Would you like to create a nature scene in
a blender that looks as realistic as this one? If you want to learn how to create a
landscape in Blender and do professional color grading in Davinci Resolve, let's take a look
at each stage in this video tutorial. Don't forget to subscribe and let`s go to make something
amazing. I am starting with the landscape add-on in
Blender, which is a free add-on. It comes with many presets, but I am specifically looking
for the Lake preset. This preset is great because it includes both terrain and water
surface. That's what I need. After adding the Lake preset, I am going to use the Botaniq
add-on to create a grass field. But before we proceed, it's important to paint the area
with a Vertex Group where you want to see the grass. I wouldn't want to see grass growing
in the water, so I painted the area around the lake. Then, I select a suitable grass
preset and I need to select the Vertex Group that I painted before for Density and Length
parameters. It creates a field that looks very realistic. In this scatter, we also have
a setting that I want to change. Like scale and randomize rotation. It brings a more natural
look to this grass field. Also, I have control of this grass using the Vertex group. Okay. I need a hero object for my project
and I found this amazing house on Sketchfab. I used their add-on to import it into my Blender
scene. And now I do copy and paste it somewhere here into my main scene. If you need help
placing objects according to the composition, you can use camera guidelines to see the composition
better. I would like to have some trees like on my
render. Again, I am going to use the Botaniq addon and it would be great to have this particular
tree and place them behind the house. Additionally, I do copy and scale this tree to put it somewhere
around here. Also, it would be nice to see some trees growing through the holes in the
house. Great! Let's add a forest in the background.
I add a new plane, scale it and I am going to extrude a face to create a surface for
the ground of the forest. Then, I need to subdivide geometry to create a Vertex Group
to scatter the trees. Again, go to Weight Paint mode, and let`s paint mask where I want
this forest growing. It may be some rough mask because it`s a background forest. Okay,
now I use the Botaniq Add-on once more and I need a new scatter, but without objects,
because I scroll down, and here I can choose a specific tree for this scatter. I select
the same tree, it doesn't matter to me now. It`s so huge density, I decrease and start
with 100. Of course, I need to choose the Vertex Group that I painted before for Dencity.
And Okay. Maybe decrease the scale and make more variety using randomization settings.
Also using Weight Paint I can adjust the density of this forest. And let`s duplicate this forest
once to place it even further to get more depth in the render. Finally, for this landscape creation, I added
other trees to balance the composition. Now it looks good, maybe we will move some objects
on the next stage. Will see. So, turn on the preview render and let`s add
some light. I am going to use the Sky texture available in a blender and make some changes
to get nice sunlight. It looks nice, but the sky is boring. Let's replace it with something
more attractive. I add a new plane for this. Change the size to something like this and
add a new material. I have this amazing sky image. Just drop this image into the shader
editor and connect to principled BSDF. We may see if it looks correct in the viewport.
So, rotate this plane by X axes and I have to place this sky behind my blender scene.
Adjust the size that covers all camera view even more because I want to render an animation
with camera movement and I need some margin around the camera borders for the sky. I guess
I leave this sky some kind of like this for now. Of course, we need to use this image
also as an emission just connect to the material and set value 1 I guess it is enough. If we
use a plane for the sky with another light source like Sky Texture, we must deselect
shadows in the Object Properties for this plane. It is necessary only for the sky as
we don't need to cast shadows from this object. Let's focus on the materials. I add new material
to the water surface and I have interesting water surface textures from megascene. This
one. I copy the path to these textures. Go to a blender and press Ctrl+Shift+F paste
here path to textures and select all necessary textures. Blender automatically connects them
to the right socket. We just need to make Unwrap to this plane. Alright, I scale the
texture a little bit. Yeah, maybe like this one. Now I wanna change the material for the ground.
Maybe this one would be pretty well. I delete this material from the botaniq add-on. Add
new principled BSDF and add textures. Of course, we need to unwrap this surface. Scale mapping
to natural size. For a more natural effect, I am going to use a displacement and I go
to the material settings and in the Displacement change Bump only to Displacement and Bump.
We need to subdivide this plane with the Subdivide Surface modifier. Not much, maybe 2 times
enough, and also we need to decrease the scale of the displacement in the material. Around,
0.1 or 0.2 would be enough. So yeah, looks correct I think. So, let`s work with this house. I guess it
is so clean for this situation. I mean this material looks so clean. I think it should
be looking more dirtier and older. I have old wood textures. Let`s try maybe this one
like a basic wood material. I delete all these textures and add new principled BSDF, add
textures and what does it look like? Pretty good. Maybe change the scale. Nice. But it
is still so clean. I add a hue/saturation to decrease the value to make it darker and
maybe decrease saturation. Next, I want to add an AO and color ramp to control this AO.
Mix Color node and I am going to use this AO as a factor or second color in Mix Node
it will add darker parts to geometry we will see what will work better. Using a color ramp
I am going to select some range in the geometry corners like the dirt effect. So experiment
with blending mode in Mix Color. Still pretty clean. I think we add some dirt maps to this
material. Maybe this one. Add mix color and connect this dirt map. Scale it and change
the blending mode to multiply or maybe overlay. Yeah, overlay looks good. I think we missed
the roughness map from this wood. I don`t see Roughness. Here we are. Let`s connect
it to our wood material and I think I also add Color Ramp. It is necessary to make this
map more contrasting. But it`s a lot of shiny now. So, yeah. Now I am delighted with this wood
material. Let's quickly fill the scene with other objects. I briefly tell you that I use
Megascans here and the BlenderKit add-on which has a very large library of models, materials,
hdris and much more both free and paid subscriptions. Follow the link in the description to download
BlenderKit for free and use more than 20,000 free models, and materials in your project.
Also, if you want to dive deeper into how to create cinematic scenes and make animation
videos in Blender, I have a masterclass for you where you can learn everything in detail.
I will show everything step by step from finding an idea and sketch to the final color grading
so that your cinematic animation looks like a movie shot. All the links are in the description,
follow the link, and get access to my master class today. But we continue and let's move on to camera
animation. I am going to use Follow Path to animate camera movement and I need to add
this Path. Place it here at the same height as a camera and I adjust this path some kind
of like this. Now I need to reset the position of the camera. I select the camera and set
location 0 for all axes. Now Add Object Constraint - Follow Path and select my path. The camera
moved to the position of this path. So, I select Follow Curve and Animate Path. Now
we may see that the camera is moving along this path if I play an animation but not in
the right direction. I want that camera focusing somewhere here. I can add some Empty object
to use this empty for the target of the camera, and place them somewhere here. Again select
the camera and add a new Object Constraint, Track To, and pick this empty object. Now
my camera will be moving along the path and always be targeted on this empty object. I
can adjust the path and camera to stay focused in the right direction. I can even move this
empty and the camera will move follow this empty. Now the camera moves fast and I want to create
slower animation. Let`s change the Follow Curve to Fixed Position. It allows me to use
the Offset Factor to control moving the camera along the path. I place Playhead in the first
frame and set Keyframe for Offset. Go to the last frame and let`s change Offset a little
bit and set a new Key. Now if I play an animation camera will move slower. Yeah, but too slow.
Again go to the last frame and change Offset Factor. Don`t forget to set a new key. Yeah,
I guess that's what I need. The last important thing that I want to do
before rendering the final animation is add motion blur. Since the camera moves along
the scene, the objects in the foreground should be slightly blurred. I will enable motion
blur in the rendering settings. Since the camera is moving slowly, I want to set it
somewhere to 0.2. This will be enough and it brings more realism in our blender animation. Finally, I want to add some mist to the artwork
in a blender. Instead of volume fog and mist pass I will use Depth Pass, which can be enabled
for the render in Render Layers and I need to select the range of the depth which I can
use by using Map Range. I want to add mist on the background so I select the range from
this house to a far distance and I add a mix color node to use this depth as a factor and
a second color as a mist color. Now I can use this color to find interesting colors
for mist. I have a video where I showed in detail how you can use compositing to add
fog in a blender and why this method is more suitable than volume fog. So, I recommend
watching this video for more details. Link on your screen. All right. I like it and I think we can add
File Output and make settings for serving animation. I already explained in my videos
on the channel that we save the animation only as an image sequence and never use the
video format for this. Links to this video are also in the descriptions, so you may also
watch them for information. I am going to use PNG format and 16-bit image
because I need as much color range as possible to make color grading. So, this is my final animation. It looks good
but I want to make some interesting color grading and as you may see I am in DaVinci
Resolve. If you are not familiar with DaVinci Resolve. DaVinci Resolve is a professional
video editing software. Originally known for its advanced color grading capabilities, Resolve
has evolved into a comprehensive post-production tool offering editing, color correction, visual
effects, and motion graphics but for us, it`s mostly interesting for color grading and post-production. Okay, I add a new timeline and drop here my
render sequence here. Now we can go to the Color Folder. All Color Grading will be done
here. Brifly, Davinci Resolve has a node structure as Blender. By adding nodes we may make some
adjustments in this node. So, I add a new node and here I make global
contrast adjustments. Using Lift/Gamma/Gain, contrast, and shadows. It`s the same as we
remember from Blender but Davinci is a powerful tool that allows us to dive deeper into color
grading. Before and After. The second node I am going to use for color.
Using Gamma I can change the color of the full image. Finding good-looking color tones.
And I have to mention look at how Davinci Works faster. Those who have followed me for
a long time may remember that I said that Blender Compositing has a huge disadvantage
in speed, but look at how DaVinci works much faster. I change the color and everything
updates immediately despite of I work with 4K footage. I add another node for deep color correction.
Using curves I can even change the color from yellow to red or green. So I want to slightly
change this yellow closer to the worm color. Maybe slightly change green. Also using curves
I can impact separately to saturation, Hue, and brightness of selected colors. Next, I need a new node to work with the mask.
I wanna use one of them here and make this part of the sky a little bit darker and add
saturation. The second mask I want to use on the bottom part again makes this part darker
and decreases the situation. In general, DaVinci is a pretty flexible tool
and allows you to work with the material at a deep level. That's why I saved the animation
in PNG 16-bit to have more space doing post-production in Davinci. Finally, I want to add effects, Glow, and
Film Grain. The first one adds glow to the image but reduces it a little bit because
it`s too much. And the second one adds film grain as the final effect. These effects work
in the paid version, so if you have free DaVinci Resolve then you will not have this effect
but everything else works in the free version as well. This is the final cinematic animation. If
you have some questions feel free to ask in the comments. Subscribe, share this video
with your friends and I will see you in the next episode.
