How to Create Low Poly Nature - Blender Tutorial

hey guys it's Steve here from CG geek with another blender tutorial now you might find this tutorial being your part 1 for a lot of future tutorials and that is because this tutorial is covering nature assets so these nature assets range from basically grass to flowers to rocks to anything you'd be using in a nature scene and the reason I'm making this tutorial is because I find myself quite often making the same assets over and over every time I want to make a nature scene and instead of showing that over and over and over again in different tutorials I'm showing you how to do it in this tutorial now if you don't have time to create all these nature assets on your own I did just release a new product on the blender market and that is the low poly blender nature asset pack this pack is 17 different textures and models of different nature assets ranging from grass to rocks to weeds to flowers and basically a bunch of professionally created assets for your scenes so if you're interested in that check it out there but and that's awesome you would be supporting me and the blender Institute if you decide to pick that up for just 10 bucks if you don't have the money and you like creating things in your own well then this tutorial is for you so without further ado let's jump into it okay so first off you're going to need some textures now I just created a tutorial on shooting your own textures so you can check that out if you want to create them with your own textures otherwise you'll have to purchase some or get some from something like CG textures calm though those can't be used for commercial work but if this is just personnel you can use the textures on CG textures otherwise the textures that come with my nature asset pack will also work great for this so that's a bonus if you buy the pack anyways enough talk so to start off I'm going to delete everything in my scene I'm going to switch to cycles render 2 and I'm going to enable a few add-ons so I always like to enable these add-ons whenever I'm working in blender because they use them all the time so import images as planes that's one of them too go to add-ons and start searching for plane you'll see it right there check it next one will be node regular this is an awesome one to speed up your workflow when working with nodes and the last one will be the sapling add-on so just start typing sapling and enable that one awesome so like I said before you can start you need to have some textures so you can either gather these textures from CG textures you can make them yourself or you could use the textures from the asset pack that I created so I'm going to go ahead and open up one of these textures that I've created and to do that I'm going to go shift a and import images as planes okay so here I have a lot of my textures that I used right here and I'm just going to open up the single blade of grass alright so before I can do that actually alright so I'm going to go shift a import images as planes and here I have some of the textures that I've created and these are some of the textures that will also come with the nature asset pack I'm going to use the single grass blade right here but before and port it I want to change some of the settings here this can speed up our workflow a little bit you see we have the material settings here for cycles so I want to choose diffuse and transparent and now the next setting I want to choose and this is important you want to use use alpha and we'll change that to premultiplied so make sure you check that it's an important setting right there and once those are both checked you can go import images as planes okay so this is just a simple blade of grass nothing fancy so what I want to do is tab into edit mode and holding ctrl I'm going to pull this so the base is at the point I'm going to zoom out a little bit here let me go top view and hit v on my keyboard so I can do more detailed movements holding ctrl and I'll just snap it up so it's sitting right on that little origin point right there and now if I go rendered you can see the base of the grass is right about at that point I could actually move it to the right a little bit here too so it's sitting right on that point all right cool so now what I'm going to do is I'm going to put a few cuts in this mess here so I'm gonna go control our scroll my wheel and that'll give me the option to put some cuts on this mesh so I want to keep this low poly so I'm only going to put four down all right great and now what I'm going to do is grab that whole blade go into side view with number pad 3 and let me tap out of edit mode real quick and rotate that up right about straight maybe just crook it a little bit ok now I'm going to tap back into edit mode and turn proportional editing on and with proportional editing on I'm going to grab the sharp proportional editing fall-off right there and my proportional editing settings grab these top vertices I'll have to check this box here so I can select the vertices that can't see you right there and I'm just going to rotate them so rotate them something like that and then grab and move them as well to be something like that now that's a little bit severe so I'm going to kind of just tweak these a little bit and pull them out a little bit something like that and now I'm going to choose smooth shading also boom cool so now if I go rendered view you should have a blade of grass just kind of sit in there and coming up on a curve beautiful so what are we to do with this blade of grass well let's make a bunch more of them so tab into edit mode and with my cursor still at the center point there if it's not that you can just go shift s cursor to Center I'm going to uncheck proportional editing because I can't have that on for this so turn that off and then I'm going to hit period on my keyboard which changes this setting here and sets to your 3d cursor as your pivot point so now I can go shift D and rotate it around that pivot point even though I'm in edit mode adding more blades of grass so I'm going to rotate this around and add a few blades of grass around in a circle there alright nothing fancy and maybe scale some of them down a little bit and scale some of them up a little bit okay and now I'm going to choose connected in the proportional editing fall-off and give some variation to these different blades of grass so just grabbing one vertice here with proportional editing I can give it some variation just by moving it around I have connected down like I said so I'm only moving the one it's connected to that and not the ones next to it so I'm just going to give some variation to these maybe rotate that so they're not all facing the same way but kind of rotate them some of them kind of go that way is a bit all right that's kind of sweet and that should do it so what I'm going to do now is grab all of them shift DM scale down on the Zed a little bit and then scale them just up a little bit okay maybe scale them down to Zed a little bit too and now you can see we have them layered so if we go command Z and keep those selected I can rotate them along with Zed and give us even more variation and these little grass bush that we're creating here so rotating along with dad to find an area that looks good see here Richie limbless said some more that might be good right there and if I go rendered you can see we have a nice little grass bush coming along not too bad some of these blades are a little weird they might need just a little tweaking but like this one here maybe they're being a little too stretched so you kind of pull them out a little bit and straighten them up a little bit but nothing too bad and you can also grab just individual blades and kind of shift DM pull them out rotate them around a little bit give yourself some variation but that's about it you create your bush and it's pretty easy so this is one of the easiest assets to create right there so let me see what that's looking like not too bad this one's kind of far out there though let's just grab that one rotate around Zed there pull it in a little closer the top view whoops what I do there we go so just kind of a crazy mess of blades of grass and that's all you want if there's some that are too sharp and too sharp basically you can kind of round them off but yeah this one I think is a little too harsh there okay so let's see what that's looking like rendered looking pretty nice so now again I get into the material a little bit here let me just grab that plate pull it down to earth and let's quit out of sunlight in here too so we have some lighting to work with so this just add a basic Sun lamp change the strength something like five and make it a little sharper shadows by taking that down to point zero one and let's give it a little yellowish hue all right so when we rendered now we have some sunlight on our grass okay so it's looking pretty good but it's needs a little love so the modeling could be smoothed out a little bit more still I think it went a little crazy on some of these going a little haywire and you can also turn off this now back to medium point if you done with that rotating around the center okay so just kind of smooth them out a little bit anything that's too harsh looking you can round off but that's looking okay now all right so let's get the materials real quick on this blade of grass or patch of grass I should say so I'm just going to split my window here down in the corner and go to my node editor close these windows with N and T for the toolbar and properties tab now you can see we already have a transparent shader and our diffuse shader because of that setting we chose in the import images as planes add-on so I'm going to leave these here I'm just going to grab these two and drag them back so I have some room to add in some new shaders what do those shooters going to be well I like to put in a glossy shader so I'll add a mix and a glossy drop that in right there and I also like to add a little subsurface scattering as an option so I'll duplicate that one more time and then add in a subsurface scattering node drop that in there and then one last one and this is going to be a translucent shader so I'm going to use an add shader for this one drop it in there and then add a translucent shader right there and pop it in the top okay so we need to add the color of this grass to the subsurf and to the translucent we need to change the subsurface settings a little bit here we're going to take the scale down a lot and then the radius we want to give it more of a green color so Green is the bottom value here blue is the middle one and red it stopped so we have turned down the blue and the red a bit and leave it at green mostly turn down the scale some more and turn on the factor a bit now the glossiness is going to be way too much at that setting too let's make it a little bit sharper with like a point zero two and then take the amount way down and let's do what we get in here now it's not looking too shabby not at all so go back to solid view and just a few more settings that I want to quick add here and this is going to be the randomized color now you could add some bump mapping to this grass but it's so small and low poly that you won't really notice it and it would just slow down your render so I'm not going to bother with the bump but what I will show you is the randomizing color this is big for nature assets so how do you add randomizing color well you add in a input object info and you see this object info node has the random option there so I want to use that random option to add random color so what colors do I want to randomize it with well I'm going to add in a converter color ramp to do that I'm going to change it from linear to consistent and I'm just going to pull this value over here and hold ctrl and put in a few more options in there just by clicking along there holding ctrl and first I'm going to change this black color here by grabbing that little box there we'll give this kind of a dead are looking grass color something like that is good I think maybe a little all right something like that and then we'll give it I may be slightly more alive looking color a little yellowish and then maybe even some more green color and maybe a different hue of green a little darker maybe and then maybe something really kind of dard dead looking a little darker alright so you just give yourself some random colors there take the random factor of your object info node and plug it into the factor of your color ramp and drop in a color mix will pop that in there between our image texture and diffuse we'll change it from mix to screen and we'll drop this color in the bottom socket there we'll want to take this color and also use it for the sub surf and the translucent now this factor here is going to be the amount of random color that the different grass models get so you see this one looks a little bit dead I'll shift D it and it will look a little bit greener I'll shift it again and I'll look a little bit dead and basically random if I crank this up all the way you'll see it coming into a 100% factor where you're getting a lot of random color typically it doesn't look so good if you have it on all the way you want to keep it something a little bit smaller like that is good and you can give the color some even more variation but really kind of get changing these colors quite a bit so something that is cool it's a really cool option to give you nature assets some good variation so I'm just choosing a few extreme colors here just so they kind of show up a little bit better when it's something like that so you can see this is a good way to add some random variation I think I might add a few different green hues in here too there we go maybe a little bit of a bluish hue just add one more in there a little bit of blueish grass cool and then you can see if turn the factor all the way up you're really getting the yellow and the green showing up and if I duplicated is all one more time you can really see the variation coming in cool exactly what we want except not so much turn down the amount about a point four and we can move on so let me just delete all but one of these real quick all right back to our graphs here some of these are a little harsh looking still I don't like the way like this one looks here with that last kink in it so I'm just going to grab some of these to kind of round them out fix them up a little bit but alright that's looking better not too bad so there's one grass little bush and the material I would say is pretty finished on it it would look really good with the translucent and shadows and stuff if you added more of them but we can call that little grass bush done perfect and let's move on to our next asset okay so our next asset will be a flower the flower is fun to create and we use the saplings generator for that so let's move our cursor to the center here shift s cursor to Center and let's go shift a add in a sapling or curve and add tree that's how you do it now you see you get this stick and you might think how do I change that well you hit T if you've never used the sapling add-on before and you have your settings here now one thing to keep in mind is if you go to select a tree rotated or something your settings all disappear so your settings will disappear if you do anything else but change the settings basically so be careful not to do too much in your blender settings because you lose your tree settings so let me go to quick add that back in again alright so I'm going to use the bevel option here and let's just change the scale way down real quick and let should do it let's take the radius scale down a bit too because we don't want this to be so fat all right so to use the sapling add-on you have basically different tabs in your settings geometry branch splitting branch goes blah blah blah blah if you've never used it before you're basically going to be just working in these few settings here we're not going to be using leaves or anything out of the add app so let's go to branch splitting and change the base size crank that down a little bit and let's take the number of branches way down in fact I think I'm going to go just with one level so you see you have just one stick here and that seems kind of pointless but if you take the segment splits up a bit here you can see we start splitting off a little bit there now they're all splitting at one point and that's because this doesn't have much detail in it so what I want to do is go to the branch growth and give it a little bit more resolution in the curve resolution there so now you can see the splitting up and down it much better the other option why I change is some of the curvature settings here we want these to curve out more so change the curvature settings a bit and branch them out something like that looking kind of good you change the variation there a bit too now look into bed basically just a lot of filling around of settings but back in the branch splitting you can do some things like turn down the amount of branch splitting now because we did way too many alright something more like that is good nice and let's check the down angle a bit it does not really change anything split angle you kind of get some varying split angles there so you might find something you like doing that variation again you might find something you like doing that kind of like in that a little bit as a unique looking plant um and yeah I just like to kind of play around the settings a little bit till I find something I'm happy with all right kind of like that let's not looking too bad maybe just turn the resolution up a little bit by cranking these up here and that's not too bad let's turn the curvature down a little down a little bit yeah too much right now bring it back up a little bit okay and I think we have too many splits going on so back in the splitting we can take it down a little bit again okay something like that is what I'm going for and you can give it a base split too that will give you some nice variation if you want might be too much though basically it's a lot of just trial and error playing around at the different settings and finding something you're happy with kind of fun eat a lot of varying looks alright so I'm going to settle with something towards the beginning here nice and simple and maybe just change the split angle a little bit there perfect nice and simple nothing too fancy add a few more splits on to that alrighty that looks pretty decent and I'll go with that so everything looks pretty good maybe in the branch growth I would change the taper a little bit so they don't taper off to nothing all right so we have a little thickness at the end of those tips there and that would do it cool so I can now select my mesh and scale it down and you'll see all my settings are gone forever all right now it's also set up as a curve right now and I want this to be a mesh so I'm going to go alt see I'll see there we go and convert mesh from curve to mesh basically and there we go we have our low poly mesh there so first off let's add some leaves across this well we don't have any leaves so let's quick make a leaf let's just pull out to the side for now and add our leaf for this flower so I'm going to do that with the images as planes option again import images as planes and let's grab a leaf weed one like this would work well alright and similar to the grass I'm going to want to tab into edit mode and go in top view I can go to no I'll just stay in edit mode I'm going to pull it up to that point there so you can see now when I switch to rendered view it's at that point there that's perfect and because I sent those set those settings in the images as planes add on the future textures that I opened up like this one here is coming in properly now with the alpha mask and everything working so I'm just going to add let's just do two cuts in here and let's kind of pull that up a little bit to give this just a little variation a little curvature to this leaf and let's choose smooth shading on that cool if we go rendered we have a nice little curve to that leaf there what I want and let's put them on the little tweak we have here as our flower so to do this I'm just going to quick create a vertex group here go a new vertex group call these leaves and basically I want them to be across the whole thing boom except for the tips of them here because this is going to be where I have flowers on them all right so take off the tips and also I don't want to make the joints well maybe I want to matte the joints all right so I'm just going to take them away from the very bottom and the top so basically what you can do is you select everything and go a sign so everything is on it and then you can come back and select the ones you don't want and click remove now if I go to weight pain I can see how the tips are all blue which means there won't be any leaves there everything else is red and they'll be leaves awesome so those quick throw those leaves on that with a particle system here new particle system hair advanced let's take it down to just something like 20 we're going to use an object for this one not a group we're going to choose object duplicate the leaf weed I can see I'm coming across there choose rotation nope we have two quick rotate our leaf here let me quick do that rotate 90 line Y negative 90 I believe it is yeah that looks about right and you can choose rotation then and then they'll show up properly I believe I rotated that let me quick see here nope kind of want to rotate in like that so you can kind of play around now with the rotation after choosing rotation the particle settings you can kind of play around the rotation of how you want to look on the plant by just rotating your object which is kind of fun so I want them to be kind of rotated downward I want to go ahead and choose rotation in my particle settings here and let's use normal alright there we go you can see the leaves kind of coming off nicely across the mesh there I need to quickly tell it not to come out of the tips like I did when I created that vertex group so I'm going to go down to vertex groups and pop it in their leaves boom alright so none of them are really coming out of the tips if some of them still are kind of like you see here you can come back with the wait paint and the subtract brush there I kind of paint them away even more let's turn the strengths up paint them away even more because they're not listening sometimes they just have to be pushed down a little bit further cool and that looks pretty nice so you can play around the number of leaves some of these random settings to give them some random variation maybe just a little bit bigger there some random size random rotation spin them pull them down a little bit with phase option here this should be rotated down all the way boom and then we can kind of pull them back up with the phase option there cool something like that and if we go rendered you can see those leaves being spread across our plant nice so something like that is about what I want I think that looks good maybe just add a few more take it up a few times oops cube advanced settings there and then give it a little more random size cool so that's our leaves and if you're ready and happy with them and you want to apply them you can you can do that now basically we're just going to go to the modifiers convert the particle system go back to the particle settings and delete it off of the mesh by clicking that minus button and then without touching anything you can go ctrl J and they'll all be joined together on through the stem stems not rendering because don't have a material on it I believe yes I don't have them too so let's quick give that stem it material just give it a new blank kind of green material and select the stem with L actually what we can do is we can just select the leaves by clicking that material and clicking select and I guess that's not going to work if we hit that you can just hit L and grab all the twig options on your twig here real quick and assign that new material to them awesome how's that looking all right I'm not going into the detail on these materials just yet because I'm still putting on the the flowers and stuff so before I get into the fine details of the material I'm just going to leave them blank like that I'm going to add in the last texture which is going to be my flower so I'm going to use this flower head right here let me quick go to a rendered view okay it's showing up nicely there I'm going to go tab W subdivide and then over here you see I have these number of cuts I'm going to change that to two so we have a little square in the middle there now I can kind of grab the corners here turn proportional editing on and maybe grab actually all of them on the outside edge here vertices and lift them up something like that and if I choose smooth shading on this as well let's give us a little more room here my toolbar you can see I have that flower kind of cup like that and that looks pretty nice not too bad you can give a little variation if you want so it's not like completely cupped evenly looks a little more natural and all I have to do now is go to this stem of our flower add in another vertex group real quick right here we'll call this one flowers and this one's just going to be the tips they're like you guessed not that they're just the tips and click assign cool go to our particle settings new particle system new one this is going to be hair advanced we only want like five because I think there's only six we want six we want them to be evenly distributed we don't want them to be random we want to be from the vertices we want them to be from this object which is the flower head and we want to be from this vertex group which is the flowers and you can see the flowers all showing up nicely there choose rotation and then you rotate your flower head real quick here to the side just rotate 90 along the y-axis I believe it is nope not along the y-axis we'll just go to right view with number pad 3 and rotated 90 that's what we want and there you go for your rendered view you can see the flowers on top and it looks very nice so that's it for the basic modeling and we can quick add some details to the leaves and whatnot similar to the grass all you'd have to do is add in some glossy shaders so translucence shaders just like you did with the grass and it leaves okay so to save on time I quickly put the same materials that I did in the grass on these leaves here just so they have the translucency the subsurface scattering and whatnot and now I'm going to show you one quick step to add the bump mapping because I think these leaves could use a little bump mapping on them so to do that you're just going to add in a vector bump and take the color into the height okay and what I also want to do is drop in a converter color ramp in here so I can tweak what the bump height will be with this color ramp and then just take the bump into all of your materials so drop it into the glossy the subsurf the diffuse and the translucent there we go so you can see this bump is showing up crazy heavy now what I'm going to do is tweak my color ramp settings to tweak the bump a little bit here so because I enabled that node regular add-on in the beginning of the tutorial I can just go ctrl shift and check out what this to this bump map is looking like and tweak it so I'm going to pull in the blacks a bit give us some nice harsher black don't mind the black outline that's not going to be applied because the Alpha is taken out later so you can kind of see where you can just tweak the bump map with the color ramp now basically the black area is I believe it is or maybe it's the white areas will be bump and the black areas won't be either way we can invert it with this option here so something you want to find where the highlight is white and the dark is black and that'll be a better bump map so just pull in these values in a little tighter will give you a better looking but map so let's go back to what our original material is by just connecting that back up control shift and you can see our bump map it looks at the black areas there's no bump the white is bump so I think it want to flip that so I'm going to choose invert and that seems to look a little bit better in this case and now I'm going to take the strength down a bit I also want to take the distance down a bit so I'm going to go down to about a zero to a distance and then just take the strength down some more do we have something like so maybe I'm just kind of seeing what looks like with a little more distance here okay take the distance down even more zero - cool now that's not too bad looking maybe take the plaque down a little bit all right still a little bumpy so I'll probably take this out about 0.2 then you kind of see it working a little bit better there all right that's not looking too shabby not too bad at all and with the color variation like I dropped in here too you can tweak these to give these leaves different colors and variation so that's not looking too bad let's quick give that stem a little bit of love by tweaking that material a little bit will give us just a little bit of a darker flight a yellowish color cool and then will give us some translucency with an ADD shader some translucency boom that will look good and let's give that the same color as the diffuse and the last thing I want to add in is a little bit of glossiness because those stems sometimes are glossy if you think of like a dandelion or something so drop in a glossy shader there and just crank the amount down a bit all right sweet not too bad looking so there's our flower and there's our grass now the flower heads themselves let me sit here could use a quick bit of love as well let's just pull these back they could use a little bit of glossy and they could use a little bit of bump so I'm going to quick do those same settings that I did in the last leaf and grass on the flower head I'll be right hand drop your color into that if we check this out turn the multiply up quite a bit bump and the glossy on those flower heads and it looks looks a lot better so same material just your glossy shader with your mix your add shader with the translucent and the bump connected to them all very basic but you can see where it's kind of time-consuming and that's why I quick jumped ahead there now let me take a look at my leaf weed here okay something looks like I could see through that of it I think it's just oh yeah there's two leaves there alright so um I think the leaf branch is a little bit saturated maybe there we go alright so the last material and I'll show you guys how to make I showed you the grass setup and the lead the flower set up real quick there last one I want to show you is rock now before I get into the rock I want to quick show you one of the method for doing the grass so I showed you the mesh grass like this but another method I like to use and this one is super simple is shift a import images as planes and I'll import something like this grass see Bush here that I shot the other day let's just rotate that 90 along the y-axis so it's looking right at us tab it edit mode and pull it up to that origin point there all right around there is good and if I go to rendered view you can see we have that grass thing it's not a side so a quick need to tab in edit mode and rotate it negative 90 degrees there cool alright now its proper basically I want this to be the same material as the grass I did here so I'm just going to take this material give it the single material which is this one and then click the little check box there so it's its own material and all I have to do is change the texture now to the new one I brought in here the grass bush and now it has the same material settings on both of them awesome so you can see right now is just a flat plain though you look at it from the side and it looks like nothing because it's flat so what you do to give this some three dimension is tada first off and I give it a cut in the center so we can kind of bend it a little bit there all right something like that and I'll smooth that out by using the smooth option in the tool bar there give yourself a little more room to work here now what I'm going to do is just tap it in a mode shift D rotate it 90 degrees along these z-axis turnoff proportional editing real quick rotate 90 degrees along is that access so we have two of them and now I go to rendered view and you can see when I go all around it it looks like it's one mesh because no matter how you turn you still see grass so this works great for some low poly work you might have to tweak you a little bit like you can see the base of it here needs to be pulled over a little bit but this works great for some variation in your grass if you use a combination of this along with this where you have the size and some cases and others is simpler you'll get some really good looking results I think some of these blades are a little fat here which tweak that up real quick skinned him up a little bit just alt clicking the edge there and dragging it cool so you can see how that's another method of creating graphs and this is the same material if i duplicate it'll have the varying colors and whatnot so there's two options for you graphs and last but not least here we go we're going to do the rocks so I can hide these or move them to their own layer now so they're not in my way just my nature assets now your shift s cursor to Center and I'm going to add in an echo sphere that's right microsphere is what I use to create my rocks when I'm doing them low poly and that is because they're nice for sculpting jump into sculpt mode here I'm going to choose dynamic topology dyno topology choose that choose something in the detail size that is pretty small no big you want you want low poly it's going to go constant detail and we'll just see what 30% looks like if it represents a little bit too much actually let's go 50% something like 50% and we're using our sculpt dry brush let's use F to create our brush little bigger and shift F to change the strength a little stronger all right I'm just gonna quickly sculpt out my rock using ctrl you can take away part to the mesh and using the normal click you can add parts to the mesh so it's really simple right now I have the mirror on I think that's on automatic yeah turn off the mirror there in the cemetery lock so it's not doing that alright and yeah it's really easy to just take away parts of the mesh and draw in parts of the mesh and this can be as detailed as you want basically you can change the detail up if you want it to be really nice and detailed but this is low poly so I'm going to keep it around there alright so I'm just going to quickly hack at this this UV sphere and find myself rock so rocks are random you don't have to worry about looking perfect let's choose some shading there and I'm already kind of liking the way this rocks looking just kind of the experiment maybe kind of layer it if possible depending on how much detail you're giving it because layering it always looks good with rocks keeping parts of it lower and little parts of it higher right and that doesn't look too bad there is a pretty decent looking rock if I do say so myself now you can always add a sub surf on top of these if you need to for more detail later on you can see it looks pretty good if you had a sub surf on that to get that kind of layered rock depending on your scene if you have the the ability to turn it up and still run defined you can do that otherwise you might need to turn it down I'm just gonna leave that one for now and let's quick texturize this rock now so I'm just going to tap into edit mode select it all and go you think I'll try cube projection and we'll see how that works go to my UV image editor here and we get that and that's not going to work too well I don't think we could try sphere projection and that might give us some good results so we'll try that and now I'll split this window again here just by dragging that up real quick and open up my rock texture so let's grab a rock texture a few of them here again you can find your textures from CG textures if you're doing this at home I'll put some links in the description otherwise if you purchased my asset pack you can use those textures to create more of your own assets I'm just going to use this rock texture right here maybe I'll use this one actually rock one let's grab that in it there and if I go to my material settings new material let's switch over to node editor right here and here we go just going to drop in a new input or ya input no I'm sorry texture image texture right there and pull up our rock texture drop it into the diffuse and we'll see what we get so the UV unwrapping job stinks let's no good let's see what the cube projection looks like if I tab into edit mode here real quick and go cube projection this is a quick way of seeing what looks best and I kind of like that I think that's what I actually went with is a cube projection it surprisingly looks well on the the rock so go ahead and go with a cube projection that looks nice and now we just have to drop in a little bit of bump mapping and a little bit of velocity nests those are the basics so I'm going to add in a mixed shader glossy like before so this would be a slight bit of glossiness on our rock rocks aren't very glossy though don't go too crazy and our vector bump drop that into the height pop it in there and pop it into the diffuse whoops I put this before the diffuse that's that's an amateur mistake right there plug that in the fuse has to be in front of the mix shader' there we go and hook that up right there now I think I'll also drop a color ramp in here like I did before so I can tweak the bump mapping right didn't blender and we'll see what that's nothing like okay so I'm not seeing too much bump I'm not because I haven't hooked it up to the diffuse say that you connect it to the diffuse you'll see the bump alright so I can give it a little bit more glossiness I think and I can take the bump down a bit strength and let me quick control shift check this and that will actually looks pretty good on its own might just bring the whites and blacks in it tiny bit alright okay that's what the pure glossy looks like and then mixed it looks like that so we could just turn the strengths down a little bit on it something like that and our rock is looking pretty awesome turn the bump down a little bit to just you don't want too crazy amount of bump all right turn the bump down and then turn the glassy down a little bit as well now the last thing that I want to show you with the with a rock is Moss Moss is something that I have on my low poly nature pack it's an option that you can turn on or off and it's kind of cool because you can really customize your rocks by adding some Moss onto them so to do that I'm going to duplicate my image texture here and open up a Moss texture you can find Moss textures on CG textures as well or you would get them like force again with the nature asset pack so cooked open up that Moss right there and what I'm going to do is I'm going to add this to my image texture so to do that I'm going to go shift a add in a color mix we're going to go ahead and drop this into the bottom and you can see if I turn this up completely open this is okay there we go boom you can see the moss coming in on that now if I drop it 100% you see it's just the moss if it turned off there's nothing now I want to mix it with the factor of the alpha there we go so now this factor of the Alpha right here is the amount of moss and what I can also do is drop in a input texture coordinate and a mapping node the mapping node might be you might have guessed is to change the size of the moss on the rock so you want to go vector mapping and you want to choose UV plug the UV into that one and plug the UV into that one and then plug the vector into that one so basically this one is the default size but this size can be tweaked now I take the scale up to two which will make the moss about half size as you can see there and that looks good so now if you want to tweak the amount of moss all you have to do is tweak the amount of this alpha so I'm going to wrap drop a map or converter math node right in there drop the alpha in the top node change it to multiply jump it in there now this value here basically will determine the amount of moss you get on your texture really cool now we might want it to be so this moss isn't colossi well you could do something with that by or say we wanted the moss to be bumpy you have the option now that you have a separate texture just to the moss to where you could take the color ramp here use like say a multiply node drop I mean not a multiply a mix node change it to multiply and drop your color into that if we check this out turn the multiply up quite a bit so yeah because of the alpha you're getting the solid black areas and that's causing the bump mapping to not multiply nicely on here like I wanted if you didn't understand any of that that's fine don't worry about it all you have to do though is drop in a color ramp whoops I'll just duplicate the one I have here a color ramp drop it into the settings here and we'll run that through the multiply node to add more bump to the mossy areas so if we go to this and I flip it boom with that little option there you can see now I have the black areas where I want and the white areas where I want the black area is I want to be the higher density bump it's going to pull the black in a bit and then multiply it on top here and you can see it looks like that when it's multiplied on top and now that's going to be more bump where the moss is so when I look at it all together it looks pretty nice possibly a little bit too glossy still so you can always turn that down a little bit and if you want to add more bump to it you would just take the multiply up on that and it gives more bump to the mossy areas so vehicle I think I can turn the overall strength up on the snow a little bit not too after and there you go guys that's how you create your rocks so I hope you go off and create a lot of nature assets and have fun doing it and yeah it's a lot of fun it is time-consuming though so if you happen to not have the time well then check out by all means that new nature asset pack that I just released my first product on the blender store that would be awesome so hope you guys have had fun creating your assets like I said this will be part one for a lot of my tutorials where I'll be needing grass and weeds and flowers created and rocks and whatnot so I'll be sending you to this tutorial to create some of these and same same way works with weeds basically like I said with this grass here you can do the same thing with a weed if you just shift a import image you grab your weed texture something like this boom tab drag it over just somewhere like that left bottom oops that's the wrong direction let me click drag over the other direction depending on rotate it up so it's standing 90 degrees along the y- x I'm sorry rotating 90 and the X there we go and just shift D it we rotated 90 degrees long as that again so we have that basic shape right there now I'm just going to take the material the grass and stick it on there so single grass won't stick on there click that checkbox change the texture back over to the weed I don't have to open it still in a cache here now we go back to the weed and if I go rendered boom you can see our weed texture has the material on it already all you have to do is tweak the bases here to get it so it matches bottom like so adult angles all right and then change the top here as well and just get those two in this case and pull it over there you can add a seam in the middle if you need to control our I just did that but you couldn't see what I was doing sorry and you can kind of bend it and make it match and pull it around a little bit but basically you can create low poly nature really simple with some techniques like effect so now you have what looks like a solid low poly plant from distance that would look awesome from close up it would look not so awesome but don't worry about that because these are not meant for close-up macro shots and then if you duplicate it you get the randomizing color like we have set up so that is as simple as that to make your low poly nature assets so make some of those and then make some more because they're awesome so that's it for now guys and Steve again signing off here hope you guys had fun creating some nature assets and I'll see you later you

Channel: CG Geek

Views: 369,123

Keywords: Blender, Nature, Tutorial, How to, Create, Realistic, Flowers, Grass, Rocks, Weeds, Leaves, Plants, Blender (Software), Animation

Id: gF6qkByl-_M

Length: 50min 49sec (3049 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 27 2015