How to Easily Make Rocky Surfaces in Blender 2.83

hey everyone and welcome to the latest tutorial from just the basics in today's video we're gonna look at one method to create Rakhi services inside of blender in a matter of minutes this is an update on an tutorial I did about a year and a half ago some of the comments kindly reminded me that it was rather out-of-date as it had been recorded in blender version 2.7 9 so today we're going to jump in and look at three main areas of animation that is sculpting texturing and lighting we're also going to be using several websites to access some resources that are free to download and CC zero that means you can use them in your project because they're royalty-free this is a slightly more advanced tutorial just so you can keep the pace and keep the video nice and short let's jump straight in we're going to want to make sure we're using blender version 2.8 3 and we're in the render engine cycles let's go ahead and get our assets now that we're going to need first up we're going to need to go to blend swap comm here we'll be able to download a nice pack of photo scanned rock brushes so if you don't have an account with them already it's free create one and free to download so go ahead and do that and then we can go to the search bar and search rock brush this will bring up several items but the one we're interested in is the first one rock brushes photo scanned and you can see this is under cc0 license which means we're able to use it in our own projects so go ahead and download that make sure to give a big shout out or a thanks in the comments to the Creator rubber duck as this is a fantastic asset and would have taken a lot of time once you've downloaded that make sure to save it in location you can access easily for later on the next thing we're going to need is some materials so the website I'm using for this is 3d assets dot one formerly textures that one has a Connelly reminds you on its site now I'm going to just search Rock and this will bring up a lot of variety of textures and 3d models but what I'm interested in is a texture so I have a look until I see what I like and I think this rock 0:38 looks pretty cool so I'm gonna download that and once again download it and save it in a location that you'll be able to access easily I've already downloaded this so I won't need to download it again and of course you can select any material that appeals to you I finally the last thing we'll need is a HDRI image we can go to a third and final website which is HDR Haven once again another hundred percent free cc0 website where we can look under the HDRI gallery and select one that will match our project the one I'm using is called spruce sunrise if you go to sunrise sunset it'll come up I'm using the 4k Edition and make sure to download and save it in location you can access easily and then we're ready to start jumping back into blender let's delete the default cube and instead add in a plane you can rotate this to stand up so can we can imagine it's like a cave wall I'm going to scale it up three times by hitting s3 and then enter I'm just going to hit G to grab and Z for the z-axis to bring it up the first thing we're going to need to do is add some sculpting detail to do this we currently have to add some more resolution to our plane as it's only got one face currently we can go to our modifiers tab which is signified via this spanner and add a modifier the modifier we're going to add today is a multi resolution one and we're going to change it from cat milk lock to simple so it doesn't deform the shape now I'm going to subdivide this about nine times but if your workstation doesn't run very smoothly with that you can do a lower number like seven or eight once we've done that let's jump into the sculpting tab and the first thing we need to do is import those brushes that we downloaded from blend swap comm to do this we're going to go file append and navigate to where we saved that folder once we've loaded it up you will see the rock underscore brushes stop blend file if we double click on this it'll bring up the internal files inside of that we're interested in the brush folder if we go into there we can hit a to select all those brushes and click append to import them into our project now by clicking this thumbnail here it'll bring up all the brushes we've just imported we can select any one would like to use I might just pick a random one maybe rock brush 32 to start off the next thing we're going to need to do is hit n to bring up our right hand side toolbar and go down to tool this will find all the options for controlling our sculpting brush well most of them at least and under symmetry I'm just going to turn off mirroring onto X because I don't want to do any mirroring with Skaal Krush now that I've done that if I right-click I can bring up my radius and strength settings so if I bring my radius up it increases the size of microscope ting brush and then the strength increases the strength of it so if I click and drag now you can see it's sculpting this rock surface onto my mesh now I might mix it up by grabbing a few different faces make it something interesting and we'll go for creating a kind of cave wall with this first demonstration you can see within a matter of seconds we've really got something that's looking pretty cool but it still looks like clay so let's go ahead and add in some textures to do that I'm gonna go back to the layout panel and just split this view in half I'm gonna go and drag and split it down in half again if you're not sure how to do that just wait to see this crosshair in the top left-hand corner and then click and drag either to the right or down this top editor the type I'm going to change from being 3d viewport to shader editor in the bottom from 3d viewport to UV editor and I'll just hit N in the shader editor to remove that top right hand side toolbar and go ahead and add a new material we'll just make sure we've got our plane selected as well and let's go ahead and hit shift a and drop in some image textures we can duplicate these a couple of times as we're going to need for image textures for what we're doing today the fourth and final one we'll just drop in front of our principal shader as we're not gonna use that just yet now let's connect these up will drop color to base color the second image texture will go into our roughness value and the third and final will go into our normal map let's hit shift D and add in a normal map node as well to drop in between the final bottom one just so the computer can understand how to interpret that normal map let's load up our texture we've saved so go to wherever you saved it on your computer and the top one we're going to drop in our color or diffuse image the second one will drop in our glossy or roughness map and the third one will drop in our normal map now for the first one the color space is automatically set to srgb which is because we want that to control the color of our material but for the bottom two we want the color space to be set to non color so it doesn't affect the color and the computer can read those image textures correctly now that we've done that if we switch to rendered view you'll see that our material is showing up nicely if we wanted to rotate that we could hit tab to enter edit mode and then hovering over our UV editor just hit a until our selection appears orange knowing that we've selected our entire mesh and we can hit R to rotate it however we'd like I'm gonna hit 9-0 and insert to rotate it 90 degrees and then hover back over this 3d viewport and tab to exit out now that we've done that it's looking pretty good but it still doesn't look quite believable if we switch to fully rendered mode you'll notice that our background is still rather dull as well so let's go ahead and add in our environment texture now to do that under world settings next to color change it to environment texture then go ahead and open up the environment texture that we downloaded earlier once we've imported this in we'll see the lighting has been applied if you'd like to have a transparent background like I do go to render properties and under film just check this box next to transparent so there we have our rocky wall but perhaps we can squeeze a little bit more realism out of it to do that back in our node editor our shader editor let's drag this material output node out a bit more and drag-and-drop this final image texture into the displacement and we'll hit shift an a and search to add in a displacement node we'll drop this in between the two as this is going to help us or allow us to control the displacement of this now let's go ahead and drag this color into the actual height because we wanted it to affect the height of our rock wall or our image texture I should say let's go ahead and click open navigate to our folder and there should be one of the maps in there entitled displacement map or height map let's drag and drop that in there and make sure we set the color space to non color well still nothing's really happened that's because there's one final setting we need to check now material panel we need to scroll down until we see settings and under settings we need to change to the displacement type from bump only to displacement and bump you'll notice something rather funky is happening it's really displacing our material but way too much let's change a couple of things first of all let's change this from object space to world space I'm not really sure that does but it seems to make it better and then let's turn the scale down from 1 1 to point 3 that's looking really good so now again in Nice displace wall and that's pretty much all there is to creating this rocky effect but perhaps we want a higher level of realism for our rocky surfaces what I find works really well is actually using textures perhaps of higher fidelity that may mean or require purchasing materials but one great tool we can make use of is a quick samaras can so that is quicksort bridge so this is a pay for a subscription-based texture site I'm not sponsored by I should add that in thee do you have fantastically high-quality up to a K textures now if you don't want to pay for textures you can go ahead and create a free account and start a free 30-day trial without having to pay anything and get access to their free library this has some great examples of high fidelity materials and textures that we can use for example I'm just gonna use one of their free light you can use this completely for free as well I'll export that into this blender project I'll just change the material to our new Icelandic rock now there's a couple of things I need to change on here I just need to change the texture coordinates automatically loaded from generated to UV so I can edit it and I also need to add in a displacement map like we do for our other one once again drag and drop that into the height set the scale to 0.5 change from object space toward space and under settings make sure we've got bump and displacement displacement in bump you can see these are quite nice high resolution textures in fact they've got fantastic preservation of detail I might alter the lighting and there's a really simple and easy way to do this if we go to edit preferences and under add-ons search node Wrangler I've already gone abled but just put a checkbox next to that and then click these three lines and select save preferences we can in our shader editor change it from object mode to world mode and viewing our environment action we've got loaded in press ctrl + T to add in essentially a world lighting rig well this allows us to alter or rotate the lighting so just by rotating it on the z axis that is the vertical up and down axis it allows me to rotate the Sun around so I can get some nice lighting some nice sharp angles with that and create some cool-looking results I really like that and you can see here we've got a really fantastic looking cable now I've just opened up a different project because there's something else I wanted to mention before finishing this tutorial you might be designed to use this effect and technique in one of your films or video games you're working on and perhaps your workstation doesn't handle crunching big numbers super well what you can do then to help have a smooth workflow using this technique a modifier properties panel we can just alter the amount of preview or render multi-resolution subdivisions so for example if we're using this asset here that I've quickly created using this effect in a game we might be able to turn the resolution down to something rather low for example we'll try three it doesn't look quite as detailed but if we switch to rendered mode it still preserves the detail pretty acceptable and pretty good all right back to the video so this is a really simple method it can be applied across the board I find it's a lot of fun to easily and quickly create things like rock columns caves and cool landscapes so let me know if you have any questions or have any problems with it and if you like even leave a thumbs up thanks everyone for watching we hope you enjoyed this video and until next time this has been just the basics of creating Rakhi services in blender version 2.8 3 [Music] [Music]

Channel: Just The Basics

Views: 135,559

Keywords: Just the Basics

Id: w8dZl8uheKA

Length: 13min 42sec (822 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 23 2020