Is Blender Good For Creating Environments

creating 3D environments using blender especially exterior scenes requires a lot of work and a lot of time fortunately there are some great tools and techniques that can help you as an artist to get the job done this video is brought to you by grasswald you can access a library of Premium quality 3D nature assets and then use their free scattering add-on G scatter to create amazing virtual worlds in just minutes with blender you can create a huge variety of environments for video games movies VFX animation projects you name it imagination is going to be the only limitation everything from sprawling cities to Lush forest and desolate wastelands to bustling airports you can create detailed Interiors like for example the Eerie corridors of a space station or perhaps a Fantasy Castle or even maybe the shifting sand dunes of a vast desert generally speaking there are two main parts part to consider when creating any environment the first part is man-made everyday objects such as tables chairs roads street signs lights cars weapons buildings you name it which will have varying levels of complexity the second part is nature such as plants trees grass flowers and so on essentially any form of vegetation oh but there is a third part which is people and animals but that's for another time in another video if you have ever created a rich environment before particularly a nature scene the one thing you will learn is that in order to make it really believable you will need to add lots of details and by that I mean lots of objects from the large ones to small ones when we look at a real landscape our eyes might skim over everything but we understand that what we are seeing is genuine when you are creating a 3D environment if you miss out on these details then something won't look quite right creating vegetation from scratch in blender or any other 3D modeling software is a challenging Endeavor for several reasons first of all there is a great deal of complexity with Organic and often irregular forms unlike most made man objects the natural world is characterized by subtle variances and intricate details making it difficult to replicate digitally in our case making 3D models of these nature assets for example when you embark on the task of creating a tree you must consider many things such as the trunk structure the branch sprawl and the leaf distribution understandably all of this can be seen as overwhelming with each of these elements requiring a different modeling technique and a different approach for the trunk and branches you might sculpt them to achieve the organic shapes or use a generator that stimulates the growth pattern of a tree and creating leaves presents another challenge due to their sheer number and the need for transparency and subsurface scattering to mimic light passing through them most people don't even know what subsurface scattering is in addition realism in vegetation is not only about individual plants but also how they interact with their environment factors such as direction of light the season the health of the plant and its age can significantly affect its appearance and this requires careful texturing shading and sometimes even simulating growth or the Decay process to achieve a believable look another aspect that not many people think about is scattering when building a scene that involves nature one of the most timeconsuming tasks is the placements of hundreds or thousands of objects like plants trees flowers or other organic elements to be frank these days it would be crazy to do that manually all of these elements need to be distributed in a way that looks random and organic mimicking the chaotic yet har harmonious appearance of Nature and doing it manually is not only impractical but also inefficient scaning tools can help they allow you to distribute multiple objects across a surface in way that both looks natural and as a result believable for example grass might need to be denser in certain areas with variations in height and color but less dense in others like on a wild troden path trees might cluster in a forested area but thin out towards the edges indeed I would say the scaning tools are a critical part of the process giving you full control over distribution scale orientation and variation blender has some tools to help you with the scattering process but things become even easier when you Leverage The Power of other tools and resources just like most artists who create amazing environments and this is where G scatter comes in G scatter is an incredibly powerful scattering add-on for blender which is completely free to use even for commercial projects developed by grasswald who are well known for their superb botanically precise 3D vegetation assets and G scatter is built on Geometry nodes and allows you to create breathtaking CG nature scenes with ease a strategically planned interface and tool set provides you with the ability to craft scenes exactly how you wish and build the environment from the ground up or load pre-built environments to quickly populate a Terrain the addon offers effect layers to control distribution proximity scale and rotation alongside numerous masks to determine how your plants are scattered and where and you can even add wind additional settings in the optimization panel give you options for proxies and Camera calling to keep your system running smoothly while the environment Creator panel allows you to save any you build as a custom environment ready to use again and again this kind of comes with some free premium assets to get you started but there are also hundreds of other plants available on the grass wall store such as grasses flowers weeds Moss debris and a lot more and all these assets and environments can be purchased with or without a subscription which is cool you can grab this catter Now by signing up for a free account using the link below but creating natural environment in blender is not just about vegetation and natural environments you also need a Terrain to scatter the assets across using simple modeling techniques like noise and displacement or using an the free add-on in blender and you can achieve good results using that but for even better results it is a great idea to use professional anal which will give you more options and will help you save a ton of time buildings are also a very important part of an exterior ior environments unless you want to create a project that is far away from civilization such as a forest or desert and in this case of course it's not going to be probably needed but a post-apocalyptic environment is going to be a perfect mix of urban environments and nature where you can combine techniques and tools to achieve the looks that you're after the obvious things to do is to create the building manually using blender modeling tools which are more than capable however if you want editable variation and the results to be believable you probably want to do it procedurally using geometry nodes or probably using some of the tools and ANS that provide the power of geometry nodes inside Blender at some point in your environment creation process you're going to want to think about skies and there are many elements that make up a sky such as clouds color and the sun in addition to the time of the day atmospherics and so on and they all play a vital role in making a project believable an obvious option is to use hdris these will provide a both backdrop and lighting for your scene and there are many free HDR available online or if you feel adventurous you can create your own it all depends on what your project is going to be on the other hand clouds can be modeled directly in blender but this is going to be a lot of work compared to using some ready assets again your final goal will determine the route you take when it comes to rendering you may already know that lender has two main options the first one is Cycles which is a physically based render engine Cycles is really powerful and it's going to be ideal for final renderers providing numerous options to realize your environment scenes in a superb quality with ease and speed the second option is Real Time mentoring with Eevee which is really great for evaluating your quality I mean the quality of materials and textures and see how everything is coming up together in your scene but at the end blender is great for rendering and can help you render amazing results I hope you guys found this video useful and informative if you did please give it a thumbs up you can also check some of our previous videos thank you very much watching and I will see you in the next one and

Channel: InspirationTuts

Views: 7,063

Keywords: Blender3D, EnvironmentCreation, 3DModeling, CGEnvironment, NatureScenes, BlenderAddons, Gscatter, Graswald, TerrainGeneration, VegetationCreation, ScatteringTools, GeometryNodes, AssetLibrary, HDRIs, CyclesRendering, EeveeRendering, 3DAssets, DigitalArt, VFX, AnimationTips

Id: dHS2I8EkJRw

Length: 9min 29sec (569 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 27 2023