Low Poly Island | Beginner | Blender 2.8 Tutorial

hey everyone it's Steve here and I have a fun new video for you guys today and creating some low-poly art using blender 2.8 and the real-time render engine to get some instant results really fast and really easy so this is gonna be a tutorial at even a beginner can follow as it's nothing that complicated we're gonna be using some new methods that I haven't even taught yet in blender using some tools like vertex paint to create the materials you see here on the island as well as some cool new Eevee materials and techniques to get the results you see here low poly is definitely a unique and kind of cool art style that takes a little bit of time to master but has some really cool looking results so if you guys want to create an island like you see here this is exactly what we'll be creating in this tutorial so stick around it should be a lot of fun and let's get started I'd like to start off by thanking Skillshare for sponsoring this video it's a new year guys and why not started off by learning a new skill with Skillshare you get access to over 25,000 online courses with the classes on really anything you can think of from how to professionally shoot and edit your own videos to publishing and promoting your work why not challenge yourself to learn something new this year and with skill shares annual membership costing just $8 a month there's no reason to not start right now also the first 500 viewers to use the link in the description get two weeks free of Skillshare premium and I also want to mention if you guys want to download the finished scene you see here you can do that over on my patreon page for just three dollars a month you get access to that download as well as all the other downloads available on the channel you also support me and keep the channel running so it's very much appreciated okay so starting off in blender 2.8 beta the first thing we're gonna do for our little low poly Island is well we'll delete that default cube and we'll add in an eco sphere so when we use an eco sphere because it's cool um also because we need it and we're just gonna go ahead and change a few of the settings here in the add settings down here we're gonna give it three subdivisions so it's a little bit higher quality but I'd like to use the ankus fear because it has the triangular really low poly type stylistic look the the triangular shapes mesh really gives it more of that cool low poly look and I'm just going to scale it I cross fear by hitting s and then 10 I'm gonna pad to make it very nice and large for our scene so we can do a little bit of sculpting which you're gonna do now I switch from object mode over to sculpt mode and here we're going to use basically just the draw brush for the most part and dynamic topology so you enable that up in the corner over here now there's a little checkbox next to it you want to check that and then okay to the warning there and you'll be ready to start drying now you can see we're off the mat our settings are a little bit too details for my liking so I'm gonna go to our dynamic topology settings here you want to make the detailing be a constant detail this means that if you're zoomed in or zoomed out no matter where you are the amount of detail you get will always be the same when you're sculpting so go ahead and make sure that that's checked on and that you have constant detail now I'm gonna give the resolution something like a six I think worked well for this mesh and then just hitting F to make my sculpt brush here a little bit bigger you can start sculpting on your mesh you can see right now it's doing it on both sides um I don't want that so I'm gonna command Z that and then just over here in these scopes want to turn off these symmetry a symmetry X there so now you can sculpt anywhere cool so I'm gonna start off by going into top view making our brush bigger and holding down control as control takes away mesh and we're just gonna kind of make this flat so I'm just gonna hold ctrl down and kind of flatten off the top of this here as you can see there as we kind of flatten down the island a bit and now what I can do is I can start sculpting some mountains so I'm gonna make my my brush a little bit smaller there again just using F in the keyboard or you can adjust the strength in size up here and I'm just gonna kind of start sculpting some mountains this is gonna be sort of the if I go to front view here this is gonna kind of be the mountains back here and we're gonna have a little bit of like a river coming through here so if you're totally down control and kind of sculpting out this mesh here it's really easy to just make some nice low poly looking mountains you just kind of hold down the mouse button move it back and forth to make a nice peak like that so just kind of making some Peaks here in the background making a little bit of a river here by holding down control to kind of carve out that river where we want it to be looping around in there a little bit and then making some hills to kind of go around it so I'm gonna kind of make a cavity between our two mountains here that I'm kind of forming where the river will kind of split it and go through there's some basic stuff you guys can go ahead and sculpt this however you want really easy though just using the sculpt draw brush here and then adding and then holding down control to take away and if you want a little higher quality um low poly I guess if you want a few more Polly's in your little poly mesh you would just change the dynamic topology resolution here to be something a little bit larger like an eighth and now you see when you draw you have a few more vertices forming so um yeah that's what we would do if you want a little bit more detail I found yeah six or seven to be what I liked the look of so go ahead and leave it whatever you want though okay so with just a little bit of sculpting you can see I've come up with a nice little terraformed mesh here and you can switch to your smooth brush by hitting s we're just selecting it here and kind of smoothing out some of those vs. too if you got a little bit too jagged in some places for your liking but I kind of like a little bit of the jagged look as well so I'm gonna leave it at that for now in the last bit of terraforming I'm gonna do back in our draw brush here is I'm gonna turn the dynamic topology down a bit down to something like three so it's less detail and then use this for the underside a little bit and using control and clicking and we kind of carve away at this a little bit just to kind of make it look like chunk of Earth I found it kind of cool and yeah you don't need as many vertices for this so I thought it'd look kind of cool to have it be a little bit more low-poly what you didn't really even need then detail at all so that's kind of what I'm doing here just kind of carving away at it a little bit to make it look a little bit more like a chunk of Earth alright there we have it just a little bit of sculpting on the base that's looking just about right you can tweak this as much as you want but that will do it for the basic sculpting here now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna add one more mesh and I'm also going to turn on a few shading options but then blooded 2.8 to kind of make this viewport look even nicer just by turning on the cavity right there and these shadow options here you can see that you get some nice cool-looking effects right in your viewport so it just makes a little bit cleaner to work with and I thought it looked a little bit nicer so now what I'm gonna do is I'm going to add in a plane we're gonna scale this plane up so it's a little bit larger than our island and then we're gonna grab it along these that axes until it fills in the cavities that we want on our mesh for that water so like I said I was kind of carving out a little bit of an area or some water and you can see now that we kind of have that filling in there nicely but there's a few areas that maybe I don't want water that's kind of filled in and so to fix that now you would just do a little bit of touch-up on the sculpting where you wanted the ground to be a little bit more visible so here we have it now just kind of deleting a little bit of the mesh where I want some more water to be and then adding a little bit more mesh where I'd like there to be less water so pretty simple and this is kind of a nice way to form where you want your water to be but I'm happy with that now and I'm just going to leave it as is and let's go ahead and finish up that water mesh so for the water what I'm going to do is go to object mode here select that water mesh go to top view and then I'm gonna hit Z to go into wireframe so we can kind of see through it with our ground here and I want the water to be kind of pouring off this side where I made it right here so I'm gonna go to edit mode and you can see this is where I want my waterfall to kind of be I'm gonna grab these two vertices grab them along the Y or X axes and just line them up kind of with the edge of the mesh this doesn't have to be perfect because we're going to be doing just a little bit of sculpting on this as well and then strewed it down along these that axes there just to kind of have it pouring over the edge cool so if I go back to object mode now and go to solid view by hitting Z and then choosing solid so we're going to do now is just kind of cut the mesh back where I don't need it and to do this I'm just gonna use the knife tool and go to edit mode and edit mode all you have to do is hit K to use your knife tool and I'm just going to click where I don't need the mesh and then start making clicks around the perimeter of my my island here so cutting off all the excess water outside of the island all the way around here something like that and then right to where that waterfall is and then you can hit return once you have that and you can see that you have a face in the middle and then a face on the outside I'm gonna grab face select here grab our outside face here and you can see that we also want just two cuts along here I can do that in a moment though for now I'm just gonna hit X and hit delete faces so we have the water and the inside there so I'm just gonna grab that knife tool and grab the vertices at the bottom here pulling it up towards the top hitting return we can cut these to be a little more straight later right there and we can now just delete these two faces as well so switching to face select there hit X and delete that face and hit X and delete that face so we have the water kind of pouring over there now we just have to do a little bit of sculpting on the water so we go to scope mode here enable dynamic topology again set it to seven and now I can just kind of sculpt the water to be coming over the rocks here where I want to be and it also gives it that nice low poly look again I'm just kind of cutting the water back here and then just a little bit of detail over the water here to kind of give it that low poly look is cool you can come back then and smooth it just a little bit and that's looking pretty cool now if you want to make the stream just a little bit thinner here you can switch to smooth and just kind of smooth any edges there lightly touching it to make it a little bit skinnier and there's our flowing water so that looks pretty cool and that should be all we really need to do for that so now let's go ahead and do some lighting and rendering on our low poly Island here so first let's set up the lighting the lighting is really important or the low-poly seen as it gives it that coolest aspect I think so lighting is super important and wouldn't use our little spotlight here and just turn it into a Sun lamp so we do this we're just gonna grab our lamp settings down here grab Sun and then what you can do let me make this a little bit bigger here and as we leave the energy at 10 but I'm gonna give it a little bit of a warmer looking color so a bit of an orange color and then just scrolling down into these shadow settings here all the way down we have contact shadows if I let give myself a little bit more room here you want to go ahead and enable contact shadows as well and now when you switch to the rendered view up here and you rotate this along this is that acts as you can see that we're controlling these Sun angles I'm just kind of rotating it to kind of hit the mountains at the side angle there so giving it just kind of a late afternoon sunlight angle something like that makes it look nice and pretty and that's good for the main sunlight maybe making it just a little bit brighter a little less orangie something around around there looks nice a little bit of a reddish shoe and now what I'm going to do is I'm going to open up an HDR so open up the HDR we're just going to go to our world settings here I'm going to choose use nodes and then for the background here color when I click that little drop box so we can grab the environment texture and then for the environment texture we're just gonna open up an HDR this one's from HDR Haven and it's the grand Cavin and it's the Korean Canyon I'm just gonna use the 3k version not Grand Haven whatever I said go ahead and open that up and you can see that we have some nice HDR lighting going on here and you can also then in your Eevee settings here up in the render settings go ahead and enable screen space reflections so go ahead and make sure that's checked and we have some nice lighting here for our scene so let's go ahead now and give a few materials to our landscape so to start I want to give a material to our water here because it's really not standing out from everything else someone grabbed our water there and I'm going to split our window here so we can open up a shader editor so here I'm going to grab a new window up in the corner here and change it to shader editor if I hit end I can close off this extra tab that I don't need right now and I'm just going to click new material so up on top there you can see that we have a new material and this is just a basic principle shader and it's really all we need for the basics of all these materials is we're not gonna be using much nodes so if you don't like no it's this tutorials for you because there's gonna be very simple materials so the first material is just going to be a greenish blue water here we're gonna go for a green blue somewhat in the middle there and now I'm just gonna add a few notes not many at all so we're just gonna go shift a and add in a mix shader' here this will allow us to mix a little bit of transparency in with our water to give it a little bit of that see-through look so now I'm just gonna go shift day one more time I'm going to add in the transparent node go ahead and connect this to the bottom and you won't really see anything happen until let me make our window just a little bit bigger here you hit n to bring up your property tabs and you can see you have some blend settings here right now it's set to opaque we want to choose alpha blend and this will allow us to use some transparency and now you can see you can kind of see through that water nicely so that's pretty cool and maybe you don't want a whole point 5 amount of the transparency so you can turn that down to about 0.35 just for a little bit of transparency and that's looking very nice the last thing I did is just duplicate this mix shader' one more time and then shift a add in a new shader this one's just going to be a glossy shader and we connect this to the bottom socket and we're going to change it from the GG x over to just a sharp reflection and you can see that gives us some really sharp glossy reflections and we're just going to turn down the amount here to be about 8.1 or a point to someone low and that just gives us a nice little water material okay so now let's add some material to our little island itself and for this we're gonna be using a new method that I actually haven't even taught yet on the channel and it's called vertice paint or vertex paint in my materials tap I'm going to go ahead and click new I'm gonna have a new material and then in object mode you can go to vertex paint here and up here you can see we have a few basic paint settings I'm just going to grab a dirt color so we'll make it just kind of a nice brown color here make you brush a little bit bigger with F and here you can see I'm just painting right over my mesh painting those Versys in whatever color I want so I'm just gonna go ahead and give them all this dark brown sort of material real quick now the one thing you might notice is that this gives you kind of a feathered paint and this is not really what I wanted for the coloring of my scene because for the low-poly I like this style of sharp sort of edges and this kind of fades the edges a little bit and that kind of took away from it a little bit so I don't really care for that aspect of it but what I found out you can do is you can actually do it where you can just paint individual faces I'm gonna show you guys how to do that in a second first as quick get our material set up here so you can see if the color is there in vertex paint but if we went to object mode the color isn't there and that's because we simply need to go ahead and add one note here it's an input attribute node go ahead and drop it in right here and in the factor we're just going to go color mining the Capitals so a capital C and then just oh L just like we have here so for the color is just going to be C oh L and if you want to see the name of your vertex group over in the object data here towards the bottom you can see that the vertex color is color so we're just naming it the same as the vertex color there right here in our attribute node and now we can just connect that to the base color and have that color coming on to our mesh so that's pretty cool and now let's go ahead and paint a few extra details to our vertice color now to do this we're just going to we can close this off actually because that's what's going to be working in the background let's save our project and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go back to vertex paint here and to paint individual faces you have to first go to edit mode I'm gonna hit tab to go to edit mode I'm gonna make sure that I have face select mode up here checked then we're going to double tap a to unselect it and now I'm going to go ahead and paint in the areas that I want maybe the mountain peaks I'll do first so I'm gonna hit C on my keyboard and I can do a circle selection now so I'm just going to kind of grab the peaks of some of these mountains here that I want some white snow on and you can use C to select and then middle mouse button to unselect so I'm just selecting some of these with C and going and having left clicking and using my middle mouse wheel to unselect the ones that I don't want selected so just a few basic selections here on top of those Peaks not what I can do is if I go back to vertex pane and choose this little option here face select masking for painting so go ahead and check that and now you can see that we just have those faces selected available for painting and what you can do now is you can just go paint and click set vertex colors or shift K and that will go ahead and assign whatever color you have here to those so I'm gonna make this a nice white color almost 100% white maybe just a little bit blue and now I can go ahead and click paint step vertex colors and you can see that those are the colors of the peaks now that's pretty cool I might want to make this just a little bit less blue actually and then do that again shift K and paint that that color now if I went back to object mode you can see we have those vertices painted and there are a nice sharp edges like I want for our low poly scene so that's pretty cool and I think I said pretty cool pretty cool a few times I might have said that more than once so now going back to vertex paint we're just gonna do this a few times when we tap into edit mode select a few faces this time I'll do some grassy patches so just kind of going wrong and selecting the areas that I want some grass to be showing up on just a few by making your brush nice and small with the scroll wheel and then also using the middle mouse button like I said to kind of cut back on some of the amounts and that looks pretty good a little bit back there and now what we can do is the same process of just going back into vertex paint here so going vertex paint and then selecting the code that we want for that grass a nice sort of darkish green here and then just going paint set vertex colors and we have that paint right over that might want to choose a little bit less green of a material as that's just a little overpowering do it again shift K and that looks pretty good back in object mode you can see we have some grass painted in there and a quick shortcut if you want to use the C select option you can do that right inside vertex paint just hitting C and you can see you have a circle selection showing up again and now you can just click a little bit across here where you maybe want a different shade of rock or something here then after right-clicking out of the circle select option you can go ahead and choose your color here so maybe just a darker gray and then go shift K and there you have your colors already added in so it's pretty quick you don't even have to go to edit mode if you want to just use Circle select option and now you can see when we go back to our mode that we have some nice little low poly materials coming over here and this is all done with one material instead of making a whole bunch of different materials it's all painted in with just one single material so that's great for our little island we have some nice materials I also just set up a different material kind of for the base here changing colors to a little bit darker kind of give it the look of like a chunk of dirt but I'm liking the way this is looking we have our water and our island now let's go ahead and decorate it with a few trees so to make some of these trees let me go ahead and just first hide our objects here so it's not in the way and hit H and I'm going to go back to our solid view here I'm gonna go shift s to be able to snap our cursor to the world origin there in the center now I'm just gonna go shift a and add in a cube so grabbing our cube and tapping into edit mode I want to select vertices select here and then I can go alt em and then just merge at Center so we only have a single vertice now so I'm just going to hit E and extrude that versity up and just make a very basic tree so I'm making a little bit of a trunk here extruding it up now I'm gonna take the branch here kind of split it out a little bit maybe go to different directions with these and then just one more extrude out here for another branch now if I grab my middle mouse wheel to kind of paint around it you can see it's all 2d and I'm gonna make this a little bit 3d by grabbing some of these vertices and just stretching them out in both directions so we have a little bit more perspective going on on our tree here and that just makes it look a little bit cooler and now what I'm gonna do is I'm going to use the skin modifier to make this solid so going to our modifiers tab right here you can add modifier I'm going to add the skin modifier so here you can see it already does did most of the work even giving us a nice thick mesh here I'm just going to tap into edit mode grab the ends of all those branches now and then with proportional editing enabled I'm gonna grab this option right here which is proportional editing this just allows you to adjust something and it will scale everything else proportionately basically what it says and I'm gonna hit ctrl a to scale down the radius of these branches and then using my mouse wheel to make that proportional editing size just a little bit bigger I'm gonna scale it all down to something like that so we have a nice little treat and a little trunk here you might want to scale this one down a little bit more it's by itself here and the scale this went up just a little bit so you have that nice kind of thick trunk going up into a few simple tree branches and that's really all you have to do so let me go ahead and turn that off so it looks a little bit better and now you're just going to apply that skin modifier and if you tap into edit mode you can see there's a lot more vertices than we need and it's also all squares it's all faces and I like to make it triangular for the style of low-poly so I'm gonna do is I'm gonna add a modifier and we're gonna use the decimate modifier so I'm gonna make this a little bit bigger so you can see this option here and the choose triangulate and then I'm gonna take the ratio all the way down to something like 8.3 to 0.25 all the way down until we can see that it's starting to give us some triangular shapes but not really ruin the mesh too much so right around here looks pretty good right around at 1.4 for this tree it'll vary a little bit on your tree itself and so you can just hit apply then now if you tabata edit mode you can see you have some triangular faces and it's much much smaller less low-poly so for this we can give it a basic material we shouldn't grab our materials tab here click new material and then for the base color I'm just gonna give it a little bit a V Brown sort of color something that looks nice if I switch to our rendered view here you can see we have that brown tree trunk color the one thing you can do for your trunk here is add one more material go ahead and click new then just give it a base color of something a little darker so a little bit of a darker Brown maybe and then tabbing into edit mode grabbing our face select tool here just grabbing some of these faces and giving it the darker color here by hitting assign and grabbing that material okay so now we have the basic tree trunk let's add some nice low poly branches to that and for this I'm just gonna place my cursor on the tip of that branch there go shift a we're gonna add in our favorite object the ICO sphere so this is a little bit higher poly than we need so you can drop down your setting tab right here and make the subdivisions just one and now I'm gonna go ahead and scale that down a little bit Tabata edit mode and we're gonna duplicate this over - some of the other branches here I'm just gonna hit shift D you can also turn off your proportional editing now I'm just gonna hit a shifty pulling it over to that branch just panning around with my middle mouse wheel here and then double tapping R to give it some rotation and then using s to give it some of its own scale I'm gonna go ahead and place that right there shift D again pull it over there scale this one up even a little bit bigger that's kind of the center of the tree there and then shift D it one more time onto this branch here and scale it down a bit again giving it a little bit of rotation and that looks pretty cool what you can do is you can kind of scale this one down a little bit more and then duplicate it and give it just a nice little second one next to it find that look kind of cool and cute but there's your basic low poly tree you can do a little bit of sculpting on this if you'd like with dynamic topology again of course enable that set the resolution down to about something like a 1 and then grab your draw brush right here hit F to make a little bit bigger and you can kind of sculpt this a little bit as well just to give it some random sort of not so symmetrical looking tree branches and because we duplicated these all in edit mode we can go ahead and edit them all at the same time now in sculpt mode so I'm just kind of drawing and taking away a little bit of the mesh here and there so with that said and done I can jump back into object mode here and we can give that its own little cute tree material and I'm just going to make another material here to give it a little bit of variation as well just by making a darker green material and tapping into edit mode grabbing a few of these branches and assigning the darker material to it so there's a little bit of change between the two of these I thought that looks kind of cute and that's our little low poly tree so once it does the tree you can grab the top greenery there and then shift right-click the bottom and then just take control J to make it a single object I'm just going to grab this and move it off to the left here a little bit I want to make one more tree object for our scene I'm gonna hit shift a and add in a plane so just grab this plane down here I'm going to tap into edit mode or I can scale it down a bunch and then just extrude it by hitting E pulling it straight up to about that size and then hitting s to scale it down nice and small I'll hit ctrl R and put one more cut in here by using my left mouse and just blew me up and down let's scale it down a little bit as well now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna place my cursor towards the bottom there I win your shift a and add in a Nyquist fear again because we love echoes fears around here and so then tell me an edit mode here I'm going to use this IQ sphere and I'm gonna first just hide my background object here because I don't want to edit that anymore so I'm gonna hit L just select the whole mesh there and then H to hide it now grabbing face select mode I'm going to use C to grab all of the faces the bottom two thirds or so of the ecosphere just leaving these on top here so you want to make sure you grab all of these you can check this box up here to be able to select the faces on the other side of the mesh there and then you can uncheck it once you're done now I'm just gonna hit X and delete those faces so we're left with just this so now I can go ahead and hit option H to bring my trunk back and this is going to be the base of our pine tree so moving this over our trunk a little bit more here going in the front view with number pad one and scaling it up a bit something like fats will work I'm gonna grab our edge select and then right click holding alt down to select the edge ring around the bottom there now I can just hit F to fill that in and we have a solid looking pine tree like shape so taking this now I'm just going to duplicate it pull it up double tap R to rotate it a little bit and then scale it down and repeat this step a few times and there we have a basic little pine tree you can go ahead and grab some of these and scale it along the Zed maybe and pull it up just a little bit higher to give yourself a little bit more trunk and then scaling along the set again maybe double tapping R to rotate them just so you have some nice variation now this just needs its own simple material I'm give it a bit of a darker green as the pine tree is usually a little bit of a darker green here and then we're gonna give it one more material this one is just going to be the brown material for the the trunk of course Ducker and then tab into edit mode hit l with the cursor over that trunk so it looks just the trunk and we can assign that dirt material or not dirt it's more of a trunk material to that pine tree you can see that looks pretty cute and there's our trees for our scene so let's finish up our little island now by adding these trees to our scene so I'm just gonna hit option H to unhide our island and you can see that our trees are kind of stuck in the middle here so I'm just gonna grab both of them by hitting shift and right-clicking both of them and then hitting G and Z to pull them up so here now I can grab our trees and I'm just going to hand place them across our scene real quick here just by grabbing them kind of placing them where they look cute rotating them along this edge to get the angle that I'm looking for and then scaling them down a bit and I thought the pine tree is look kind of cool being around the base of the mountain a little bit more for the most part anyways I'm just going to grab it along the the axis over here scale it down and then just kind of pull it right so it's sitting along the side of that Island there I'm scale it down a little bit and then hit shift e duplicate it again and this one we can scale up a little bit taller maybe just by hitting s and z along these that access there this one might be a little bit smaller right next to it and you can see how we can kind of just shape our scene now by duplicating some of these trees around giving them a few different rotation angles by rotating them around these Zed and then just rotating around a little bit of an angle scaling them down and we can form a cute little island and it's really a type of art form that takes a little bit of practice but is very easy and I think it's fun for beginners to kind of start with a scene like this as it kind of gets you started and 3d and here we have it guys so the last step just to kind of finish out this scene is to place our camera so with my view set right around here in the angle that I like I'm just going to grab my camera there by clicking on it in the viewer there and then hit alt ctrl 0 and we'll snap the camera to my view there I then hit G in my mill mouse button to kind of pull it out to the angle that I would like for this shot kind of place it right here and then oh the last thing that really adds some cool looking effects to our low poly scene like this is some poofy clouds in the sky so I'm just gonna go ahead and again add microsphere and I'm gonna change that down to a 2-1 in these subdivisions there we'll scale it down a bit so then with our ecosphere I'm just going to jump into sculpt mode and do the exact same thing we've been doing where we enable dynamic topology and do a little bit of quick sculpting to kind of form a nice poofy little cloud here so I'm just gonna make it a bit longer here and that should work so I'm just going to go back into edit mode here so we can grab that and duplicate it once or so scaling it down rotating around so we have a nice smaller one next to it and now we can just grab these and in our camera view kind of rotate them around so it looks nice for the camera and duplicate them across our scene and [Music] you can do a little bit of sculpting on these duplicates to give them a little bit of variation but I think that looks pretty cool and then the material for these is very simple very similar to the water material just give it a new basic material here switch back to object mode and if I split my window here we can bring up our shader editor and you just want to give it a blend mode of alpha blend right there and then you want to disable show back face and then you can turn on screen space reflection as well those are the few settings right there and then you just add in a transparent node like we did before so shift a shader mix shader' drop it right in there and then add in that transparent shader plug it in the bottom socket and you can go ahead and leave it at about at 0.5 or so and then if we go ahead and go into camera view you can see we have a few cute clouds in our sky it's the last thing to kind of finish off a render then is a few easy settings that make it look even nicer if I switch to our Eevee panel right here I just want to go ahead and make sure screen space reflections is enabled depth of field is enabled and for that we can change some of the settings in the camera settings so if I grab my camera settings here go ahead and change the depth of field here to focus on that ICO sphere object right there I'll just give it an f-stop of something like a 1 so it's nice and shallow and we get some nice blur coming from that and then back in our Eevee settings you want to turn on ambient occlusion as this really helps give some cool effects you can increase the amount to for a low poly scene like this so go ahead and increase the amount up to about 0.75 and both these settings don't really make too much difference in a scene like this so I'm just gonna turn them off and then the last thing is enabling some bloom and of course it's way too strong but if you take the threshold way down so you just have a very small amount of that it looks pretty nice and then going down to the bottom under color management you want to change the contrast to be a little bit higher maybe a medium high contrast would be nice just to give ourselves a little bit more colors popping in the scene and then the very last thing is we can actually have some reflections in our water here from our trees if we want to add in just putting our cursor there if you want to add in a light probe so I'm going to go shift a down to light probe and I'm going to add in a reflection cube map so this is just a circular cube that will add reflections to whatever is within this basically empty object so if I go to our indirect lighting right here and I can just turn on auto bake so you can see the results happen in real time so you can see adding a light probe over the wall or maybe a few of them if you have a few different water sources will add the reflections you see appearing right here so it's actually interacting with the clouds and some of the trees you can see in our water there and that just kind of gives it a little bit of a nicer look depending on what angle you're looking at it from and that kind of just increases the quality of it a little bit more so there's our cute little low poly Island if you click the overlay button there you can turn off the extra overlays and just see it for what it is and it's pretty cool looking this could really easily be animated as well if you wanted to just by hitting the keyframe option right there adding a keyframe on frame 1 by moving your camera a little bit and then jumping to frame like 120 or something and hitting G and your middle mouse button to zoom in a bit maybe reposition the camera just a little bit as well something like that and you can see we also have a keyframe now add it on there because of this option so if we turn that off now and just played it through you can see we have a nice little cute real-time animation being played here so hope you enjoyed this little low poly tutorial learn something new and had some fun creating some low poly art that's gonna do it for me guys I like to again thank Skillshare for sponsoring this video and if you want to learn something new this year definitely go ahead and check out Skillshare with the link in the description and I will see you guys in my next video bye

Channel: CG Geek

Views: 724,139

Keywords: Low Poly, Blender, Easy, 2.8, Low, Poly, How to, Tutorial, render, Tree, Grass, Mountain, landscape, fast, beginner

Id: 0lj643VmTsg

Length: 35min 10sec (2110 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 15 2019