How to Create Sci-Fi Buildings in 5 Minutes

here's how to create sci-fi buildings and skyscrapers in blender in just minutes I'll be using some of these techniques in an upcoming video with Nvidia Studio on November 11th where I'll be taking full advantage of the speed of the GeForce RTX 4090 to create an entire sci-fi world the concept most of you voted for in just three days starting with our most hated default Cube we'll scale it twice then an edit mode snap it along the Zed so it's sitting on the origin point scale along the Zed about so and then in edit mode drop in a few Loop cuts on that cube with Edge select mode you can grab some edges and Ctrl B to Bevel a sharp corner on them bevels are nice and sci-fi then select everything and right click to subdivide it once adding more bevels to those edges because again it's sci-fi e and subdivide again and split your window to slap a material on this switching to our Shader editor and then unwrapping with you and choosing Cube projection with node wrangular enabled Ctrl t on that principled Shader to add in a new texture and open up this glass building texture linking description to fix that texture stretching go Ctrl a and apply the scale then you Cube ejection again now to the material you'll give it 100 metallic drop in a color ramp and connect the texture to the roughness adjust these values to get some cool Reflections in the building and you can also drop in a bump no connect the color ramp to the height and drop that into the normal of course with a small strength now for some variation add in a second material in edit mode switch to face select just selecting random faces on either side of the mesh to assign this material to now you can select and extrude those faces out a little bit Control Plus and assign the material to those new faces now add in a texture on this second material this one will just be some scratched up metal now you'll want to delete the texture coordinate node on both of these materials and add in the input attribute node connect the vector up and type in UV map this will be needed later on for the geometry nodes play around with the scale value until the metal looks good you can also connect that texture up to the roughness alright now on to the skyscraper so move that chunk of sci-fi aside and go shift a add in a cube pull the top face way up along the Zed and go Ctrl R to drop in a bunch of loop Cuts now it's on to Geometry nodes open up a new geometry nodes window here in the bottom and click new for some Geo nodes shift a and the first node we're going to look up is the mesh 2 points node go ahead and drop that in and you can see it changes our new Cube to a bunch of points which is what we want now grab our sci-fi Cube and drag it into your geometry nodes window add in a second Geo node this will be the instance on points node and connect our object info node to the instant hey we got a tower of sci-fi cubes now add in the random value node and connect this to the scale that does quite a lot duplicate that random value node change it to vector and connect it to the rotation here's why we want Vector because we want to zero out all these values except for the Z rotation give this a value of something like 45. now to make the rotation a little less random we're going to add in a new node this will be the vector math node drop it right in and change it from add to snap now change the Z value here to something like 11 until everything looks nice and straight on your rotations now if you turn x-ray mode on you can start scaling up some of those vertices on our Tower and forming a unique mesh with geonodes for more detail you can add in the subdivide mesh and drop right into your geometry this will give you even more sci-fi detail then go ahead and scale and extrude this mesh moving it around to create whatever sort of sci-fi skyscraper you want it's actually really fun modeling with geonodes and not half as scary as it may sound in rendered view you can see that's looking really cool now there is one last Geo node that we want to add and that is the realize in instances node connect this at the very end and this basically turns all those instances back into a mesh because we need that for the next step here which is back in our Shader material now we can add some cool details to this material start by adding in the ambient occlusion node with the color ramp node connect that up and crunch the white value here with this data we can add in a color mix node connecting it to our building texture giving the bottom color a nice dirty Rusty sort of grunge color and connecting the color ramp up to the factor here you can see this is adding that color everywhere the ambient occlusion is landing you can add more detail to this by adding in a texture Muse grave texture cranking the scale really high with a little bit of detail and then duplicating a mix Shader here changing it from mix over to screen and connecting it to our ambient occlusion color ramp now you can see if we use this before the invert node as the factor we get some nice grungy details there's a few settings on the AO node that you may or may not want to use the inside option seems to kind of invert the ambient occlusion so if you don't want that just crank the black value up nice and high on your color ramp that gives you the grunge only in the corners so you can play around with the setting both ways that looks quite a bit better now you can add some more realism by going to the preferences and enabling the add-on IV gen if you hit n to bring up your properties tab it will be at the bottom once enabled I don't often use the ivgen add-on because the results always kind of look similar but for the skyscraper I thought it worked really well increasingly Max IV length up to something like 25 increasing the leaf size and reducing the leaf probability is the only settings I need to change shift click to place your 3D cursor wherever you want this IV to grow from click add new IV and wait for blender to do its thing a few moments later we have some really detailed looking IV added to our skyscraper and all we need to do is slap a basic bark material on the curves and a leaf material on the leaves textures will be available in the description below I think it looks really cool to add some nature to our modern sci-fi skyscraper which is always our goal right I mean as long as it's easy it's super easy now to edit the base mesh and have some super detailed buildings stay tuned for my full sci-fi worlds video dropping November 11th with Nvidia Studio you guys won't want to miss it

Channel: CG Geek

Views: 95,384

Keywords: Tutorial, Easy, Blender, Free, Fast, Low Poly, Beginner, Lazy Tutorial, mrbeast, game engine, Unity, Unreal, SCi-fi, Realistic, free, fun, How to, 3d video, Geometry Nodes

Id: c0rb7Ea9oFY

Length: 5min 28sec (328 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 05 2023