Low Poly Landscape Tutorial | Mountains, Water and More | Cinema 4D

heywhat too long people my name's todd i and welcome to the first of many tutorials we will be doing here on my channel in my website today what we're going to be covering is this picture right here you see on my desktop now we're going to be doing two tutorials for this one and this specific tutorial will be covering the landscape so things such as these rocks here the water the mountains in the background things like that as well as the render settings and then the next tutorial will cover things such as the trees the clouds the sky and then dive into photoshop to finish off the picture itself so let's jump right into cinema 4d i want to be using our 14 studio you guys can using any version that really is a pretty universal when it comes to what i'm going to be doing here and that let's jump right into it so the first thing you notice when you see this picture here is the sort of rugged rugged sort of rock walls with water in the mail sort of a stream heading towards this mountain and that's what we're gonna start we're gonna start with the base of our actual scene and it's gonna be pretty cool it is fairly simple for a lot of people who happen to dope too much into low poly with cinema 4d it really isn't that hard because it is working with very low numbers of polygons it's quite a simple thing compared to modeling something like a creature or anything realistic low poly is much more simple and a lot of fun it does have a really cool unique style i do have a few pictures here that I can show you besides that one we also have this picture right here and what else I have a bunch this one's a bit of an older one but you guys get the idea of what low poly is you can even put it in backgrounds of things such as that and you guys have seen a few banners of mine where I've used low poly in the background this is a filler and it looks really nice so we're just gonna focus on the landscape aspect though in this tutorial so let's dive right into it so the first thing you want to do is drop in a plane just any plane it really doesn't matter then we're gonna change this width and height segments here so let's go with something around 5,000 this is going to be the base of our entire image we bigger and just so it's easier when we import other things and of course these segments here are going to be determining how many polygons are going to be interaxial landscape and since we have a rather large landscape we're going to want a rather larger number of polygons so let's try and see what 60 looks like that is a fair amount right there I'm pretty content with how that looks and let's dive right into the actual modeling part of this now working with low poly the one thing that you do have to remember is this tag right here it's called the Phong tag and you want to delete it right away when working with low poly because what it does is actually I'll keep it to show you guys what it does let's just model something basically where dozens of rounds out everything so that it doesn't really have a jagged look but we're going for that jagged look so I'll show you what it looks like before and after I'll run to some stuff while we go along but I used to leet that right away I'm just gonna keep to show you so we're gonna try and make this plane editable that's the first thing that we're gonna want to do so make sure your plane is selected and either click this button right here or hit C on your keyboard whatever you rather do I just hit C because I'm more keyboard shortcut kind of guy but I'm as long as editable it is good it'll have this little triangle picture with these points on it and if I still know then that you've actually done it so we're gonna go huge this little arrow icon and right click on here now sorry not yet we're gonna click on the arrow icon then to this little cube here is going to show look the surface of something lit up and then we'll be able to select certain points here we're not going to want to do anything with that yet we're gonna want to right-click then go to brush and then change the fall-off to constant in the mode to surface now what this is gonna do is it's gonna let us to draw on to here like so and as you can already see that makes some kind of really jagged mountains I don't know you could do something with that if you wanted to but that's not the look I'm going for today um let's try to actually make this a little less powerful a hundred percent is a lot let's start to go off with something like 45 40 and the radius you can control by bringing this up or down or hanging the square bracket keys on your keyboard that's also going to do it so once you have a decent strength and a good radius you're just going to want to sort of pave the way for your water and I'm going to start by making a smaller sort of smaller sort of path and then beefed it up a bit later so this is the path I'm doing I'm just going to sort of a squiggly line pattern here and just follow that on this side as well and there we go it's just a very very very light outline before we do anything else and then what I'm going to do to make it a bit better as I'm going to make this a bit bigger so you can either once again use these arrows or the square bracket keys but I'm going to bring the strength down to about 30% and then just go over again so we sort of have sort of have this sort of bigger Ridge but you can see falling off around where it should be which is what I'm going for here and I just go over all that again and then it sort of buffs it up a little bit makes it a bit more chunky and tough LF we're going to the exact opposite of that we're gonna make our radius a bit smaller but turn the strength up to something like 70% and just get those Peaks up nice and high that one is pretty damn high but we're gonna keep that let's get those Peaks a bit high or whatever you think looks good because that's the one thing I'm not gonna be teaching you guys exactly how to do something while you're following this I want you to do it whatever you think looks best is gonna make your thing I don't want you to copy exactly what I'm doing here but that's what it looks like and now I'm going to show you guys what I mean by the foam tag making everything rounded out now you see when I render this it's sort of rounded it looks like a really shitty ps2 game from like ten years ago but we can get rid of that by simply deleting this long tag and then when we hit render you see it's really jagged and that's the look we're going for obviously in this early state of the render it looks pretty bad but uh that's the basic idea we're going for right now so I threw this far then you're obviously um you got something good so far now we're going to be working on making this more of a a terrain rather than just a path so once again make sure your brush is selected if you did get D selected once again you click this little mouse button make sure surface is selected right click your brush and with the same fall-off and mode selected I'm gonna make this strength something fairly lights something like your 25% and we're just going to go over everything and make it more bumpy more unnatural something that isn't just your regular you know nothing's just nothing is just straight and normal and boring we're gonna make everything nice and buffed and more of like a landscape which is exactly what we're making so let me just finish this off and you guys also have to keep in mind that with the strength you can actually in fact make it negative so if I make a strength negative 25 or yeah sure 24 I can make this go down and it also helps with the landscape as well and I like to make a go negative inside here this is where we're going to be adding our water so if I make a negative here that when the water comes up I really won't affect the the rocks around if the landscape around it too too much plus it's more natural Evelyn knows that where rivers are the the land they're sort of been eroded away or it's just is this lower overall so that gives it more of a realistic look to it and there we go now we have a pretty solid looking landscape right there I'm pretty happy with that now what we're going to be doing is actually adding a texture to our land now you can do this any way you couldn't either add just a normal color what I like to do to make this more abstract is because since this whole thing is already abstract I like to add a gradient something slightly unnatural so under color we're gonna hit this texture little arrow here and go to gradient double click on the gradient picture and then we our two colors you can add as many as you want I'm just gonna add two personally the first color I'm gonna make it more like a sandy beige something that you actually see and the secondary color something more unnatural since in the actual picture that I showed at the beginning I had more of a this color um what should I go with this time I want to go with with a a purple sort of a faded less saturated purple like so I'm pretty happy with that and obviously this adjusted however you want it change this to however you want it I'm going to go with the two DS V and I Drive it on and see how that makes it look that is pretty nice I'm pretty happy with that for sure and that is our landscape so we're gonna add a bit more to it obviously we're not done this tutorial yet let's start by adding and some water for the water we're also going to be using a plane and make sure to delete the foam tag right away you guys know why at this point and what was the size that we use for this I blues it's a five thousand it might have been yeah that seems right so once you make out the same size as your plane as you can see it is still out of place a bit like you can see it in these parts here and we don't want that so since we did make this part a bit deeper where the water should be we can actually lower this and for the most part it should fix it but I'm not going to be doing that I'll show you technique that I use I'm gonna keep it exactly where it was before and before we make this editable you want to make more of those width and height segments so we're going to go for something like 55 that should be a good amount and then we'll make it editable by either hitting us a button up here once again or pressing C while your plane is selected we're gonna be doing a very similar technique to what we did to the land but we're also be adding a few other things it's gonna be pretty cool so let's just hit this button right here make sure this is selected so we're just going to be um pretty much getting to the brush again whenever I said to get to the brush before copy those steps which is select the arrow the surface right click brush and we're going to be making sure that our strength is a negative number probably negative 25 will do and what we're gonna do with this is just go over all those parts that are sticking out on the land of our plane and make sure they go under because we don't want the water to be sticking out in places that it shouldn't be so just make sure that's all were and out of sight that way we can make sure the water is just sticking out where the water should be and this is just my personal method I'm sure there's a better way to do this but um this is just how I personally do it and as you can see if we were to get a camera right around here you'd only be able to see the water where you want the water to see there were you'd want to see the water that was pretty bad English right there so the next thing we're going to do is make a water texture now for the color obviously it's whatever you think your water should look like if you want to make it lava be my guest and make it orange but so let's take this tutorial I'm just gonna make a normal water a nice crystal blue like that that's pretty nice specular you want to keep that on for water obviously transparency you're gonna want to check mark that and make sure it's fairly low you don't want to be able to see all the way through something especially in low poly it's not to look too realistic make sure the refraction rates 1.33 which is what water is you don't have to go that far into depth or far into detail because people won't really notice that much but whatever I like to just make sure things are as good as possible and then reflection you want to add the slightest bit of reflection since it's supposed to be a very undetailed image and I'm just going to make this transparency a little bit more something along the lines of 56% Alex good throw that on there and then if we just do a quick render it's will look Dan and we're still we're still early we haven't added any of the render settings yes so it's not so slick to be right now but um I just can see the blood is pretty straight if I go back to this image you see how it's all it's all like bumpy and it looks like actual flowing water now we're gonna be doing that right now we're gonna still be using this brush tool like I said and we're just gonna go over it very very lightly because we're gonna be adding a lot of effectors and whatnot to actually make this look a bit more realistic we'll just go over it so it's all uneven for like what we did with the land earlier we're just not as in and just go over all of that and then I'm going to go over it again with a negative so it's not really bulging out too much and yeah as long as it's uneven we should be good you only have to go too far into detail with this at all now look that is like that it's sort of bumpy you can see that nothing too crazy though so what we're going to be doing is we are going to be adding a random so we go to mograph effector and click on random drop that into our plane go to the deform or tab and change it to polygon as you can see already if I go to an off and polygon it adds these these waves these bumps it makes it look a bit more like running water now if we go back to the effector tab we can change the strength and I pretty sure 100% is good for now now we're also going to be adding a few other ones we're going to be adding a displacer when we doing the same thing drag that into the plane this is place it we're going to be going to shatter shading shader and noise and then we can change these as well the strength the heights if you want to make it crazy you can do whatever you want really listen we've been more calm for myself I'm gonna like it's at a 93 strength 39 centimeters that looks looks fairly good and then we're going to be doing one more thing and we are going to be adding a whereas it's a Kinect now how we get to that is we go to where that this one right here with the array symbol is and go down to connect in order to drag the plane into the Kinect and then we're going to be changing the tolerance all the way up and then you get these sort of triangle jagged um just very very cool looking polygons but the thing is is when you add it to a Kinect it adds its own built in Fontana onto here is in followed under the Kinect change it to manual and then it's gonna get rid of that it's going to make it back to our low poly look and that is exactly what we want now we're gonna be doing a few more things and I'll jump ring to the render settings we're almost done the landscape part of this video now you can do anything you want with this guys you really don't have to follow every step I want to like if you wanted to add more with this brush that you wanted to make more jagged mountains here and just make those everywhere you could have done that if you wanted to you're not supposed to follow exactly what I want this is just to teach you guys the techniques and I want you guys to go ahead and then show me what you guys can do after learning these simple techniques because it's really not too complicated all anyone who's starting off with symbol forty can really get the hang of it sorry about that I really knew do need to get a drink that's better but like I was saying anyone who's new to cinema4d you can really get these techniques they're very very simple and they make a really really cool looking image when you're done and the render settings do help out a lot so if you're thinking right now it doesn't look too good this stick until the end and I'll show you what can actually turn out to be like so we're not a few more things we're going to be adding mountains and that's very very simple to do all we're going to do is go to this cube here click on our landscape just going to drag this up so we have a better look at it as you can see it's a lot smaller because we made our landscape itself a lot bigger we're going to delete the phone tag on the landscape itself and then we're just going to edit the height so it's more of a mountain shape like so and then we're gonna make it a bit bigger and actually for this part what I want to do is make an actual angle that we're going to be making our picture look out of so this looks like a pretty let's see let's find a good angle um you know I would have to move this for a second because this blocking my view let's see I am pretty happy with this view right here that's pretty good for a tutorial this is pretty good so I'm just going to drop the camera view by clicking the camera icon and we can get back to work on our landscape so we're gonna grab this mountain that we just made and what are we going to do with that we are going to put it wherever we think it looks best but before we do that we're gonna grab it and bring the width and depth segments down to something more along the lines of 45 let's give a more of a low poly look maybe even lower than that maybe maybe 35 will be a bit better yeah I'm pretty happy with that and rotate it find a good angle I like this this is just seed one if we receive 0 sorry if we go through all the seeds it's tons and tons of different mountains that you can look at and where is can at add our texture onto there and as we can see it sort of follows the same design as our rugged water filled landscape and then we're just gonna put that there if we go back into our camera we see it's just this side there we're just good risking one to cover the entire length of our image and if you want to you can actually make this a different texture this is what I'm going to do for the purpose of this tutorial so I can show you a few more things even if it doesn't look as good I just want to show you as many things as I possibly can so for the color I'm just going to make it a which is a normal mountain color I guess for this we can just continue with that sort of orangish beige-ish look yeah let's just go with that turn off the specular and I'll let's get rid of this old texture here throw that on the landscape also that reminds me I should probably turn off the specular for the actual texture that we're using for everything so that's a pretty good mountain color I guess if we go back into the camera yeah that should be good and then we're just going to hold ctrl click on our landscape and drag up to like a second one an exact copy move it slightly to the side actually no before I do that there's something I need to show you with the landscape we're going to add a few effectors here we're going to be adding a one which is called polygon reduction drop that right into the landscape and as you can see it really really changes how the mountain itself looks it really makes it look more simple and I really like this a factor but the problem is is when you add it to something like the plane here that we made with all the rugged sort of mountains and where the water flows through since it has a gradient texture it really messes that let me show you if I add this gradient texture on to the landscape and then go through the polygon reduction you see that it adds this sort of weird chunky like it really doesn't look natural kind of look and I really don't like that um if it's your look if you're going for that go ahead by all means you can make it look like that but I really don't think that looks good at all even though that the actual effect of the polygon reduction effector really makes it look great which is kind of a letdown so we're gonna have this plane sort of texture and I'm gonna make this really really low poly about about 83% and I'm liking that I think I looks good we're also gonna be adding just a few other things just to make it look a little less natural little less recognizable from the original and let's see what else good yeah let's try that a connect again so we're gonna drag the landscape into the connect and just drag it up until we see something happening and let's see that looks pretty solid to me once again make sure the falling goes to manual and I am pretty happy with that now the one thing you have to keep in mind and this is what sort of helped me remember is if something is green you drag whatever you want to change into the green and if something is purple you drag the purple onto whatever you're trying to change so I dragged my landscape into the green but then I dragged the purple onto the landscape that's just how I sort of remember that and I'm just gonna change the name of this two mountain or Mt for short they're not my Wow mountain and T there we go and that's gonna be a first magic now back to Rio saying before hold ctrl and click and drag and I'll make an exact duplicate did I just mess up that I really did so hold ctrl drag all the way up and you'll make a second mountain there we go now let's just move this one right around there and then we'll open it up go to the landscape itself change the seed to something that you think looks good for your situation I am pretty happy with seed 10 right there that looks pretty good for what I'm wanting I want to go back into my camera make sure everything looks good that looks pretty solid to me continue on with this method hold ctrl duplicate that bring it over slightly and at this point your computer might be struggling a little bit it is a lot to render out especially with so many different things and so many custom pieces here we're just going to continue on with this make sure it looks good zooming with the camera go over a bit more let's maybe even rotate this a bit just to make sure things are oh I guess I sort of have the anchor point slightly messed up there whatever works gonna continue on with this doesn't only matter what the angle is and just continue on if you know what before he looks pretty good continue on making more and more until you have something that you are pleased with and honestly this is such a cool style I'm very very into low poly I think it looks great and we're just going to zoom into the camera one more time we should be almost done and yeah so dragged on more and more 5th mountain it's getting kind of repetitive I know I know but it's totally worth the look looks great and I'm gonna tell era we're going to dive into the render settings after this and you'll see just how amazing this gonna look it really is amazing how cool just something that's so simple can turn it and this should be about the last one yeah let's just make it big just to make sure yeah that looks good maybe just rotate it a bit let's see yeah I'm okay with that that looks great so now we're going to want to do is we are going to want to go into our render settings which is this third one right here you guys should probably know this output I want to combine 1920 by 1080 simply because that is a resolution of my computer monitor and also that's 1080p pretty much a standard for high-definition these days and once I have that make sure you go to save choose wherever you want to save it to I'm just going to go to the desktop and name it touch for tutorial save alpha Channel we don't really have one but if you wanted to make sure that there was sort of a transparent thing check that I'm not going to and then we're going to go to a format PNG definitely is the best one for this now we're going to want to go to this effect tab but I want to add two things one ambient occlusion we're gonna want to drag the contrast up to something high like like forty percent something like that that's going to be good and that's all we have to do for that and then we're going to go back into effector go to global illumination and just let that be so now if we go back into our camera we're going to be adding one last thing rendering out and show you guys what we've made so far so we're going to want to go to a physical sky so we're gonna want to create it should be right here and as you can see it already brightens things up quite a bit so inner physical sky we're gonna go to time and location and just mess around and this is going to be some really cool lighting that you can make whatever you want whatever time of day you want you just type it in and it's going to make it I want to render this out and see how it looks I'll be right back guys my recording software doesn't like rendering stuff and recording at the same time so I'll show you guys what this render looks like when I'm done I'll be right back and look at that it really is amazing how much just a few simple render tech and I just really pop a picture that's what we have so far as a landscape and that's where I want to conclude this tutorial because we were just focusing on the landscape itself next tutorial we're gonna be adding things such as the sky clouds maybe even tree is just some really cool stuff to make this more realistic overall but at that for just a quick how long did that take only 25 minutes or so is a pretty cool if you're new to low poly you focus on just messing around with a lot of these techniques and you never know what you can make personally I think this looks great for the time that we put into it and like I said make sure you click on the next video in this tutorial series and we'll really make this picture a lot better than is right now but hopefully you guys learn something if you did make sure drop a like on this video share it around and if you're gonna make something to eat me your picture I'd love to see what you guys made out of this but once again guys my name is Todd I hope you guys learn something and I'll catch you in the next tutorial see ya

Channel: Tiedie

Views: 162,081

Keywords: cinema 4d, cinema 4d tutorial, tutorial, low poly, low poly tutorial, speed art, low poly landscape, low poly water, c4d, how to, how to make, 3d modling, cinema 4d low poly tutorial, photoshop, creating, beginer tutorial

Id: MkKl5lV9ZAo

Length: 25min 39sec (1539 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 25 2014