How to Render Millions of Objects in Blender

hello and welcome to andrew's fever dream uh or the million subscriber special that's what this is i tried to render a million donuts probably ended up with quite a few more so this is going to be a tutorial on how to render an infinite amount of objects using some some tricky hacks and things in blender so hope you enjoy this tutorial so how do you render infinite piles of stuff well the method that i discovered works best is uh three steps it's rigid bodies baking and then micro displacements start with a low poly version of in this case a donut uh use an array system to make like a tray of them right and then you use rigid body to make that fall on a plane i've got a full tutorial on rigid body if you want to check that out but it's it's pretty simple then if you just duplicate that trace as many times as you want rotate them in slight various ways so that it looks interesting and then if you let them fall they should just make like a big mess like a big pile of donuts the aim is to make it so you can't really see through it they all just sort of looked wedged in there together that's nice um then uh you you freeze the the rigid body sims so that it's static and then you want to replace you don't need the low poly versions anymore so if you select all that and then just select the high poly version last if you hit control l and then select object data it's now going to override the high poly mesh over the top of the position of the low poly stuff so now it's uh now it's the proper finished donuts and then it's time to do the baking baking um i say that in inverted commerce because it's really just a it's a it's a render so you add a camera and then you position that directly above it looking down and then you want to set the dimensions of it to be square because for textures all textures should be square and if you change the camera type to be orthographic it's also going to remove any perspective and it's just going to help for baking a texture right you don't want any any perspective in there and then the lighting you don't want any lamps any direction in it you want it to look kind of like an overcast sky so remove any lamps and then just set the world color to white so that it's just completely flat lighting and then you should get something that looks like this which is pretty cool but if you want to make the the icings look different then you can also use that little trick that we did for the full doughnut tutorial for the sprinkles um and that's just to use a object info random through a color ramp set your colors and then they all get one of those colors which is kind of cool now rendered it out it looks cool but the real magic and the whole reason for doing this this thing is that we want to have like accurate like bumps like accurate geometry for each of these donors and to do that we need to get depth information from this render so a blender comes with a depth pass but the problem with it is that it's got aliasing problems it doesn't have anti-aliasing so it's got these jagged edges and it looks horrible so the way around it is to use not the depth path but the missed pass so if you go to the uh render layer pass settings you see a missed checkbox you check that box and then go to your camera and then enable underneath viewport options uh missed and then you'll see like a start and end point for where it's calculating mist um and then go to your world settings and you'll have a start and end point for the mist so then you just set that to be like the top of the donuts and the bottom of the donuts and then if you rendered it you would see uh in the mist past you would get something like this which looks lovely now if you were to try to use this texture and tile it across a surface then you would see some pretty obvious seams because we haven't made it seamless yet so there's really jarring lines in it so this is something we do a polygon it's kind of one of our specialties somebody's job is to get rid of seams and photos and i can tell you there are software out there that claims to do it automatically they don't they they might be well at like one specific thing but there's no like software that'll automatically get rid of seams well at least so we actually do it the old fashioned way with a clone brush so uh we actually use affinity photo because it enables you to paint across multiple layers which is handy when you've got maps so we bring it into there you use the affine option which is kind of like offset for photoshop and it just puts that seam right in the center there and then it enables you to like clone brush it right across things and i was doing this for the donuts but trouble is is when you're working with donuts it's like rings and to create a continuous ring with a hole in the middle across it it's a lot of work and then i realized like working digitally i've got a blender file open here why don't i use that so i selected everything except a crosshair right in the center of the frame deleted all the other donuts rendered that out and then basically drag that across and put it smack dab over the top of everything and i did that for uh both the color pass and the displacement pass and it worked it made it seamless so then if you just reverse the affine thing you've got a seamless texture so all that work was to give us these two maps which is kind of crazy but it gives us the power the god-like power to make anything look like a pile of donuts so if you took that color texture and then you put it across a plane scale it you can see that we get what looks like endless donuts but the real power comes though with that displacement map so if you take that displacement map add it in there make sure you set it to non-colored data which is important because it's grayscale and then you want to connect that to the displacement input right it won't look correct by default because you need to add in a displacement node between it connect that to the height info to convert grayscale to displacement great now still doesn't look very good because this is fake bump it's not changing it's not adding any geometry detail or anything like this just kind of faking it like a normal map would so what you want to do is go to the material settings and then where it says in the settings displacement instead of bump only you want to change that to displacement only and at first you'll see that nothing has changed um and that is because it's actually looking for geometry on the plane to actually change that and we've only got four vertices to play with so what you want to do is add a subsurf modifier and if you increase that to its maximum amount you'd see little bumpy waves going across it so it's working but doesn't have nearly enough information to work with so there's a little hidden feature in blender that you can only access by changing the mode to experimental don't know why because this feature's actually been an experimental for like three years i don't know when it's going to be out of experimental but anyways when you do that you should be able to go back to the subsurf modifier and you'll see a little checkbox there that says adaptive so if you check that what that's going to do is it's going to subdivide your mesh now dependent on your view so looking from your camera it's going to subdivide more towards the foreground close to the camera and then gradually fall off and subdivide less further away which is exactly what you want because you need that detail up close but you don't need all that detail at the back there because it's just a blurry tiny little pixel right so so it's a really clever way to save on render time and memory um with just checking that one little box and by the way in preview mode it's it's only subdividing like a kind of a low res amount you can actually see that in the subdivision settings of your render there if you change that closer like i usually just go two for preview and then one for render the lower you value you set that to by the way the more it's going to be subdividing it so it's kind of reversed to what you'd think um but then you'll be able to see it and then when you do a final render you actually get the full polished thing and um yeah you get some pretty convincing looking donuts finally but there is a problem problem you might have noticed is that you can see a repeating pattern right and that's you know even though we went to the trouble of making this texture seamless if you te if you tile something like 100 times doesn't matter it's you still your eye is going to be able to detect repeating patterns it doesn't matter what sort of amazing wizard you've got with the seamless brush you're still going to see it there's no way around it but i saved this right for the end because this is the closest thing to sorcery uh that i've seen in a while except for maybe november that was pretty nuts but so basically at polygon we've been trying to solve this problem so bill barber who works for us um has been hard at work developing a solution for this um and we're calling it the uber mapping node and we're giving it away for free so if you click the link in the description you'll be able to download it but basically once you've downloaded it you go to file append click on that blend file go to node tree and then you just want to append in that one little node tree there called the polygon uber mapping node so when you do that you go back to your your your shader settings here and then uh where it's got that texture coordinate thing just delete that and then go shift a group and then the polygon uber mapping node and it's going to add in this little node here and that's just going to replace it right now the setting at the top there for scale set that to 15 which is basically what we had before nothing else has changed now these first four values they're just kind of global values you can ignore those the real gold is right down here at the bottom these two values of mosaic if you set the mosaic rotation to pretty much anything other than zero you'll see magic occur so if you look at grid view you can actually see what it's doing here instead of it just being squares that are like in a grid that's repeating it's taking those squares and then it's sort of rotating them in kind of a veroni pattern and it's a simple thing but it breaks it up to a point that your eye can't detect a repeating pattern anymore and if you actually uh increase mosaic noise as well then instead of a straight edge you also get a uh kind of a broken up noisy edge and it's amazing it's like magic it's now you've got like uh something that'll actually infinitely tile and you won't be able to see um see it which is really really crazy uh the only downside is that you will actually get uh seams now because it's it is actually creating hard seams there but because we made it seamless our original texture at least we don't have double seams um and since it's you know breaking up the pattern so well you're not really going to be able to see those extra seams it's creating anyway so but that's the hard work done the rest is really just making this infinite landscape look convincing so i added little hills uh just by adding another noise texture into the displacement info which is pretty simple and it looks pretty convincing but you can see that as with all hacks in 3d the illusion breaks down up close so what i did was i just made a little hill right in front of the camera and then i just did another rigid body sim right in front of the camera and then the illusion is undetectable right so in the background it looks just like an endless seam of donuts uh there's little problems in there but you can't see it because it's far enough away and then in the foreground it's uh it's covered with real donuts which of course you wouldn't be able to see any problems because it's not a hack and that's it that's how you make an infinite landscape of anything so 3d art is really all about little tricks like this i spend like a lot of time reading articles watching tutorials from other software going to conferences and picking up this stuff along the way but i know that most people don't have time to look up this stuff so what i've done is i've made a newsletter it's called the this week in 3d newsletter and it's once a week where i share three to five links of videos articles anything that i've found useful and then i just share it with you so there's 200 000 people on this list it's totally free so there's a link to that in the description so if you want to be part of that click that join it and i hope to see you on there but otherwise thanks for watching and subscribe to see more videos like this bye

Channel: Blender Guru

Views: 15,912,640

Keywords: blender, tutorial

Id: CQ9VmCN2EsE

Length: 11min 38sec (698 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 13 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

Always love these videos. I rarely touch Blender nor really any 3D rendering software, but things like this make me keen to have a go myself if and when the need arises.

[u/SpiritualySaneEmpath]

That intro is incredible

[u/rlege]

Is blender free

[u/4THOT]

Someone who knows this much about 3d modeling is worth their weight in fucking gold.

[u/ijxy]

I hope this person makes infinite money.

[u/gswitonper]

Thats ducking cool! Thanks :)

[u/Minitrain]

d o n u u u t

[u/Master77188]

This

Is

What

I

Need

[u/SecondaryLawnWreckin]

Wildly approachable