Make a Grassy Meadow in Blender

great this is any price here from Valente guru welcome to another blender tutorial we are going to be making this grassy meadow you can see in front of you so we're going to be learning a whole bunch of different things grass obviously as well as making a volumetric mist there's need a nice hazy morning sort of look a particle distribution so making like the realistic choppy look of how real grass looks in the world adding a trail path through it lighting a whole bunch of different stuff stuff that you can use to make your own nature scene or I don't know you could add a little character maybe a car sitting on the lawn there you could do a whole bunch of things so yeah without further ado I think we should Oh first of all let me show you what the scene looks like is it right here so I'll be providing you with a few models so you know this little shrub and this little tree here which you can download for free and for the grass we're going to be using something which some of you may know of called the grass essentials pack so that's a new product from blender guru which enables you to create realistic grass the reason we're using the grass essentials pack are not strands was because I realized you know a couple years ago actually that strands they look nothing like real grass stalks do in the real world and so you just can't get realistic results with it so we created the grass essentials pack so that you know you can create realistic looking grass scenes so that's what I'm thrilled about that's why I'm using it so we can finally get into some nice real looking grass so yeah anyways without further ado oh and if you don't have the grass essentials as well there's no pressure like you don't have to buy it to complete this tutorial I'm providing you with one of the the grass species the main grass species that we're using to make this grass field here so you can download that for free as well but yeah alright let's go ahead and get started now so I'm going to go ahead and replace the default cube always replace it I don't know when we ever keep it really with a plane and just make it fit you know roughly the size of the grid floor and just so you know what scale that you're working with if you just have a look at the size of it you know it's 16 meters and that's just so that you know that as you're working on your scene that you know you're working with the scene that's about 16 meters in length so that tells you the height of other things like trees and other things like that I've just turned on my screencast keys tool by the way you don't need to do anything this is so you can see what I'm pressing over there should have done it before I started but had to restart all right so snapping the camera to my viewport to where my view is yeah and I'm just going to move the camera in and I'm going to keep it fairly low to the grass field here about there and I want to keep roughly 1/3 of the camera above the horizon so we're mainly focusing on the grass but also a little bit of horizon as well and that's just a composition thing you know just just make sure there's an actual focus which in this case is grasped okay so adding the grass let's get to that so because we're using the grass essentials we're going to be appending in different grass species to do that you want to jump to a new layer so it's not all on you know your main layer and you want to go to file append and then here you know once you've you can download this model here by the way off blender guru and you can play along at home we're going to be a pending in the grass behavior grass how will you pronounce it no idea but it looks pretty cool so we're going to click on it and then the one that you want to click on here is a group always go to group and then we're going to click on append alright and then you click append and there we go we got the grass Bahia looks a grass looks that's in so with this one here now that we've added it into the scene if we go back to our main plane here go to the particle settings we can add a new particle system and then just from this drop-down list here just select the name of that part because it's in the you know the data of the scene now we can just select it and now we have grass on our scene we you know got a few sprigs here and there looks like sort of end of the world drought happening but it's there so you want to increase the emission amount so for a lot of seems like oh you know like 30,000 is generally enough this is obviously not enough this is such a big scene that we're going to go with more particles in order to get the point across for my final one I think I went with like five hundred thousand which you know might be too much for some people as machines the you know the benefit of the good things instead of using strands is it doesn't use as much memory so these will actually render fine on a GPU so that's also one of the benefits of it but anyways so I'm just keeping it at thirty thousand for now before you amp up you know the particle amount one thing you want to do is down here you can see how slow it's going right now so let's just go to the modifier stack here just going to turn off the view from the viewport so it's not slowing us down and then just underneath display I'm just going to set this amount to be ten percent right you know I only have five percent so five percent of thirty thousand particles will be viewable in the viewport but the rest will only display in the render View mode the other thing is on our main sorry on our layer where we appended in our grass system this one because it's linked it would also have thirty thousand particles on it which one if you add in more weeds and stuff this whole scene here can get a little bit crazy like on this layer so just does a habit just turn it off from the viewport there anyway getting a little bit too advanced let's just stick to this grass here so we can focus on one thing all right so if we gave this a render right now a Chad let's just let's give this another render you can see I've already attempted this tutorial once and now I'm giving it another go alright to do a test render I'm going to have to obviously set a sunlamp so we can see something so with this Sun here I'm just going to rotate it about that angle there and you know rotate that direction so it's a little bit the Sun is pointing in the same direction as the camera which is good and now let's just go with these settings and let's keep the strength that about ten all right and let's just see how this looks with thirty thousand particles it probably will not near there it will not look fantastic because there's not enough but one thing you will notice because if you look from the camera view is that you've got grass on either side of the camera now people that have got the grass essentials or even if you followed all the tutorials you know what I'm talking about here this grass that's outside of the camera view is going to be calculated in the render I wish it wasn't but it is so you'd think that blender would go like oh it's outside of the view of the camera forget about it don't worry it'll be fine we'll just focus on here disregard everything else but it actually will calculate all this stuff as if it's in your scene so you don't want that you want to try and get away with this lack the least amount of particles as possible in in a render so we want to try and get all those particles over here so the way to do that is with weight painting so weight painting if you've never done you hit ctrl tab the whole plane is blue and this allows you to paint onto your mesh where you want things to appear now before you do any weight painting because it paints according to the geometry of the mesh we've only got four vertices right now so if we try and did any weight painting it doesn't give you much detail you know so we need to append this a few times so let's go subdivide and then I'm just going to increase the number of cuts I'm going to type in 150 which sounds like a lot but we're going to be painting a path we're using weight painting as well so that'll be good to have that extra geometry in there all right so one other thing when it comes to particles is if you have a look at this render here if you look in the distance like the grass amount is almost okay like on the horizon there like the grass looks a little thicker but as you gets closer to the camera there's huge gaps in it and that's just because of perspective like as things get closer and closer like you can start to see big gaps it's the same as if you actually stood on a grass lawn looking out into the distance you can't see any gaps in the grass but if you look at your feet you can see tiny little you know holes in the ground in the in the grass so again using the same same logic we want to get away with as little at least but the least amount of particles as possible so we want to try and bring some of those particles from the back to the front so the way we do this I'm zooming through this by the way sorry if it's fast but we do have to get to a lot we're going to be using the weight gradient tool so we click on this bad boy and then I'm just going to drag from wherever the camera is and just drag it up to be about there I've got a garbage truck outside apologize if you can hear mr. juggernaut so just dragging it out about that so the you know the red or something is that's like a value of one and blue is a value of zero so I want to get it so the it's not completely dark blue but just a little light blue so there's just tiny a little bit of grass at the back there but most of it is towards the front and then to cut away the stuff that's out of view of the camera I'm going to be using a weight amount of zero and I'm just going to draw like this Shh and now going into top view mode now that I know the basic you know parameters of where the grass is looking I'm going to paint out what isn't visible to the camera and this was a little method that I came up with when I was working on the architecture Academy because I noticed that yeah all this grass was getting calculated in the render and that meant you had to increase the particle amount in order to make the ground look you know covered and then I realized why don't we just paint it out and it worked so I've stuck with it so you can now in order to make this apply to the grass because if you look it hasn't made any difference to the particle system underneath vertex groups you want to click on density and then you'll see one there that says group and when you do that you'll see that now that weight painting has now applied to our mesh here so all that is now cut out and most of it is more towards the front and then there's less at the back so to show you what that just did I'll give you a little let's do another render using just that you can see that we haven't we barely touched the render times I guess because a few of them have to be drawn maybe it's a little bit more but we've barely touched the render times and we've increased the amount of particles without having to increase the the number here at all so a little tip for you all right let's now get serious about let's increase the particle count to be 300 thousand all right now let's give this a render and you'll probably see that we need some work done out let's have a look ok great so this is how it looks at three hundred thousand which is I mean it's not bad you actually sets it like that's a solid attempt um but trouble is is that this looks like carpet now and the reason it looks like carpet is that every single grass blade is almost the same size there's a tiny little bit of randomization there but not much in the real world grass doesn't grow at like flat uniformity across everywhere there is always patches of it that are growing taller than others and that can be from any number of reasons like some areas receiving more rain than others some areas are receiving more sunlight more shade if a dog pisses on the lawn that will seriously affect it like it'll be a little extra like energy in the cross feather we puffing up it's it like the real world is just like bumpy it's all I'm trying to say that's an easy one well just spilt over my water that well okay had the lid on okay embarrass myself so the way we do that in blender is by using a texture to affect our particle system so with the particle system here still selected if we go down here all the way down and underneath textures if we click new we can add a texture just for this box if this wasn't here like I don't know when they added this but feels like an addition in the last year but anyways now from the texture panel if we just select particle system texture we can now add any particle we can now adjust the texture which is going to affect this by default it's set to image which I don't like let's instead set that to Varon i and once we've added in the verrano texture in order to first of all see it applied to our texture here to our particle system sorry underneath influence this is where you tell how it's going to affect the particle system by default it's set to time which from what I see makes no difference in any way so underneath hair what you want to check is length so now this particles this texture is going to affect the length of the puzzles and look at that you can automatically see like how much more realistic that is even in the viewport that looks closer to real life so really important now at the moment that the text is like it's too wavy which is going to to obvious to the viewer let's turn this back let's go to point 1 and Michael even further let's go to point 0 5 make it look really choppy and if you find that there are areas of it where it's like you can actually see through it because they're parts of works like really cut what you can do is underneath the colors if you turn down the contrast that will ensure that because basically whatever's black here in this texture here is going to have zero you know zero length of particles so you want to try and get it so that it's it's a gray color at least and then you can increase the brightness if you want to make everything a little bit taller and yeah that should look already should look a lot nicer so let's give this another render now just with the addition of that texture and you'll see immediately how much better it looks let's just see what this and boom check it out look at that so that automatically as you can see just looks infinitely better and that's what you want to do you want to try and break up the uniformity of the grass that's like Bri the number one rule when it comes to making a good grass scene is break up the uniformity like the grass is it that's why stuff looks like fur or like carpet because by default everyone you know just leaves a particle system as a you know you know uniform distribution across it which is not like real life so problem you can see the ground which is white and we don't we don't want to be able to see the ground or you can see the ground you know that that's alright but the ground shouldn't be white obviously so let's add a particles a node a material node to the ground all right so I'm going to go texture image texture and I'm going to be using where we're going to use a texture I mean these are some textures that came with the grass essentials which you don't have to use you have to feel like I'm like forcing you to use these you can just get some of Sidi textures calm and they're pretty much you know going to be very close to this they just ground and dirt textures I'm going to go with a rocky looking one like this guy here number three and add that guy in there dum-dum-dum dum-dum-dum okay that guys in and I'll connect him up to the diffuse input there and I'm going to add in a mapping node and this is so that we can because that texture like if we just actually let me just turn off this particle view here if we gave this little render now well first of all yeah lets you view unwrap that very quickly and you'll see exactly yeah like look at this side of that thing that's crazy and actually that's bark that's not what I wanted at all yeah these thumbnails they're not big enough let's go with a rocky one what something looks like right okay that's kind of dirt and rock to get that guy in there but basically because these textures here are seamless seamless means that you can tile them and you shouldn't be able to see this seam or the seam should be at least not that noticeable because it's almost impossible to get something completely seamless but you know we'll try so we've added this in here UV coordinates a mapping node and then now I'm going to set this scale to be lets go 20 each all right which is going to look a little better are probably even more let's go 35 35 and that's a lot better already all right now one other thing that we can use to affect the the particle like the realism of the scene is that in the real world real ground is bumpy like it's wavy ground is never perfectly flat unless it's been you know a surveyors gone out there and measured something and you know put some concrete on it or whatever the real world you know the ground is just wavy like these little bumps and notches and all sorts of stuff throughout it so that's what we want to try and put in our scene here so the easiest way to do that is by using a displacement node oh look the ceilings up on the roof now sorry the ground is up on the ceiling whatever so adding a displacement here I'm going to click on a new texture and look now it's way too far down again that's weird so go back to the texture panel here and let's go displacement texture by default it's set to image again let's go clouds and look at that we've now got some wavy looking stuff so we can adjust this you know we can make this look less but the biggest one you want to first of all turn down is the strength of this displacement by default you know it comes out really heavy at one so you dial it back and let's go also yeah let's change the noise here noise sighs to get some like nice I don't know might go like sort of like slightly wavy like that and I'll turn this down to be even further even smaller to be you know I'll get something different let's go out smooth shading on that but I am going to let's crank that back up you know point zero eight and I'm going to turn the depth down so that this is like mostly smooth and I'll turn the size up all right so we've got a little bit of waviness going on which is cool and I'm going to add in another displacement note how about this and then this one I'm going to make clouds again but in a minute which one is which I think it must be a texture - all right let's go small it's cool it's small alright I'm going to get that quickly here we go turn this down and then turn this size down here as well okay and let's turn up the depth there we go now we're getting somewhere alright and then I'll set this down to what it should be like 2005 so now we've got some big waves in there with some smaller waves the big waves are a little too big but something like that I don't know I'm sort of playing around now but that looks is going to look a lot nicer than what we had before so we've added in the we've added in the texture for the ground so that's there so we shouldn't be able to see the white anymore and we've also added in two displacements so the ground should be a little bit wavy now we've also got in the texture from the for the particle system so that should be in full effect as well alright so now this is the problem a particle system is above seeing this modifier stack here particle systems above the displacements so that was not a good decision so let's try that again yeah if you don't and that means that the particle system lays out its carpet and then it makes the ground wavy and it doesn't match up so particles basically always have to be underneath everything else if you ask me there should be like a little warning tells you you know the strands don't affect it anyways but look at that that is time to look like real grass now how about that that's looking pretty cool I think that this way Venus is a little too extreme to turn that down well maybe it's not that one it's extreme alright let's go this one yeah that's going to look a little nicer I think great and that'll be fine cool alright so one other thing that can really impact how grass looks and this is like it's so easy it's almost cheating you want to use something to cast a shadow onto your ground the one I recommend is always get a something off you know CG textures let's go CG Texas I just got it on my separate window here but you can get some trees off here screams from shrews nature trees you've got some alpha mass trees if you download one of these you can use them in blender to create a nice shadow onto the lawn net so I've got some already which you can download off blender you if you want with this tutorial just yeah look at this on blender and you'll see it and the way you want to import a texture like a tree with an alpha mast background is by using what's called the import images as planes so if you just type in planes into your you know file preferences add-ons planes then you'll see import export import images as planes so this enables you to go file import images as plans the reason you use this of course is that essentially I'm nice trying to say I'll just pick a tree if ice now I'll tell you about all right let's go with I'm gonna go this one right here okay this is a tree line okay I created these ones myself a while back and I'm going to go and this is really important down here material settings diffuse and transparent import that guy and look at that so that now matches the dimensions of the plane which is why you use the import images as planes otherwise it never matches you kind of have to like try and line it up doesn't work so always use that add-on and also it's already created for us the node system so that it takes into account the transparency part of the PNG there which is a big help as well so I'm going to rotate this around and let's check this out okay I'm going to go shift Zed and look at that already with our Sun here selected if we wanted the Sun you know the light to be sharper we just adjust that centimeter there I'm going to go ask a five centimeter because it is morning so it should be a soft dis looking shadow or something like that all right and now if we look at it from the view let's grab this let's pull back our trees a little bit pulling back and yeah that should be much better oh yeah awesome alright now the other thing I want to do is with the world settings there I'm just going to set that to black and the reason for that is that I'm I want there to be sky lighting like normally if you wanted sky lighting you could just adjust this and make this you know a blue and now the shadows are a nice bluish color but when we add in our whatchamacallit volumetric Slater add later leader eater later for the mist this world settings here won't affect the mist in any way so we have to add in a separate land for this so I'm just going to create it just duplicate this Sun lamp rotate it around so it's sort of on the other direction of the which way the Sun is facing you know and you know just loosely set it up here I'm going to set the size of this to be really high because I want to just be like soft shadows all over everything and I'm going to make this a nice light blue color and I'll turn this strength down to two so let's have a look at that and the shadows now there you go should be a nice light blue color cool so now that I've done that let's give this another render with those new settings born nice it's it's very noisy so the next one I'll make sure that the sampling is set to at least 50 so you can start to see the actual grass coming through but that is a good result that started look really cool the other thing that we were going to do is this is like a series of things to make grass look more realistic you know just extra things you can add some visual interest to your ground shock horror instead of it just being a flat plane with a few bumps that we've already added how about we use this proportional fall-off tool down here turn it on or you can just hit oh the hotkey and then using the mouse wheel I can scroll up and down and we can just make these little mounds little mounds and I might create one here there's this one arm it's a little sharp actually let's pull it back let's go up to hang on a second I don't like where that one's placed this is where I want my my main sort of mound to be this one's going to be a little further back but that's so good another one up in the end there cool I want this to sort of you know the whole point is just to make it look like an appealing sort of scene and I don't know there was some scientific research I read I remember where I was it sounded like from the University of Bologna but that was something that was like humans prefer winding paths as opposed to straight ones I don't know I mean there's some facts you read that you're like alright University people are you just using an excuse as to why you were taking a hike instead of going to class oh we were testing the the and everyone's like like looking around like point to one guy am i guys like up the UH the winding pass and I like that where's your proof and then they just published on lunch a bunch of nonsense alright let's move along now this is I started look yeah it's time to got sick put some hills and stuff and let's give this around a now let's see how that looks hey how about that that looks pretty good to me that is nice that's actually coming out better than my practice one I think kind of yeah little yeah and texture you know distributions worked really well alright one thing before we add in anything else I want there to be a background we got just darkness we've got a grassy plain into the void of nothingness and it's not too pleasing so in order just to shape the rest of the scene so we know you know just broad strokes how the rest of the scene is going to look I'm going to import in an image which is from the nature Academy I'm just going to I'll let you download it it's on Blender guru with this it's just one of these sky see I mean if if you want you can get one off CG textures as well other things I don't know you know where did that thing go okay found it it's right here this guy alright I went past it so because we're going to using this is the background I'm going to be using a material settings emission so I'm going to click import there is I'm going to scale this up and put him at the back here and again the reason I'm using a plane it's like the first time I've used a plane for a sky in years because I normally just use HDR's nowadays but because volumetrics do not are not influenced by the world environment can I have to get a little bit more creative so yeah I'm just putting this guy out here and if I just go into render view mode right now then you can see how that looks with some some mountains in the background there like you can see this is pretty basic like how to get a nice you know looking scene very quickly yeah it's pretty easy now by default it's made it so this plane only affects the the camera like it's just a bright you know plane viewable to the camera but since that you want to affect the volumetrics later I'm just going to turn that off which didn't really make much of a difference like a slight difference when we add in the volumetrics that will actually kind of light up the volumetrics just a little bit so that's kind of cool all right so now that I've got that let's give this another render with our you know grass everything else I lock the samples and you can see they've come a long way from the start and let's give this a render now alright so that is pretty cool the only downside is that I guess this the shadow of these trees is so smooth that it actually looks like it's shadows from the clouds which I mean is not terrible but you know I want it to actually look like it's you know shadows from from a Sun that's coming from the side so I'm just going to sharpen them up just a little bit but that's about it now let's talk about the trail one thing that can help for composition is to have a leading line which is going to guide the viewer down somewhere so currently your eyes aren't really going in any particular direction it's sort of they're leading out to the back there but just barely so a way to do this is by creating a trail a winding trail so I'm going to use a weight paint have another vertex group and this vertex group I'll just call trail and I'm just going to paint from wherever the camera is right now using a white paint brush of one I'm just going to paint like this just to sort of winding paths the most important thing is that from wherever the cameras position that you have the path starting from like directly in front of the camera because when you do that what you find is that it sort of looks more inviting to the viewer because the pathway is going directly in front of the camera so it looks almost like you're actually there like in the scene which is kind of cool I'm also trying to get rid of any act like just red and blue that's all I want I don't want any in-between colors because consider influence the grass negatively by making them half as tall or whatever so I want them to be on or off so anyways so we've got one vertex group the vertex that we painted the first time which is this one here and then we've got this trail okay so I want the grass here to be using the the main vertex group for the density but I want the length to be affected by the trail now if I just turn on particles here you'll see what this is done and to put all the grass on the trail which is the opposite of what I want I want the grass to be not on the trail so if I click that little button there that's going to make it negative whatever the vertex group is so now the grass is everywhere but the trail which is perfect so awesome let's give this another little render now with our new settings I don't see how that looks awesome so you can see immediately the effect that that trail has done it's it's just created a nice guiding line leading you through to the end of the picture which is it's just beautiful so now talking about the rest of our grass here it's great but it looks like a golf course the golf course effect cause when you have one type of grass that you're trying to make it look like it's bits in the wild like all it's a you know it's a horror in the middle of nowhere but it looks like it's been so carefully looked after because there's no weeds and in the real world weeds are absolutely everywhere they just you can't stop it if you've ever owned a lawn you'll know exactly what I mean have to get out the weed killer every weekend go out there and wacom they're just constantly growing and in the wind you know the while it's even more so so that's we're going to be adding so we're going to using grass essentials again if you don't have the grass essentials that's fine you can skip this step but I'll just show you you know some extra things you can do so I'm just going to the same way that we added in the first grass file append and I'm going to be going to the weed section where's that weed section Oh weeds weeds and I'm going to be using the chick weed to start with let's drop this guy in here group a penned pen from library drag him out of the way and make sure that we turn him off so he's not in view over here and I'm going to add in another weed let's go Dallas cross that's ones always good nice little bunch of grass all in one place always looks really good in the scene it's one of my favorites and another one that I'll add in is just let's edge plantains prickly grass speed well no I think those ones are going to be oh wait wait wait a minute mMmmm not in the grass section we're going to be using a what to called grammar grass blue grama grass okay now this is going to create like some really long strands like some long looking you know bits of grass so adding this guy blue grama grass and that's what this one looks like so it's this really long looking grass and I'll show you something we can do in combination with the Dallas grass to make this look really cool I'll save all that so first of all let's add in the Dallas grass weed so this one is let's turn off these displacements and the mean okay so it goes a little bit faster so yeah adding them in just the same way as we did the first one add in your particle system then from the drop-down select grama grass and there we go it's got some of that then I want to add in I said Dallas grass version it doesn't matter add in the Dallas grass next and drop that in there and you can see that these are actually sharing the same point so from where they're sprouting from is from the exact same area so I'll increase the Dallas grass height just because I want to be a little bit taller than the main grass so just find out how tall the grass is which you can get from the side here and make sure that these particle systems by the way are above your displacements otherwise it's all going to be whack again yeah those above it good and all right okay so where's the Dallas cross hang on a second yeah because of the because the displacement is kind of hard to see now but normally you can see from the side which one is tore but yeah the Dallas cross okay that it's pretty big now so that's fine now these big long strands these are the ones from the grammar grass which we've added so we can turn those down in size and go back to and normally you wouldn't tweak this but you want them you know just to be a little bit smaller a little coney sprout sort of coming out the top there now anyway what I was saying before before I got distracted was that you can see that the Dallas grass and these trends are actually coming from the same area the same little point on the plane and the reason for that is that for each particle system you've got something called a seed value which is the randomized offset of where things actually sprout from so when you change this you can see that just if you just you know scroll through this you can see like an infinite placement of the different grasses if you leave them all at zero then they'll all sprout out of the exact same area which is not good so you want to change them so that each one has its own seed value but one thing you can do because we've got Dallas grass in each one it actually looks cool with this long bit coming at the top of the Dallas grass the utley you know the main little bunch there so I'm going to leave them both at seed one so they're now sharing the same point which is something that I was experimenting with and I thought it looked pretty cool I'm also going to make sure that it doesn't land it's also affected by the group so the distance from the camera and again the trail negative negative whatever the trail is and I'm also going to increase the count of the Dallas grass to be 500 all right so nice and bushy and I'm just going to the exact same thing with this one here group trail negative and there we go and you can increase or decrease the amount of these little long strands that sort of come out of it but you're just trying to make it look like it's you know as wild looking as possible so let's have a look at this grass now with just those two weeds added to it let's see how that looks all right so there you go with with just those extra weeds you can see it automatically starts to look a little bit more like a you know real wild sink there's some weed sprout through it I'm going to amp them up though I don't think there's enough not enough for my liking so let's increase the Dallas grass let's go a thousand and I'm also I'm just going to increase the the size of that Dallas cross as well so it's a little bit taller and the same with these long ash looking strand it's got 500 of them and I'm also going to add in a chickweed which is another one that we added in another we'd type and the chick we looks like the terms turn these other ones off these tiny little sprouts of like leaves and they're very common weed type we see them a lot so I'm adding in that guy and I'm going to amp it up let's go again I don't know it's go mm with the chick weed all right and let's uh let's go seed value of three so they're different they're not sprouting on the same point I have lengths of six make them a little bit bigger and again we'll just use the same you know group really amps up the density when you do that which is cool and then the trail make sure that it cuts through the trail as well and yeah we could give that a random now or we could just try it with another weed let's have a look here see any other weeds did we want to add in we've got some giant wild rye which is interesting let's try this guy I don't think I use this one for my scene but why not why not this guy um like I think is just like the long strands which are good as a you know grass particle system of their own they're not really good for creating bunches so yeah we'll skip on that let's go crabgrass though so that's more of a bunch it's adding that guy let's go right here so I'll take him to go to the first layer here and let's go new particle system crabgrass and again make sure we set this to be group negative the trail and we'll almost we're going to get to the volumetrics eventually guys will get there so those are nice and big which is good all right let's see how that looks with those extra adjustments they'll change the seed value to six something different see how that looks now all right there we go so you can see it looks a lot more chaotic now with just those that extra adjustment adding in these these bunches here the bunches are a little tall turn them down a bit the crabgrass and the rest of it is pretty good so I'm going to leave the rest of it what we're going to do now is the volumetrics matrix so the aim is to create a misty sort of look this is the one that I went with which you know it looks crazy different to how this turned it out turned out but it's a it was an experiment with blowing matrix and stuff you can see all right Adobe get out of here we don't need to be reminded every 10 seconds we've got is nice sort of wavy misty effect and the aim is to create what's called radiation fog which doesn't sound good but that's the technical term for that type of fog which is when in the early morning I think what they call the difference between the dewpoint and the air temperature is less than 4 to 2.5 degrees Celsius or so - it's some specific thing and it basically causes like condensation to rise off it which gives you this low hanging fog so it's the fog should be closest to the grass and then as it goes upwards it should sort of dissipate a little bit so in the world settings you've got something here you've got volume now you can add in a volume which will affect the entire world when you do that it will choke up your render like the lighting you'll have to make like crazy thick to go cut through all the lighting you'll have so many problems I can't really find the use for using world volumetrics just yet because I find it's just it chokes everything out there's no way for it to know yet in blender what the camera is looking at and to only calculated inside that so it just it goes crazy so what you're going to do instead I'm telling you what you're going to do you will do this add in a cube and just flatten it a little bit and then if you hit if you want to scale this on everything but like if you just scale it's like that it's going to go big so if you hit s and then shift Z it's going to scale it on everything but the z axes and look at that so we've now got this cube just been stretched down to about that size which is good now we want to apply the scale which is important and we want to have a look at how this looks just on its own with the lighting so let's get the lighting move that to its own layer let's just focus on this on this volumetric cube there and I'd split this in the other direction let's go to the node editor and we'll add a new material to this cube here delete the diffuse and in place of it we're going to be adding in a volume scatter shader so this volume scatter shader it were not going to be connecting anything to the surface so that's what you normally do with any other in a material this is volumetric so it's only going to connect it to the bottom if you put anything in that is just going to cancel it out so just leave that in there and this density amount is always set to high I find like 0.1 is generally pretty good and if we just hit shift Z you can see automatically what effect that that's had on this little cube here and from the view of the camera this is now how it looks inside our our scene so really foggy oh that's the other thing you want to make sure that the let's just make this full screen that this like because from the view of the camera you can see that the top part there's no volume metrics so you want to make sure there is volume metrics always turn off proportional fourth so just increase the size of that you know to be just so there's it's just above wherever the camera is looking just slightly otherwise you'll get an ugly sort of cut off sort of look so something like that that's pretty good but as I said before we want the mist to be low-hanging so this is where you have to get a little bit fancy what we want to do is you want to add in first of all a gradient texture let's go right here drop that into the density input of our volume scatter and if you hit shifts that you'll see that now there's a gradient from the left-hand side to the right-hand side okay just a very slight gradient if you said to quadratic I think it's a little bit more obvious but there we go a little bit like that and then we want to rotate it so I'm going to add in a texture coordinate node and then let's go mapping let's go take the output of the generated and then put that into the input here for the gradient and then I'm going to set this why I'm just hoping that this works I'm going to hit 90 it worked Oh last time I did this for some reason it wasn't correctly going but what you should have is that the the fog is now going from top to bottom in that direction all the way around you want to check like the front and the side axes because sometimes this is with the we like volume metrics I just mad with with mapping it's crazy understanding what these values do is just almost impossible to it's just crazy trying to create a simple gradient effect is because it doesn't work like a standard 2d image it's three dimensions there's volume it's crazy so I don't know anybody under the out there he'll understand you know victim avi maybe you can tell me a better way but this is the way I do it once I've got that now going from top to bottom I want it to be the other direction so I flip this I flip it on its head and then I you know I find out where it is and then I just move it up a little bit like that and now if we just go back to that you can see the mist is now low-hanging and provided you don't apply the rotation then you should be fine now it's too thick at the moment and the reason for that things that it's you know just using a density of whatever this is like one so I'm going to add in here a math node set this to multiply and then this value here basically then becomes the density so I can set a two point one and it looks good but as well as that I want to control what the the lowest amount of density there can be for this cube so if I add in a color ramp node that hasn't adjusted this at all in any way yet but now if I set this this black value here the black means zero volume so if I increase this you can see that the top part of that cube is now filling up with some volume so I just want to make sure there's always some some bit of volume there so I'm just going to set this to be a point one you know so just a little bit because otherwise it just looks weird if it just cuts off cleanly the scene just it just looks bizarre I also want to just bring up that low-hanging fog just to be a little bit higher up so it's not completely you know like dissipating from beneath the ground and then that should be pretty good with the rest of it great fantastic so let's drag in the rest of the scene and then one more thing before we render this is very important underneath volume sampling down here you've got something that says step size now by default it's set to 0.1 the lower you go the more accurate the volume rendering will be but the longer you'll render times will be now I set this at 0.1 and my render time is well like four and a half minutes and I did point five and the render times were like one minute and a half and there was virtually no difference in the difference in quality so this step size is a bit of a bit of a misdemeanor I don't know I don't get it I don't know why it matters that much I'm going to set it to two because you know it doesn't really matter that much we're getting this light haze we're not going for like precise to the millimeter you know volumetrics so you'll thank me later set that to two also maximum steps supposedly the maximum steps it'll pass through before it gives up I don't know what that means either but I know that lowering it reduces the render times and doesn't make much of an effect either so turn that one down and if you want some more realism here's a little tip you can increase the render times a little bit by going under light paths and setting volume bounces from zero to one so you'll get a bounce off the ground or a bounce within the volume whatever and you'll have it the volume will have a little bit more color to it essentially so we'll give it a go let's see how this looks now with uh with those changes okay so that looks pretty cool still looks like the fog of death is uh I mean yeah it's coming in a bit so like we're gonna have to dial that back another thing another little tip so every one way again let's do this another thing that we're going to do you will do is uh is we're going to add in some wavy so like give it more of a clout like a sort of a blowing miss because at the moment this is like a fine mist which is just encapsulated everything but there's no variation - it's not like the wind has blown and there's like thicker parts over here over there it's just uniform and as I've you know hinted to in this tutorial uniforms generally not all that it's cracked up to be you know for realism sakes you want to add in some severe sorry I added in the Volume Mascara that's they should have done that bad me instead what we're going to do is we're going to add in a noise texture and this noise texture we're going to use noise Texas basically the cloud texture it's the same thing and we're going to use that to cut through the volumetrics to create areas where there's no volumetrics basically so first we want to do those connect this to the object coordinate from from there so you let me just zoom in here so you can actually see this better so noise texture to the object coordinate like that and then we'll take this and essentially we want to feed it into our between our color ramp and our multiply node because this is where it's gone from a gradient texture to a color and now it's going into where it's actually going to become density so we can use this which is a color texture as well and if we add a mix RGB node we can take the output of this noise texture put that into the mix input there and then set this to multiply so it'll take the dark values that's what multiply does of this noise texture and feed that through this which is mostly white and I'll use that to cut away at it all right well like I said that de mainland you're right you got that huh way to still bit down enough you could figure it out from here alright let's see how that looks alright actually probably you won't be able to see anything if we actually just go in to rendered View mode yet until we add in a brightness and contrast node and then just set this to something really high like five all right so let's just see how that looks now with those settings change to it hmm okay see it's yeah tiny little puffs are coming through this you want to make this a little bit lower let's go to and there you can see it's kind of this like wavy form now so contrast is a bit high at five because I don't want it to be like areas where there's completely no mist it's going to look unrealistic so an area of like you know like two is going to be all right and I'll increase the detail on this as well so it's a sort of a you know roughish sort of cloud throughout the whole thing but that should look a lot better and I'm also going to dial back the old the old volumetrics there and unfortunately when you dial back the volume metrics everything else like it just becomes noisier it's just the way volumetrics work I think it's because it like reduces the number of dots like these little tiny dots in the volume and in doing that it like increases like just yeah you reduce the dot so now it looks grainy whatever let's give it a render see how this looks now with those changes and hopefully it looks good all right how about that nailed it touching it's pretty good I mean obviously you cut a you got to really ramp up the samples to get rid of this grain but once you do that should be pretty good so um yeah all right we're going to add some trees and some bushes in a sec but first final thing we got to increase the behavior grass I'm going to double it actually because you can see down here there's patches where there's not enough grass showing through and that's no good I want it to look like real thick wild grass so when it comes to like doing final renders and stuff like that you got to amp it up which increases you know render times a little bit memory a little bit but it it'll make it look a lot better just just so much nicer so do that and now let's get into the trees to the data editor so this is the final touches I mean we're not using any product of mine I've got these you can download these download them now off blender guru oh and I just did a yeah append the hotkey is shift F 1 if you want oh sorry reminding me when it comes to trees and bushes don't append link linking uses far less memory thank me later so that what I mean by that is here instead of going append you go link that's it so find the the tree that you've downloaded from my website or you can use this time wisely whilst I try and find out where I buried mine foliage trees or you can see simulator from the architecture Academy all right I'm using this one I put in the shrubs folder it's the Stags horn so much which has got a little bit of a red little little chilli flower kind of look to it which is a good one because it's it's got some color to it so that's going to become the focal element which is the whole point of adding it because just having a grassy plain you know you post that online on share to somebody go look at my grassy plain and they go cool man that's a grassy plain now what you know like what's the what's your next move buddy come on you got to have something that people can take away from it you know so the tree is something else it's a focal element it's not much I mean a human would be better adding in a little hiker I tried adding that by the way didn't work then yeah I wouldn't I wouldn't recommend it then you can add in an extra up now which is this little tiny dark gold one here the shrub darts gold no it's not that one no I got it wrong hang on I'll find it I'll find it I always find it this one what is that oh it's a sweet pepper bush sweet sweet pepper bush it's got these little like yellowy white flowers that come out of it they're pretty good as well and if you haven't yet seen it check out the compositional video and I bring that up now because it's this next bite is about balancing out the scene so you want to have a shrub here and that's going to counteract this weight but then you want to just have one lonely shrub you want to have one in the background as well you know a little on over there but then it's a little heavy on this side so you want to have one up here maybe let's go silhouette so that's got a little bit more visual what do you call it visual weight behind it so then we're going to have another one over there now where's the trail trail is there and then just so that it looks more complete I'll add one way way way in the around there and and then one over on here as well and this is going to look sick man it's going totally sweet all right yeah so watch the compositional tutorial which is on planning your introduction to composition no understanding composition and that'll explain visual way and I only bring it up I mean if you could compositions like if you spent three hours learning about composition like I can't think of a more value like a better use for your time as an artist than learning about composition like any time spent on it is it's just going to be gold like you got to learn it and and start applying it so just yeah watch that video it was all I could do to try and encapsulate all the books and all the stuff that's out there about rule of thirds and golden rules and stuff to try and make it easy to understand so watch that and hopefully you'll be right as rain so give it a render now and hopefully this will be it all right there you go so it's it's pretty much done well done give yourself a pat on the back whatever that's going to do for you I have no idea this is what the the final one looked like and this is what my crazily different one look like I don't want to like say this is the tutorial result because that is a lie it's so different but the techniques are exactly the same it's just adding in the grass getting the texture distribution correctly and adding in weeds and just tweaking everything till it gets right I didn't want to do this entire scene because there's rocks and there's all sorts of trees and a tree stump and all that stuff I didn't want to confuse it with so yeah and this is a if you give it out a longer render this is basically the result you'll get as well yep so that's it guys thanks very much for watching I hope you enjoyed it and if you make anything cool with it do let me know because I'm always looking forward to seeing what you make with it anyways that's it thanks for watching bye

Channel: Blender Guru

Views: 428,621

Rating: 4.9389553 out of 5

Keywords: Blender (Software), cycles, grass

Id: zhYtJ_VmvXE

Length: 56min 37sec (3397 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 30 2015