- Hello everyone, Martin here, and welcome to this break
down video to show you a bit of behind the scenes of one
of my Blender environments. One that is actually the cover of the master 3D environments
course in Blender, which is now finished. And you now have the last
chance to get a 25% discount because the early access is ending. This lone mountain scenery
is actually the very first workflow I show you in
the course, and there I try to redeem the reputation of built in ANT Landscape Add-on, which many Blender users consider useless. Well, in my opinion, it's
not, not by a long shot. All the steps that I'm
going to show you are of course broken down in the course. And a little note for those of you who've already gone through the chapter, I've taken the feedback
from the early access stage and I've expended some of the lessons that some students had problem with, especially when I did not
go linearly or step-by-step. The way I've gone about this
scene is I first searched for reference images of
the sort of environment I wanted to make. Though the very first one I gathered, this wonderful key shot from
the second Hobbit movie, actually remained as the main source of inspiration for me. Nevertheless, I knew I wanted to make it a little bit more forested, so that's what the other
images helped with. I started with creating
the actual mountain. As mentioned, I used ANT and
a mountainous preset for this, and then played around with
the settings a bit to achieve a slightly more iconic look. You can see some of the
settings that I chose here, and this gave me a nice base mesh. A key part of making this
mountain was adding enough surface detail. And the problem is ANT usually
doesn't give you enough detail right of the bat, so to solve that I've added a displace modifier
on my mesh, and into it I plugged in a rocky displacement
map a which then displaced my subdivided terrain. The more subdivisions you
have the more detail you get at the cost of performance of course. This however really helped
me sell all the detail on the mountain, and combined
with normal maps later, it gave me a lots of visual interest. With that I was able to
blend in several BSDF shaders with snow and rock textures,
and using a mixing network I was able to get a nice
random blend between them giving me this result. And the trick that you
can use for texture mixing is utilizing the built-in erosion add on. I mean, in my opinion, its
erosion effects are not the best and they take forever. Nevertheless, they automatically generate amazing weight maps for you, which you can then easily
convert to vertex colors in the vertex paint
mode, this option here. And this way you can
utilize these vertex maps in the factor sockets of your mix shader or RGB mix nodes. And it's a very handy option when you're using ANT Landscape. By the way, all of the
textures I used were free from the website formerly known as CC0Textures, now ambientcg.com. They're all still CC0 though, so it remains an invaluable resource for free texture, images. Blending of materials and
blending of displacements, that was the main part of
making this mountain work. I had my own settings for
blending snow and rock onto this mountain, but this is actually a great
example of where students were able to help me. My network was very convoluted, giving me a lots of randomness
at the cost of simplicity. So I was actually recommended
to make a network like this, just using three notes, sourcing
the mountains normal map, then separating just a Z channel from it, and adjusting it with color ramp. This elegant solution is
one of the possibilities. You can map a snow to
your horizontal areas and rock to vertical ones fast and easy. Once I finished with that, I was able to proceed to adding
more elements to the scene. First, there was a very
simple water surface. I made it circular, a
trick that I do to be able to get rid of visible
corners in the distance. I've used a vector displacement
sequence that I generated and baked in Blender using the super awesome ocean generator. In chapter four, I provide this sequence, so I did not go too detailed
with this water element. I just plugged the sequence
into the displacement socket, using a vector displacement node. I played with the strength to
make it a little more apparent and with control T I a mapping network. I changed the mapping
for the texture to be somewhat more repeated. What mattered was, how it
looks in the camera view. And here the repetition looked fine. I then edited the BSDF settings like this, having maximum specularity,
some metal-ness, and zero roughness with black color. And this is how we make a water
surface like this very fast. Rest assured though, there is a whole chapter 11
dedicated to this water topic, and it will be able to
achieve much more elaborate ocean surfaces there. Next up, there was a sky
element, which was simply enough, just a flat image plane. This is actually what
I always attempt to do using just a little bit of effort, but adding tons of details with it. You just need to be careful
so that those images fit your foreground when it
comes to the amount of detail, the horizon line, and the coloring, otherwise it gets quite
apparent real quick. Then I just use ANT Landscape again, used similar settings as I did
before, only I repurposed it for these foreground pieces of landscape. At the time of making this course, geometry notes were still
a thing of the future. So I relied on good old
particle systems, and with them I have scattered lots of
trees and little rocks that I got from this wonderful
package at Blend Swap. And then it was also dust plains using transparent image textures
that I provide in the course, and also little ice pieces
that we generate using the built in rock generator
directly in Blender. You just activate it in
the settings and add-ons, search for the extra objects add-on, and then find it in the add menu. I found a preset that worked for me and adjusted the settings like this. Also made 10 variations here
and then squashed the rock on Z axis effectively making
it an ice piece, fast and easy. I then just distributed these particles onto the surface of my lake
using a particle setup. Obviously the final scene was quite heavy. That's however, where to render layers and compositing helped. This is a workflow that
I utilize in each chapter of the course, and though it may seem that it slows down the process, keeping you from the
wonderful final render. Well, the exact opposite is the case. Separated render layers help
you render your scenes faster, or sometimes at all. And by dicing the render into layers and thus being able to
render each one separately, I was able to render
various parts of the image to be later put together
in compositing stage. The way I put this together was, I divided everything by the scene's depth, so I have foreground
layers, midground layers, and background layers all diced up into separate collections. And based on that, into render layers, which are basically presets controlling which collections are activated
and which deactivated. Once you start compositing scenes, you will quickly find out how
very powerful this process is, since it gives you the ability to not only put together your final image, but also to really fine
tune the blending of various elements and even add extra ones on top. For example, I could blend
in these gradient textures achieving a really nice
light scattering effect. Rest assured, the course
includes an introduction to this topic. One that I plan to release for free here on this very YouTube
channel in the near future. So I hope that breaking down
this environment gave you a bit clearer idea of what creating
such a scene entails. Together I tried for this
course to give you a versatile toolbox for you to be able to create any 3D environment you wish. And it really makes me happy
to see the student results kind of confirming this idea. All right guys, it's
been a very long journey for me on this course,
but it's finally done. Well not completely, I'll
be improving it constantly, even based on your feedback. And I'll be also adding
some bonus content later, especially when blender 3.0
comes out and the geometry nodes will reach their more or less
final stage of development. Before that however, you can already enjoy 12
hours of content focusing on all sorts of different
environment types, and techniques. So that's it from me for today. Hope you enjoyed this brief breakdown. And I also hope to see
you in one of my courses. Stay creative my friends, Martin out.
