How to Make a Rock Arch in Blender 2.90.1

hey everyone and welcome back to the latest episode of just the basics today we're going to look at how to create this rock archway you see now this is a request i had based on my previous tutorial where in the preview i showed a rock archway spinning around a lot of people wanted to know how i made this and how they can make it themselves so let's dive straight in first of all let's open a new project inside of blender and make sure we're running the latest version which is currently blender version 2.9.1 then let's head over to our render properties and make sure our render engine is set from ev to cycles also if we have a graphics card that's compatible let's set our rendered device from cpu to gpu now all we need to do is go tab on our cube to enter edit mode this cube is essentially going to be the base structure for this rocky archway what i want to do now is in my edit settings go over to this left hand corner up the top and change from vertices select to face select so i can just select the top face of this cube then by pressing one on my number pad i can go ahead and press ctrl and then right click where i want to start creating this rocky archway just by clicking i can create a simple rocky outline and there we have it there's our rocky archway not really we still need to do a few more things for example making sure i've selected this bottom foot here i'm going to rotate this on the y by hitting r and y just to make sure it's nice and flat i'm also going to grab it along the x to drag it back a bit to straighten it up maybe and then i'll hit o which will enable proportional editing inside of blender so now that when i hit scale or rotate if i do that you'll see there's a circle that appears this allows me to essentially control the proportion or how much of the other cubes i edit when i change something on one of the faces so if i scale this up right now you'll notice that the more i scroll out the more it affects the other parts of this archway i like to have it so that one side's far bigger than the other and also i'll just select this inner top area here by pressing alt and click and then just scale this down to make it something more interesting maybe make it a little bit shorter and there we go i'm pretty happy with how my basic archway is looking of course the next thing we need to do is add in a lot more geometry as currently it's a very basic cube-like structure nowhere near realistic enough to be a rocky archway to do this let's head to the modifier properties and add in a multi-resolution modifier this modifier will essentially allow us to smooth out to subdivide add an extra geometry to our shape now i'm going to do this about eight times that is hit subdivide but if you have perhaps a pc that doesn't handle crunching numbers super well maybe you might want to go for a lower number or at the very least make sure you set your level viewport down to something lower as the only settings when you turn up to max is essentially the render settings once we've done this you'll notice it's starting to look more like a balloon that's because there's too much of a curve on these feet i'm going to hit tab to go back into edit mode and just use shift to select both of the two feet then i can essentially extrude out the edge or make it much more of a sharper angle by pressing shift and e and dragging them out until i see a pink icon or a pink outline around those edges but if i do that and hit tab to get our edit mode you notice the angle is much harsher now in fact it's too harsh for what i want so i'll just go back into edit mode and hit shifty again and this time drag the mouse inwards a bit just to soften that now if i hit tab to go out that's something a bit nicer a bit more of a gentle transition and perfect for what i'm looking for so next we have to start sculpting to add in that extra detail well let's hit ctrl a first of all to make sure we apply all transforms so that our sculpt brushes won't be stretched unnaturally because we've been playing around with this shape of the cube after that we can head to the sculpting tab currently we don't have any brushes besides the default draw one so i'm going to use the same method from my previous tutorial where we go to blend swap and use this rock brushes photo scanned brush pack now if you don't have this already you can go ahead and create a free blend swap account and just search rock brush and we're looking for the rock brushes photo scan pack which was created by user rubberduck and once again we'll make sure to give a big shout out for the hard work involved in creating this once it's downloaded make sure to save it in a location you can easily access and of course don't forget to unzip it you can do that by right clicking and selecting extract files or extract all files making sure too that you extract or save the unzip file in a location you can easily access from blender i've already done that so i'm going to jump back into blender and i'm going to go ahead and hit file append and navigate to where i've saved my rock brush folder once you've done this go ahead and double click on it and you'll notice the first folder inside of it is entitled brush so double clicking on that it brings up all of the rock brushes i'm going to go through and just select all of them you can do this by pressing a or manually selecting the ones you want and then hit append now that we've imported these brushes let's hit n to bring up our tool panel on the right hand side and go to tool as we want to access the options for our sculpt tool and now under symmetry i'm just going to set off mirroring on the x this will stop it from mirroring everything i do and what i'm going to do is also select one of these rock brushes to use for wait a moment hopefully the thumbnail should appear i'm going to select rock brush number 20 first of all i can right click to bring up the settings such as the radius and strength if i want to make them a bit bigger but other than that i'm ready to go so i'll just click and draw in this detail some nice bits of rock now the best thing about this kind of sculpting is it really rocks okay i'm sorry who i think i am video co-pilot or something anyway moving right along i'm going to go ahead and just add in some more random rocks on the other areas of it before going up and selecting a different rock brush just gives me a bit of different uh versatility with designing this so i'll make sure that i've covered all the areas you can do this the bigger you drag the less detail you might have in a certain area but honestly all we're looking for is something that looks visually pleasing so once we've done that make sure you hit even the under areas and even the feet we don't want to leave no part of this rock not looking rocky enough and that's essentially it i'm really happy with how my rock is looking now so i'm going to head out of the sculpting tab and jump into the layout tab the final thing we need to do of course is add in some lighting but first we also need to add in some materials so to do that i'm going to use an add-on that was recommended i think it was uh rowan w so thank you so much for recommending this add-on because it's super helpful and saves a lot of time it's called the lily surface scraper add-on for blender to get it just go to google and search lily's surface scraper and it should come up first of all with the github website once you're there go ahead and just select this green download code button and make sure you select download zip and as always save in a location you can easily access to install it inside a blender go to the edit panel down to preferences and under add-ons select install navigate to your downloads or the folder you've saved it in and just double click on lillysurfacescrapemaster.zip and once you've done that it'll bring it up i've already installed it so it's not coming up for me but i'll bring it up and just make sure to hit this nice box next to it and of course down the bottom corner select save preferences so you don't have to import it every time you open up blender once we've done that we can go to our material settings and down here if you scroll down a bit you'll see the lilly surface scraper add-on this allows us to grab different materials from popular free cc0 texture sites and import them straight into blender without the hassle of manually importing each individual map of which there can be five or six if we wanted our material to work really nicely but first you'll notice it has this little warning that we have to save to use this add-on so let's go ahead and hit control plus s to save and i'm just going to say this as rock archway and now i've done that i'm going to open up 3d assets one this is another fantastic website that brings together all different cc0 3d materials from across the popular sites online and i'm going to search rock to bring up different rock materials i can use now you can use any of these that you like only certain sites though will work with the lily surface scrape add-on that is the popular ones like 3d model haven 3d textures and cc0 textures but i think that's besides the point of this tutorial so i'm going to go till i find one i like and i think something like this one here rock 29 is a nice kind of desert sandstone rock archway so i can go select the link and hit control plus c to copy that then back inside of blender my lilly surface scraper add-on appears somewhat different in fact it has the option to import surface so if i click that it asks for a url now i've just copied one so i'll hit ctrl v to play paste it inside of there and then select ok what you should see next is that it brings up the option for selecting a variant that is the quality of the texture you want to import i think 2k will be fine for this tutorial but you can select anything up to 8k in either jpeg or png format so i'll select ok and you just have to allow a moment for it to download obviously and save it to your computer now it's done that let's go ahead and see how our material is looking if we go to the material preview menu or preview shading we can either click this little icon up here in the top right hand corner or hit said and just select material preview now as you can see here it's not looking very good at the moment in fact our texture is horribly warped so let's unwrap it properly i'll hit tab with my object selected and it brings back our basic cube shape and just hit a to select all then hit u to unwrap and because this is mainly made up of cubes i'm going to select cube projection here we have it our image is nicely projected onto our object so i can hit tab to go out of edit mode and there we have our material applied nicely to our rock archway the last thing as we mentioned earlier is we want to set up our lighting so to do this we're going to head to the world panel or the world properties panel and under surface we're going to select color selecting this little yellow dot and set it to sky texture and this will open up the nishida sky texture now if you don't see this it's probably because you're using an earlier version of blender as this is only available in blender version 2.9 and upwards but it is a fantastic lighting tool so let's see how well it works by hitting z and just switching to our rendered viewport and here you can see our lighting's applied very nicely i might actually set up my camera as well so i can get this to have a bit of a render out so i'm going to hit 0 to switch to camera view and under my output properties designated by this little printer icon i'm going to set it to render only the region that is my camera area so nothing else is rendering and it'll save a lot of space and weight on my computer's gpu next i'll hit n and just go to view and just zoom in until i'm happy with it then select lock camera to view so now wherever i move when i'm in camera view the camera will move to as well now i've done that i might also just go back to my world properties and just change the rotation of the sun a little bit until i've got this lighting just sort of sneaking through onto my rock as i kind of like that look where it's just seeping onto the edges of it i can also change the sun elevation to be lower so that it looks more like a bit of a late afternoon setting and finally under render properties i can select film and set the background to transparent so now if i render this out i can use it as an image for a background with a transparent background that is so that i can use it any of my projects or even in some map painting so your final settings you may want to change or choose your render samples i like to set it to about 100 something not too heavy i also like to set to adaptive sampling make use of the latest blender features for that and also under denoising i like to turn de-noising on but essentially that's it that's how i created this simple rock archway and of course as mentioned in my previous tutorial and this one you can apply this method to any shape you want to create to make something look nice and realistic as a bit of a rocky asset of course you can use any material as mentioned before you can use paid for materials sometimes they can deliver a better result but you can use any of these free ones too if you'd rather keep it open source and completely free well that's all there is to it everyone thanks so much for watching really appreciate your support and hope to see you in the next tutorial until then this has been just the basics of how to create a rock archway inside a blender version 2.9 man these archways really [Music]

Channel: Just The Basics

Views: 39,104

Keywords: Just the Basics

Id: -RQ7PDzPVAc

Length: 14min 29sec (869 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 10 2020