to this little green triangle normals and click auto smooth now immediately you can see that it looks much different it sort of looks smoother even though there's a lot of details in there and you'll see better if i jump into uh my viewport my best rendering uh preview so um i'm gonna change the slide to a sun change the strength to one and so as you can see it's already starting to look like something so it's pretty neat now um we want to add some um toon shading to this so i'm gonna go to my material panel so click on foliage material i'm going to rename this stylized foliage and i'm going to extend this timeline here pressing shift f3 to access the shader editor and we're going to make a simple toon shader so i'm going to delete the principle bsdf clicks on click on shift a to add a diffuse vsef because we don't need any of the fancy stuff we just need the diffuse values now i'm going to press shift a again and add a shader to rgb and i'm going to connect the two here and i'll need a color ramp so there you go i'm gonna click on ctrl shift to preview this now i don't know if you're using nodewrangler in the add-ons but it's a very cool add-on that gives you some shortcuts in the share editor and that's what i'm using so if you if you click on ctrl shift and it doesn't preview uh you just need to go to uh edit preferences add-ons and activate the note wrangler so now if i play with my color ramp here oh just make sure that you have color plugged in all right perfect so i'm going to change this to constant that way i only have a two-tone shader and you can see that it's starting to look like something now um i'm going to want to add a couple more levels to this so i'm going to add a gray one and i'm going to move the white one much further to the right and then i'm going to add a second darker gray here okay okay so you want these three to be very uh close together on the left and you in a way that you won't even see the black one okay because we're going to be using the ambient occlusion to get those details so as you can see the more you crunch this it's going to be getting the perfectly black values from the ambient occlusion so i'm going to get some extra details from here and you can still you can play with the distance here and the upgrade the factory if you want to there we go and for the white one as you can see we're not picking any of it the reason i'm putting in at the very end of the of this ramp is because i'm going to use a second light here that's going to be uh much stronger so we could call it uh rim light and if you go to this light setting you can bump up the strength of five and and that way that means if you only want a standalone if you only have a standard light it's never going to be picking up these uh light values that needs to be super strong but if you use this light the rim light now it's going to be picking out the white and you can place it a bit angled behind your mesh so you can pick up these uh these nice rim lights from a different direction if you want to so this is going to be the base of our trees but it's not actually going to be a tree it's going to be the building blocks of our trees so the way we're going to be duplicating this duplicating this blob is by placing it into a collection i'm going to do this by pressing m new collection i'm going to call this foliage instance by doing this you can actually hide this foliage instance you can now click on shift right click anywhere to move your tree cursor and if you create by pressing shift a a collection instance you now have this foliage instance available because it allows you collection instance basically allows you to duplicate any uh collection that you have um it will make a perfect instance that's very quick to uh to compute and so the cool thing is you can make a bunch of these copies and the only thing blender has to calculate is the first particle system and then you can make as many foliage instances as you want and really won't slow down your computer that much so i'm gonna put them all into a new collection called uh tree so just press m then type tree and i'm going to be picking them all up and scaling them down in the x direction and this is part of the trick to get a ghibli look is that uh you want your trees to be a bit flatter and so this technique is really good to generate trees that are further away if you want to make trees that are very close and you see all the leaves you'll want to use a different technique or add more more particles to your system or whatever but this this would be perfect to make those trees in the background that has just this two or three tone shader um so yeah so you can duplicate these out however you want you probably want to rotate this a bit so it doesn't look um too much of the same and and so you can scale them up in the x direction if you want to but if you want them to be getting a lot of light you just kill them up in the x direction and you get a big lighted area so obviously you can still like play with lighting um it's pretty neat and you have your rim light that you can play with all right so let's add some colors to this shader to do this i'm going to use a reference from a good movie so we can really pick the colors exactly like on the screenshot to make sure that we're matching it perfectly so i'm going to create a new plane shift a plane and um let's rotate this 9 degrees uh scale it up a bit and we're going to apply a material to it so just make a new material emission change the image texture to this reference here and i just need to fix the uvs so i'm going to place myself in this side view press tab and then you project from view all right now we're going somewhere all right so this would be a great reference for us as we're moving forward just to make sure that we're really matching the style correctly so you can click back on your foliage material to do this you can't click on the uh on these because these are are just collection instances and they don't actually have a material slot they're just instancing the original one which do have material so you need to click on the one that's in foldage instance and two access material so i'm going back to shared editor by pressing shift f3 and uh let's let's add some colors so i'm gonna try to match uh this tree here in the bottom right in the in the top right so let's pick our white color and pick this bright green and for this one i'm gonna pick the slightly darker green and finally the sharker one i'm gonna pick this one and and you'll notice that even the darker regions are not actually that dark so there you go let me make this one a bit darker okay and this one a bit lighter all right so not so bad right it's it's starting to look uh pretty similar so uh if you observe carefully you'll notice that there's not just one type of tree there's multiple colors here there's these darker pine type trees and then those ones are a bit greener so i want to find a way to be able to quickly switch between different colors on your material and the twist is that i still want to be able to just use this single instance but you'll notice a problem which is uh if you look at your foliage instance they don't have actual material slot so you cannot say oh so this one use a different material you'll actually need to duplicate the entire particle system for each type of tree which would slow down the computer unnecessarily so um i'm gonna show you how you can uh make this switcher on your material which will let you use the same like just one material and be able to switch between different colors easily um so let's go on your foliage here and i'm gonna create another color set so let's just duplicate this with shift d and i'm going to be matching this one so let's just pick the colors pick this yellow color here this green one and this dark blue so these ones don't seem to change much okay so if you connect your color to this and i press ctrl shift to switch between the two you can see that now we have two different styles of trees but so how do you switch between these two from this from the scene so i'll show you how the we're going to do this is by using a node called object info and if you see here there's this input called color um so you might not know this but there's this property on any object if you go to viewport display that's called color and so if i change this here you won't see much the way to see it is if you change to shaded view here and change this setting to color object and that way you can have this uh just basic gray shading but apply colors for to keep things organized you know so when you're in in full shaded view you don't actually see these colors but we can use this color to affect our material so i'm going to leave this up white and i'm going to go back to my foliage and then let's add a matte operator so i'm going to press shift a matte and change this to less than so we're going to be telling it if the value of this color is less than a certain value then it's going to be switching to a different color so i'm going to type in i'm 0.8 to mix these two by pressing ctrl shift right click and then i'm going to plug this into my mixing factor so now what happens is if i go to this viewport display color here if i bump it down it's going to be switching to the different uh cutter set because it's driving the the mixing factor between these two so as as soon as it gets uh lower than the certain value it's going to be giving either zero or one and so it's going to be switching between these two so uh what if you want to have a third set of color where you just need to duplicate this color wrap again and pick the new colors so i'm gonna pick this color here this one here there you go this one's going to be a lot darker all right so let's switch between these two you just mix the third one with the mixing here so ctrl shift right click and then duplicate your matte operator put the lower value and plug this into the factory so now if i duplicate this again and go to my color property if i go down it's going to be switching to the other material now it looks weird because i forgot to plug my shader to rgb to the color ramp so let me just do that alright so i have different colors i can switch from easily and if you want to change multiple objects at once you might find that it's it's not so easy uh because you cannot select multiple of them and change them all at once so if you select two and try to change it only one will change so the way you do it is uh you change the first one and then you change you select all the other one select the one you want last right click and then oops right click and so you can see it but it's you need to select copy to select it um so that's it now there's another thing you can do to um tweak the lighting to your liking so um i'm gonna show you how so let's say you want some area to be more lighted or something at some place to be darker what you can do is uh add some point lights so i'm gonna show you how to do this let's say you shift right click press shift a and add a point light now this point light if i bump up the power a bit can be used to add some lighting to your trees and since it's a point light it's going only to affect what's around it so it won't affect the other trees and and sometimes you get this weird uh rounded sphere so you can just bump up the radius so it's going to be a bit more random how it affects the thing the tree around it and so you can had a bunch of these because if you observe um here on these trees there is often this very large portion of the trees that are completely in the light and so um sometimes it's nice to uh fill these top areas with some point light to match the style a bit more and if you want to add some shadows well the cool thing is you can just duplicate this point light and it's the first time i tried this i didn't even know if it would work but you can actually put a negative value in there so if i put minus 50 i'm actually casting shadow with my light it's weird right but it works so uh you can duplicate this light um to add more shadows where you want to and so you can really easily add light and shadow this way and so this is uh completely manageable oh one thing uh it's gonna slow down your scene a bit the more point lights you add but if you unclick shadow on all of these point lights you can add almost as many as you want and it won't it won't slow down anything so uh yeah that's it now feel free to like play around with it and make some additions um so you can obviously for trees that are further away it doesn't matter if they are sort of flat but if you want to have some more um perspective to your trees there's really nothing preventing you from scaling them up like this um so uh yeah feel free to do whatever you want with it um rotate them to uh make them less uniform and uh yeah that's it so um hope you learned something today uh let us know if you have uh any questions in the comments and we'll be happy to answer um and until then see you next time [Music] hey thanks for watching did you know also developing an animated series called dino answers we also have a six part tutorial series on how to make a full feature tune shader and blender so if you like our work make sure to check them out and subscribe to our channel alright take care

Channel: Lightning Boy Studio

Views: 683,702

Rating: 4.9820051 out of 5

Keywords: Dinomancers, Lightning Boy Studio, Official Lightning Boy Studio, Lightning Boy Studio Tutorial, Dinomancers Tutorial, Ghibli, Ghibli Trees, Ghibli tree, Ghibli 3D tutorial, Ghibli Tree 3D Tutorial, Ghibli Blender tutorial, Ghibli Tree Blender Tutorial, Blender 2.8 toon tree tutorial, Ghibli tree free 3d tutorial, Toon Shader Tree Blender 2.8 tutorial, David Lightning Boy Studio, Best Ghibli Tree Tutorial, Anime Tree Blender Tutorial

Id: DEgzuMmJtu8

Length: 29min 35sec (1775 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 18 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/sculptedpixels]

This is awesome, thanks for sharing.

[u/StatusBard]

Yeah. That was a neat tutorial. Looks extremely close to the original.