I'm OBSESSED With Animated Miniature Worlds In Blender!

16 today i want to talk about how i made this miniature world effect in blender this isn't exactly a tutorial more of a making of but if you've got a basic understanding of the blender interface you should have no problem following along with what i did the original idea for this pace was to make a water whale which would be kind of suspended in nothing almost like a snow globe while i was researching i came across this little diorama of an english cottage and i instantly knew that it had exactly the vibe that i was going for in my head i wasn't sure exactly how big i wanted the scale of this whole scene to be so i figured a better idea was to build out the house first and then we could make the rest of the scene around it and we would know exactly what scale to use i imported this image of a doll which i got from 3d textures and i start to use loop cuts and extrusions to build out the basic shape cutting up photos like this is a method i use quite a lot these days to get really quick results it doesn't work so well always if it's going to be close to the camera but if it's further in the distance you don't need to worry about it and you get some really nice results a few of the areas did need a little bit of cleanup because the door handle obviously overlaps parts of the glass and the door the simplest fix for this was to just select those faces and reproject them onto different parts of the image where there is no overlap for instance i got parts of the glass that were clean and i just reprojected over there i also wanted to give a little bit of extrusion to all those metal bolts that are in the door instead of just having them flat but cutting out each one of those by hand using the knife tool would take a really long time and it probably wouldn't look very neat so instead i just used a bunch of circles and a nice projectile to cut them out knife project is a really handy modeling technique which i don't see when used too often in blender it allows you to create knife cuts based on the edge geometry of another mesh you just add a mesh in for instance this plane and then you add a cut object in this case the circle you select the cutter and then you shift select the plane to make it the active object if you hit tab to go into edit mode with both objects you can then select the knife project from the mesh menu the knife projector works based on the camera's perspective and it's really handy when it comes to cutting out more complex shapes that you couldn't normally do unless you use something like a boolean i knew that this scene was going to take place during a summer rain shower so i needed to replicate a little bit of water on most of the surfaces my go-to trick for this was to add a must grave texture with the detail cranked all the way up and the dimension value cranked all the way down then i just used this node to control the clear coat or the roughness value of most materials it makes it look like there's a little bit of surface splashes of water on top of every material and you can change the scale to get different effects in my opinion cgi bricks tend to look really bad if they're just made from a simple texture set slapped onto a flat surface you need to have some sort of displacement in there too in order to get a realistic effect especially if you're using like crooked old bricks like i'm using for this cottage the best way to get a more realistic effect is to use displacement this texture set came with a height map which pushes and pulls vertices out of the mesh creating real depth that can't be replicated with just a normal map blender has something called micro displacements too which are handled at the render level inside the shader you can activate it simply by changing this material setting to displace then if you hook up a height map to the material output via a displaced node you will get some displacement since displacements work by pushing and pulling out the geometry you obviously need to have a very dense mesh with lots of subdivisions in order to get any sort of fine details this is actually a real problem because very heavily subdivided meshes are going to make blender very slow it's going to make your render times longer and to be frank it's probably going to cause a lot of crashes to get around this limitation we can change blender's feature set to experimental mode now if you go to the subdivision surface modifier you'll see this new option called adaptive subdivision adapter subdiv changes how subdivided a mesh is based on how close that part of the mesh is to the camera it can give you this really nice finely detailed displacement and it won't bog down blender as much since the parts of the mesh that are further away from the camera simply won't be subdivided as much and it's dynamic too so if the camera moves closer to something that should have more displacement on it it's going to subdivide the mesh up more so you can always get this really nice result no matter where the camera is in the scene a while back i made a procedural terracotta material for my patreon supporters i remember that i made some nice pots for that so i decided to add those to this thing while i was doing that i realized that the most component of this material would work really well with a lot of the other materials in this scene it would make them look a little bit more aged and like this i've grown into the world so i created a new node group that just had the most component i could just drag that into any material in the scene connect it up to the very end of the note 3 and it would automatically cover whatever material it was in this nice layer of wet moss i'll be adding an updated version of this material to my patreon sometime later this week the walkway outside the house was literally just made by stretching out a cube duplicating it a bunch of times and moving into the basic shape of the structure every time i duplicated one of the cubes i also moved the uv map to a different spot on the image texture just you'd get a little bit of less obvious repetition i used the hue saturation node just to drop the value of the texture a little bit since it's supposed to be wet wood in fact i did this pretty much any time i dealt with an absorbent material in the same like the stones or the rocks most absorbent materials become a little bit darker at least when they get wet i also went around all the planks and i added just some random variation just because something's man-made doesn't mean it has to be all straight lines and 90 degree angles in real life you get a lot of these nice little subtle twists and bends rotations slightly misaligned pieces that can really add to the realism without adding much extra work for the plants in this scene i use this amazing tool called botanic if you watch my video from last week you'll already know about this add-on it's got this really great library of ivy and growing vines that work really well to cover up the cottage i really like the fact that the vines have certain shapes they can fit around door frames and windows and even corners to make the same fill a little bit more lived in i also just used the quick smoke effect on the chimney stacks to add a little whisp of smoke coming out the top since this scene was going to take place through a little bit of a summer shower i wanted to add a wind force to the side as well so it would just be blowing the smoke across the screen instead of having it going straight up so with all the main objects in place it was time to create the world i added a sphere and in wireframe mode i selected the top half and deleted it then i just capped off the top to make a half sphere as it stands the geometry of this half sphere at the moment isn't ideal for sculpting so i used the remesher tool just to give me some nicer quad geometry and then i went in with the smooth tool and i smoothed all the way around in the sculpting panel and then for the top pond i used the clay strip brush just to basically carve out the shape i really like using the clay strip brush when it comes to this because it gives you kind of geological features for free like you can just naturally scrape away out apart the ground it's like oh that looks like rock which is pretty cool finally i just separated the top part of the garden from the bottom part of this figure and i separate those into their own objects then i did a quick uv unwrap on both of them and it added this like muddy soil texture for all of the grass in the scene i went back to botanic it has this really good tool for scattering different particle systems like grass you just select the asset that you want and click scatter and it's got as a particle system all over the thing with a few little settings that you can tweak but then you can press the weight pen tool and you can just quickly paint on exactly where you want each grass particle to go so i used four or five different grass particles for this for instance there was a main grass which covered pretty much everything and then there was this sort of longer wild grass which i put around the surface of the pond around the edges and i used this uh floral grass that had these little yellow flowers in it to go at the other side at the front of the house that you can't see botanic has a really good library of flowers shrubs and trees as well which i used to bulk out the rest of the garden scene really quickly a lot of the trees in botanic are animatable as well you just select the tray you want to animate and then select which type of wind animation you want to apply from a drop down and it'll automatically apply that to the tree the developer of botanic was good enough to give me a discount code to pass on to you guys you can get 33 off any version of botanic until the 21st of august if you're interested in doing scenes that have a lot of plants in them i suggest you snap it up while that's on because it is a really good offer you'll find the discount code and my affiliate link for botanic in the description of this video if you want to know how to place assets manually like grass without using something like botanic scatter system i suggest you check out the video that i posted last week where i tried to recreate a bob ross painting in the time it took him to paint it on the tv show so at this point i decided to add a few little animated ducks to the scene in hubert's already made a better video on this topic than i ever could so i'm just gonna point you in the direction of his video but it's basically just a case of adding a subdivision surface modifier to a cube and kind of extruding it until it kind of looks like a duck and then just applying that texture under the shape add a quick armature so you can move the duck's head around and then you just add a little animation there's really not a lot to it i think the rain and the pond were actually far more interesting than the ducks i made a circle above the scene which i filled in just by pressing f and then i used a simple icosphere as a raindrop as part of a particle system that was attached to that circle i set the velocity of the particles to a negative value so that all the particles would drop straight down and i used a really high number i think 80 000 particles then i added a plane that would be the water in the pond and i gave that a lot of subdivisions making the rain effect on water is actually quite easy using the dynamic paint tool dynamic paint is basically a way that you can tell one mesh to affect another mesh in blender you just select the water plane and you make it a dynamic paint canvas then you select the particle emitter and you make that the brush then under the drop down sentence for the emitter you want to just make sure that the actual particle system is the brush and not the mesh that it's been emitted from there's loads of different settings involved with dynamic paint and i'm not going to bore you by going through all them in this video it's basically just a case of trial and error you just play around with different settings say what looks good and then bake out the animation when you've got something that you like so after loads of trial and error i did end up with a simulation that kind of looks like the pond's been hit by loads of different drops of water so no little countryside garden would be complete without a flag i added this image of a union jack into the scene and i just cut it up with a few love cuts it doesn't really need much i selected two verts near the pole and i created a new vertex group with those verts inside it then in the cloth settings i could just go down to the pin group section and i could use the vertex group as the pin what that essentially does is it excludes those verts from the cloth simulation so that the flag will stay attached to the pole i added a force field for the wind and i just used that to blow the flag around a little bit i took a ridiculously high level of wind for some reason to get this thing to blow around but eventually i got to work i did also think that the scene looked a little bit strange without some sort of fence or wall going around the outer perimeter so i quickly just created this fence that was missing the right hand post what that means is that it was basically tileable i could add an array modifier and i could just repeat the fence as many times as i wanted i set the array type to a mode called fit to curve then i selected a circle curve object that i made to go around the size of the garden the fit curve mode basically does exactly what it sounds like it makes the array go one for the length of a curve in order to make the array match the shape of the curve two we have to add a curve modifier afterwards and just select the curve that we've made to drive that as well if you do everything right you'll have this repeating object that adheres to the length and the shape of a curve then you can just subdivide the curve and you can move it around and shape it however you like one word of warning though it is really important that the array object and the curve object have the exact same origin point or this isn't going to work to create the roots that are coming out the soil underneath i actually used just a few more curves if you add a curve and then go into edit mode and delete all the verts you can press t and say that there's this little draw mode icon then if you press the end panel and under active tool you can change the depth mode to surface what that'll allow you to do basically is just draw a curve straight onto any surface then you can go into the geometry sentence for the curve and just give it a little bit depth to make the roots a little bit thicker this method worked pretty well for the roots and also works really well if you want to do like a pile of pipes or cables on the floor or some cable that's going like sort of up the side of a building it works really well for that i use this all the time okay so i was in the final stretch now when things were starting to look good with most of the same together but i did think it looked a little bit strange that the world was kind of this hemisphere when i imagined it always as being more like a tall sphere so to finish off the other end of the sphere i thought it'd be a good idea to add some clouds and this basically made a half sphere that covered the area where the clouds should be and then in the shader editor i added a principal volume shader and i connected that up to the volume i just control the density of that shader using a noise modifier and a color ramp in the end i actually ended up replacing the principle shader with an emission shader set to a really low volume which is a nice way to get volumetrics that aren't very noisy because unfortunately the clouds as it was set up were very very noisy and it did look pretty poor even with the denoising turned on sometimes it's worth sacrificing a little bit of quality if you can just massively bring down your render times so at this point i realize that the rain particles which i created earlier just weren't going to make the final cut with motion blur turned off they looked like they were moving really slowly and with motion blur turned on everything just became a streaky mess i'd need a different solution so a few years ago just to test out the capabilities of av i made this really simple jurassic park scene at night with the rain and to make the rain for this i just used stock footage of some rain and i composted it after by setting it to screen mode in after effects so i did the same thing here to make the rain just to make it look like the rain was interacting a little bit more with the world though i also added some video textures of water splashes these particular splashes were filmed by inhubit but you can also make them yourself really easily just using a liquid simulation in blender cg gig has a really great video all about making rain including this part of the technique i'll link to that in the description so with all the hard work done it was time to render this out and get the compositing i made two main render passes for this there was one that had the house in the world on it and there was another one that had the cloud and the smoke once i put those together i made another render pass which was just the z depth luckily z depth passes don't need many samples so they're very fast i think i use like five samples denoised and the zebra death pass just allows me to add a little bit of fog into the scene especially near the start and the fog gradually disappears as the camera moves out finally i thought it'd be nice to tie everything together with a little bit of atmosphere that just went around the whole world as the camera moved out to make this pass all i did is i made the world space the whole environment black created a sphere that was a little bit larger than everything else in the scene and i made that a white emission shader and then i just brought that render pass into after effects and i used that as a matte after i blurred it a little bit it gave you this nice little hazy atmosphere around the whole world so with a little bit of color grading you get the final scene which looks like this i was actually really pleased with how this came out it was an enjoyable process to make and i'm actually very tempted to make more of these miniature worlds with different ideas different sorts of environments if that's something you want to see let me know in the comments i'd also appreciate if you hit the like and the subscribe button if you haven't already and i'll catch you later with another video

Channel: DECODED

Views: 317,898

Rating: 4.9737377 out of 5

Keywords: tutorial, DECODED, Blender, blender 3d, software, blender for beginners, free 3d modeling software, open source software, 3d software, vfx, vfx artist, orb world, miniature world, snow globe world, cottage blender, garden blender, botaniq blender

Id: XawAQTT-9SY

Length: 17min 13sec (1033 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 12 2021