How to Make UNREAL Environments in Blender

I am nothing and I will protect [Music] Pandora this scene was inspired by ubisoft's new game Avatar frontiers of Pandora it has an absolutely unreal environment and here we will go over how you can recreate it all within blender important things that we will cover are character animation VDB volumes and AI upscaling in the compositing stage let's get started the story is that the RDA is mining for resources with their mining operations they destroy the Western frontier of Pandora the navi Homeland for Navi this is the fight for survival to begin we have two main characters the na'vi which is GRA from Avatar and the RDA Mech we summoned the Nai from sketchfab and we assembled B the mag from the BMS Meg Squad the na'vi is armed with a heavy bow and explosive arrows upon contact they explosively relase a powerful paralytic that disables the driver of the mech on the other side the mech is armed bilaterally with high caliber machine guns the stage is set for their face off we upload the na'vi to mixo for quick rigging and we download a set of five map data components a run a turn right shooting the arrow standing and then the idol we combine these animation using the nla editor the bow is parented to the left hand bone of the navi the bow string is animated by shape keys and synchronized the movement of the right hand for the arrow we used the child of constraints to be first connected with the back bone of the Nai and then the handbone when she draws the arrow we then simply key framing the position of it as it leaves the bow for the mech we make an ik rig and we shoot a reference video to animate over admittedly the scan make us look a bit silly but it does work well in principle you shoot a reference video and you animate the bones of your rig over the movement of your reference however in all case this did not work well because of big difference in focal lengths between our digital and real cameras we therefore scrap both the rig and the reference in which again refer to miimo here we just download the moap data without the mesh for Idol walk and death the parts of Mech can then be parented to the respective bones and all the moap data sets combined in the nla to give the Mac animation once our core animation is done we set up the rest of our scene the ground consists of six particle systems working in tandem to create the vegetation Rich environment of Pandora we have trees weeds some rock low vegetation then mushrooms and finally some exotic medium vegetation for the background rocks we want them to be covered with moss as well for this we have two shaders one is the rock Shader and the other is moss they're both combined with pearing noise as the factor to mix it further with the ground we import the ground material and mix the output of previous material with the ground material using vertical gradient as the mix factor to top it all of we have a looping animation of arran that we import as a plane to put the ecran in our scene we simply key frame the position of the plane an avatar scene is not complete without some big puffy Cloud for that we can download free VDB Cloud volumes from amben website link in the description we import them and tweak the density of the volume to our light in for the explosive impact we import another vtb and this time it's animated with some destroyed Mech Parts here and there our entire scene is now set for The Showdown this is an outdoor environment and an hdri with the appropriate rotation would suffice as the primary source of lighting with this angle we get Long Shadows and nice volumetrics within the clouds as well we now have a lot of volums in our scene and this can dramatically increase our the times to keep them under control with minimal loss of quality we set the volume bounces as two and under volumes step rate render at five and Max steps at 256 with motion blur transparency tiling and persistent data on we set out to render after the render we use this as our background Sky image but we have one problem this is only 1080p in resolution but for it to be a good background we would need it to be much higher resolution than that for this we use a free software called chaina to upscale the image from 108p to 8K resolution there's a tutorial in the description that shows how to set it up with the chainer set up we go to P torch and drag out the upscale image node we load the AI trained upscaling model here if this is the heart of our operation this is the brain we drag out the image to load the image file set the output from output socket connect the name with the name and set an output folder with this circuit in place we start the upscaling process it takes a few seconds and here we have an image upscaled from 1080p to 8K we can appreciate the difference in the detail by comparison for compositing we import the upscaled image as back ground for our render we apply a small amount of camera lens blur and Vibrance to it we then have a vignette at the bottom and top part of the image our render then comes on top of this this is followed by explosive impact we change the color of the explosion using wi co-pilot color Vibrance effect which is arguably a better form of tint effect to add some glow to the explosion we duplicate this lay and add a gorian blur to it we do a small amount of color correction for higher contrast a fog lay on top of everything to give it uniformity and some atmosphere as a cherry on top we add lens flare from the direction of the light and this completes our composite the sound design is very simple in the first step we have the sounds of the mech Second Step has sound effects such as explosive impacts and Mech falling down gluing it together is the main soundtrack with the battle will cry and there you have it a Nai resisting the occupation forces and perceived the hero of the clan let me know if you have any suggestions for more breakdowns be sure to grab the free assets from my gumroad and I will see you soon farewell

Channel: Hamza N. Meo

Views: 5,856

Keywords: environment, blender, 3d, unreal engine, 3d environments, unreal, avatar, way of water, pandora

Id: -JiBysr2dyc

Length: 7min 22sec (442 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 16 2024