Make A Minature Forest Scene With Geometry Nodes - Blender Tutorial

hello and welcome to another exciting blender tutorial today we're going to be making some bioluminescent mushrooms let's get started [Music] now what we're going to be doing is starting off with getting our camera set up and then we're gonna block out our basic shot and then we're gonna get into some detail so i'm gonna jump into my camera by hitting zero on the number pad key and then i'm gonna select my camera and i'm gonna come down here to the camera tab and i'm gonna go to viewport display and pass part two again this is just a preference thing i like having the edges of my frame blacked out makes it easier for me to focus this doesn't do anything for your render this is just for you to focus on what's important i'm going to open up my view tab on the side here and click lock camera to view and i'm going to kind of come down here try and get a good angle i'm going to want to use a really long lens because i want to have like a lot of depth of field like this is a i've got my camera and i'm in the i'm in the woods and i'm zoomed in you know so i want to make sure i've got something that's set probably to like i don't know we'll try an 85 maybe to start with and we'll try and model and create the scene to the lens to the camera so we can try and make it look as good as we can with what we got now i'm going to take this cube and i'm going to delete it there it's going i'm going to go shift a and i'm going to create a cylinder i'm going to rotate it oh actually one really important thing i want to move my camera around a bit so that the x and y directions kind of line up with the angle of my camera so this just makes it a lot easier for me to position things and rotate and kind of shape the scene to the camera okay so what i'm going to do is i'm going to hit r to rotate and y to lock it on the y axis and i'll hit 90 type in 90 my keypad just to rotate it around and i'm going to hit g to grab an x to lock it on the x and i'll just bring it right over here and then i'm going to go into edit mode by hitting tab and i'm going to select this end cap right here i'm just going to delete that i'm going to x and delete face because i don't really need it and i'll hit alt holding down the alt i'll click this loop that'll select that edge loop now i'm going to hit e to extrude and grab with g and x to lock it i'll just bring this over here or in fact probably the easiest thing to do is let's not do that let's just grab this bring it around and then hit ctrl r and then roll my mouse wheel this makes a bunch of loop cuts all right now i'm just going to take some of these and again with alt to select the whole ring and i'm just going to offset them a little bit in different ways like i'm grabbing this one on the white maybe down a little bit this one go up this one go down up why bring it out like that all right i'm going to take this thing i'm going to rotate it on the z a little bit like that and i think i'll rotate it on the y some too just like that and grab it up that's pretty good this is going to be like a log that my mushrooms are going to be growing on i'm thinking they're going to grow kind of right around this spot right here now i'm going to leave my camera so i'm going to take camera to view i'm going to pop out i'm going to go back into edit mode on this thing and i'm going to alt click to select that in loop there and i'm going to come up here to the proportional editing tool and i'm going to click it to turn it on and then i'm going to hit s to scale you see this this we this circle i'm going to roll my mouse wheel to expand it and this will just allow me to kind of shrink things down you can see it's proportional so the further away it gets from the center of that circle the less it's going to affect things i'm just going to scale it down so there's a little bit of a slope a little bit of uh you know fall off a tapering to that shape now i'm going to right click and shade smooth to tell blender to render this geometry smooth because you know trees don't have that kind of that's kind of a surface so i'm going to rename this cylinder i'm going to double click that and i'm going to call this uh tree why not i'm going to click my main collection i'm going to click plus to add a new collection and i'll call this one bark and then i'm going to create some stuff i'm going to hide this tree just so it's out of out of my view for a second here and i'm gonna look at look at this from the top down view by hitting seven on my num keypad and i'm gonna hit shift a i'm gonna create a cube scale it down scale it on the x and i'm going to scale it on the z like that and then i'm going to come over here i'm going to go subdivision surface i'm going to turn it up to like maybe four then i'm going to go over here i'm going to select uh displacement click new come to the texture tab select clouds and then i'm going to take the size of this thing and just play with a little bit right click shade smooth see that kind of looks like a piece of bark sort of you know close enough right then what we can do is come here let's create a new material for this thing i'm just going to have a look at it in rendered view [Music] and i'll split my view i'm going to go up here create my shader editor grab my shader editor i mean sorry bring this up here i'm going to give it a kind of a brown color like that it's going to be pretty rough so i'll just turn the roughness right up i'm going to get a musgrave texture and i'm going to get see i'll keep it at that i'll go to multifractal i'm going to get a map range node and i'll plug it in now the reason why i'm doing this i'll show you i'll just put this in the emission so we can see it i can take this and i can increase it so from max the higher this goes basically we think about what the map range nodes doing you've got values coming out of this must scrape texture that are zero to one but they go beyond that right they go up to like you know i don't know how high they go but they're sort of infinite in either direction i think because it's like a it's a mathematical calculation that creates this noise pattern and so you've got these numbers that are really big anything that's over one it's going to blow out to white right because remember white is one and zero is black anything goes below zero is going to disappear it's gonna go below black so when i'm looking at it without this map range node if i mute it you can't really it kind of cuts off a little bit if you really notice this if i get a color ramp and i drop it here and i like try and drag these together you can see like it's i can't really get much more than that like i lose everything that's in here in this space whereas if i use a map range node i can bring all that information kind of back into the bounds of zero and one so by saying actually take everything that's from zero to three and turn it into zero to one it's gonna sort of without losing information it's going to shrink all those values down so they're a bit more visible hope that makes sense and i'm going to grab a color ramp and i'll drop it after the map range node and now i can play around a little bit with some contrast you can see the higher i go at this the more it's going to kind of shift that black point and white point um now see i might take the scale uh i'll take it up i'll do go up on the dimension i'll bring the dimension down and the detail up and i'll bring the scale down that's pretty good um and then i probably want to stretch it a little bit so i think what i'll do is i'll go over here and i'll grab a mapping node and a coordinate texture coordinate node and i'm going to take the generated that's fine generates the standard the one that it's using by default already but you have to plug something in to get the map range node the mapping rain the mapping node sorry you have to plug something in to get the mapping node to work uh i don't want to scale along the x maybe let's try that yeah kind of stretching it out is what i wanted to do that works now i'm not going to be plugging this into the image i'm just doing that so i can see it clearly all right i'm going to come here and grab a bump node and then i'm going to take the color put it into the height and then we're going to take the normal and plug it into the normal and we're going to unplug the emission now if you're not familiar with bump nodes i've got a lot of tutorials about normals and what they are but the basic gist of it is a normal is the direction that a polygon is facing and when you use a bump node you're basically simulating like there's more geometry than really exists by using a texture so it uses that texture to say okay well there's all these directions that the faces are pointing and so that's how it knows how to calculate how to render the light it's a really cool topic it's worth understanding i'm going to turn the distance down to 0.1 and that will just kind of change this overall scale of the bump noise which makes it look a little bit better on a small object might go 0.01 now that's too far 0.05 looks pretty good strength is fine i also might put a little bit of color variation using this system here so i will create another color ramp and i will drop it here and take this color ramp stick it into this one and i'll plug it into actually before i plug it in i go to this white color and i'll color pick the brown and i'll plug this in this will just give us a differential it'll kind of differentiate between these two colors i can drag these in as well to get a little bit of variation i might take this one off black bring it up a little bit and give it you know another kind of maybe a less saturated brown maybe i think that looks good i think this will work this is our piece of bark we could use this displacement texture we could set the coordinates to global and that's going to change how it behaves as it moves through the scene i will need to change the yeah let's try this let's actually try doing it like this i'm going to i'm going to go to my texture tab i need to change the size to get it to work again like we had it on the size that works i think that's pretty good take this one i'll put it just back here zero zero zero and then what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna turn on tree to back into my camera i'm gonna select the tree come up here switch this over to geometry nodes click new to create a new geometry node system we'll call this bark and i'm going to go for a point distribute node i'll drop that here you can see we get all these points now distributing across the surface of the geometry that we're piping in from our group input but i don't want to lose my tree so i'm going to come over here and i'm going to grab a join geometry node and i'll plug this one into here and this one into here and this one back in if you're not familiar what's happening here is that we're taking that free geometry it comes into the system comes down here and becomes something totally different with the point distribute node so the geometry disappears but the tree itself also gets piped to here so it stays the same and this one gets joined back up with it so that's how we're able to marry those two together all right so i'm going to start with a low value because i don't want this to like go completely nuts sometimes it's a bit crazy and i'm going to come over here and i'm going to go for a point instance node i'll drop it here we're going to start with just just object because i think with the procedural way that we set it up okay so first thing we need to do is apply the scale so it's not see it's not bringing in the scale everything's got this like much larger shape to it it's basically what this is if it was set to 1 1 1 of the scale so we're going to go f3 apply scale so we want the weird scale numbers that we've got there we want them to be one one one so there we go so now you can see it works it does change uh the way things are behaving so we may need to just go back and tweak that a little bit uh so let's just have another look at this guy here um let's see i only want to go uh can i can we just do x does that work i think that is right actually let's just go on the x so we'll just have it displace along the x coordinate all right let's turn the tree back on now we need to get the rotation correct because it's you know the wrong they're pointing out there's a couple ways we could do that one we could go into edit mode and actually change it in the object but we can also rotate these points so let's go over here and let's go align rotation vector node we're going to drop that here and you can see it's going to line everything it's just happy accident that it's the right one to start with but that's what we want now we can turn this density up and let's just have a look is it the same exact shape for each one it is i think the same exact shape so we would get a little bit of value out of going with collection i think so let's try collection untick hold collection and select bark now we can do it here is shift d and we can just duplicate a couple of these right and the more of these we've got they're all going to be behaving differently as long as we have to move them pretty far actually to get some good variation but all these barks are going to be different i can actually untick this group as well to hide them all now i can click my tree object again and turn my density up until i've got the coverage that i want if i turn off this here the show overlays it's going to be a little bit clearer for me um so that kind of works um we could go larger with these guys it's also kind of nice to have some some see-through to be honest because that's sort of how trees work like you get this little like gaps in the bark which is kind of nice let's put a material on this tree object which is like the same one uh and just place it on there i think that works pretty well um okay i think this is gonna suit us uh for our needs so that's that's how we've made some bark i think it looks pretty good let me go ahead and come over here to my render settings i'm going to turn on ambient occlusion bloom and screen space reflections so we've got those on we're also going to go ahead and get an hdri to set the sort of environment of our space correctly so i'm going to go over to my web browser and i'm going to go to hdr haven which is now called poly haven give the poly haven crowd a shout out this is an awesome place to go they are h they are patreon funded so go check them out we're going to go browse hdrs you can use these uh for free your projects and i want to find see let's go to nature let's see if we can find like a forest there we go forest slope i think this will do well for us oh no here we go that's what we want this one right here looks great so this is the lotus waterfall and i'm going to download this thing at just one case fine that's all i need so now what i can do is i can bring it in so i'm going to switch over to my world shader so go to shader editor and then go to the world shader the world is what lives in this tab here and you can just change the color in this space but we want to actually do something a little bit trickier with it we're going to go here and go shift a and we're going to create an environment texture there it is type in environment texture and we just open and navigate to the texture file that you've downloaded the hdri all right now once you've imported your file uh we're gonna do is click and take the color and we're gonna stick it right here into the background color and now you can see we get this nice nice texture maybe that is a bit little maybe it's a little too low rest maybe i should have gone higher than 1k so those pixels are let me do that i'm going to download i'm going to try let's go to 4k open that bam see okay see how sharp that got it looks nice okay now what we're going to do is we're going to create a mapping node and we're going to use that to move this one around now we need to you see it goes blank because we don't have the texture coordinate node you always have to use the texture coordinate node when you're using the mapping node so texture coordinate node bam i'm going to take generated throw it in there now it's back because the default is generated so you can see it hasn't changed that's how it looks now i can just rotate this around not look uh location i'm going to use rotation i can rotate it around to find a nice spot for it anyways what's so cool about this is this is being used now to light our scene so this isn't forming the light okay um i'm going to take my tree and duplicate it and grab this one down and maybe scale it a little bit roll it up oh that's kind of cool look at that look at this nice kind of natural looking break looks pretty good and i think if i if i create some depth of field now with my camera it's going to look really nice so if i come here to my camera and i go ahead and turn on depth of field you can see it's going to start blurring that i might turn my f-stop down even further and i'm going to want to focus kind of right around here is we're gonna go all right so the next thing we wanna do is start thinking about these mushrooms and how we're gonna get them to work and yeah what they're gonna what they're gonna do so i mean it's pretty easy what you do is you come over here and turn the strength down and then we go and we go curves so rgb curves and we drop it in here to the color and we turn the blue up so i just push the blue curve up and what that's going to do is going to start to color everything as if it's nighttime um and then i need to take this light which is in our scene i can delete that now it's purely being clicked by this then we can go shift a create a sun lamp right find a nice kind of angle on this and then give it a little bit of a blue tint you can see it starts to look like nighttime pop out on my camera go back to shaded mode let me actually think about this i'm gonna go for a mesh i'm gonna go for a uv sphere and i'm going to grab it up on the z i'm going to go into edit mode go to vertex selection mode and turn on transparent and i'm going to look at this thing dead on by using one on my number keypad and i'm gonna go b to box select i'm gonna grab all these and hit x to delete vertices okay so i'm looking at the cap right the cap of the mushroom okay i'm gonna loop select the bottom keep looking at it from the side here i might hide my cameras so they're not uh they're under extras i don't have to see that um and with my proportional editing turned on i'm going to grab zed roll my mouse wheel to shrink down that circle and let's do that like this so we can have like this slight sort of rounded shape to it okay now one thing that that mushrooms have is this kind of like frill inside right so i'm just going to hit a to select all i'm going to hold on alt and just oops hold down alt and shift and click each of these rings like so all right now with all those edges selected what i'm going to do is hit e to extrude grab and i'll turn off porch lighting grab and set i'm going to drag these down all right if i turn off x-ray mode you can kind of see what i'm doing right i've just extended these things down now i'm gonna hit scale zed and i'm gonna drag and i'm gonna drag till they flip all right now they're kind of sticking out the bottom a little bit which is cool now if i go out of edit mode you can see i've got this nice kind of cap plus that frilled bit but it's all quite thin now right click and shade smooth and i'm going to go over here and i'm going to add in a solidify and bam we instantly get something that looks a lot like i'm not sure now we're getting something weird on this edge what is this one i think it's cause they're connected so what i should do is separate things i think we're gonna look at this in the top down view and i'm going to hit b to box select we're going to select that but reason i don't have transparent mode on right so by doing it like that it's not going to select anything that's hidden just all that stuff down there so i've just selected the cap basically now what i can do with that is i can go p which means separate the hotkey for separate i can separate by selection it will make this actually a different object right so it'll disconnect all those vertexes now what i can do is i can select the new object like this i can go out of edit mode back into object mode grab zed just drag it up a little bit so it's no longer intersecting like that then what i can do is actually i can join them back together and it's not going to have that problem anymore because i've separated those vertexes so there you go now what i can do is i can come down here and let's try adding in a subdivision surface modifier just to round all this stuff out a bit that looks pretty good and then what i want to do i'm going to set to um i might do it before the solidify yeah i think that's a good idea now let's add in a displacement modifier to this so we're going to go for a where are you displaced there it is and i'm going to click on new to create a new texture well that's cool and i'm going to jump down to the texture thing and we're going to switch this to clouds again i use clouds pretty much all the time and i want to make the size really big i might go bigger than that let's go five right so it's really big size then what i'm going to do is come back up to the the wrench thing and i'm going to take the strength down to 0.1 and i'm going to hold down shift and drag up just a little bit to adjust this thing so what i'm going to do now is i'm going to go back into edit mode and i'm going to select this center vertex right here actually even better what i could do is select this loop right so what i'm going to do is hit c to get brush selection and i'll just click there making sure that i've got transparency turned off so i'm just selecting the top bit um what i could do now is i could just shifty to duplicate and then grab zed just to bring it inside a little bit i can also scale it down some then i get an e to extrude and grab z and just bring it down like this okay and e grabs it i might delete this uh these faces so delete those faces and i'll just go to edge mode select that edge loop all right now i'm going to look at this from the side i scale this thing down also going to [Music] turn i want to see the effect of all these things when i'm in edit mode so i'm going to turn them all on that's what these buttons do is they make the effect visible when you're editing this this last bit here um and i'm going to get a reference because there's kind of like this like bloom thing that happens right grab this up i'm going to hit e to extrude and scale and grab it down like that right and then e scale it in again grab it up e scale grab it up because this is what they do they kind of like form this frill we're going to go down and then e i'm going to hide my trees so i'm just looking at my mushroom and then when it gets down to the base it really starts to flare out again mushroom looking thing now we also need to make sure that the head here we need to tilt it because it's not going to be it's perfectly straight i'll i'll show you what i did there by the way sorry um if you just hold your mouse over an object like we know these bits are separated because they're not actually connecting the vertices aren't connecting um i can hit l while i'm hovering over it and that will select anything that's connected to this object and then i can do the same here so these guys now i've got them so i can rotate this all right i'm going to scale this guy down and i'm going to find a position for him on this log we're going to create a new collection and we're going to call this mushrooms and we'll take our mushroom which i'll rename and i will drag it into the mushroom collection and then what i'm going to do is i'm going to take this tree i'm going to shift it and duplicate it but on this tree i'm going to get rid of the geometry node system so i just come here to my modifiers and just hit x delete the modifier off this i'm going to hide the other trees i'm going to go into edit mode and what i want to do is basically just select the faces that i want for where these mushrooms are going to appear so i'm just going to hold down alt and select a couple of these i'm going to hit control plus to expand my selection and yeah i think that's that's probably all i want i don't think i'm going to want any more than that i might even get rid of some of these over here so i don't want these things like everywhere in my scene uh yeah that's pretty good i'll get rid of these end caps here and i'll get rid of those bits oops now what i'll do is i'll go up here and i'll pick select and i'll click invert and then x delete faces so that's all i've got i can go back into my camera and with this guy i'm going to call this mushroom placement and i'm going to come out of my shader editor i'm going to go to geometry nodes click new and i'll call this mushrooms and again i'll go for a point distribute and i can turn my density up or down i'm not going to join because i don't want to get that piece of geometry in there i just use the log so that these are going to like form in the bits that i want um there's other ways of doing it like i could use like a vertex group on the log itself and use that to generate it but you know it's sort of like whatever comes in your mind when you're making something you just go with that and you can refine it as you progress but as long as it gets the job done i'm going to go for a point instance and i'll select collection turn off whole collection and i'll select mushrooms all right now we can decide how dense we want these guys we're also going to go for a random attribute randomize i'll stick this right here and the attribute we're going to randomize is the scale i'll keep it on a float and a minimum and maximum i'll take the maximum down a bit and the minimum up a touch like that i'm going to shift d to duplicate we're going to randomize the rotation now i wanted this to be a vector because uh rotation is x y and z scales x y z but i want x y z to be the same because i want to just kind of scale uniformly but with this rotation what i want to do is i only want to rotate randomly on the z i think well maybe on all of them actually so we just need to do is kind of bring these around first we'll find a spot that that looks good so i'm actually going to grab a value node and i'll plug it into here and type one and i'll get another actually i'll just use the same one in both actually even better what i'll do is i'll grab a combine xyz node and i'll put this into both the minimum and the maximum and now i can kind of just rotate this around to find you know a good base position that i like and i can also use this to determine you know what's the bit that i'm going to use to create the variation i think it's going to be the y so i'll unplug these and i'll use these numbers so copy paste copy paste copy paste and then what i'll do is in the max i'll just increase this one up a little bit and i might bring this one down a touch i might just offset these guys a little bit see now they're going to be kind of like close to where i want them which is pretty cool all right um now i can turn my density up to get even more i might bring my max scale bring it down a little bit i think now let's go ahead and turn on our trees uh let's take our mushroom placement i'm gonna grab zed and bring it up a little bit now the reason why they're they're all kind of appearing down inside is because the origin of our mushroom is up in the the neck so one thing we could do to really help this is by going to transparent mode on my mushroom and i select go to edge mode just like this alt click this bottom edge i can go shift s cursor to select it then i'll put my 3d cursor right in the middle of those points now the reason we're seeing all these in edit mode is because they're being instanced through the geometry node system so that's why we're seeing them all but what i can do now is go out of this i can select this go object set origin origin to 3d cursor that'll put the origin down at the base of the mushroom and then all these guys are going to work so now i can actually bring this back down a bit now i'm going to play with these rotations a little bit more then i've got this thing right and i can take this now i can shifty to duplicate and i can you know customize place a couple more of these that'll give me a bit more freedom all right so let's get some cool materials happening on these guys i'm going to turn on rendered view so we can see our cool little mushrooms in action and i'm just going to work on one of these guys um i might actually i'll just put the same material on both of them i'll turn off all my selection stuff and i'm going to switch over to my shader editor i'm going to go off world to object all right so i'm going to create a new material and i'll apply it to both both of these guys so now as we tweak this material it's going to just work across both of them all right so let's see i'm going to turn up subsurface to begin with because i know we're going to need that this is going to allow light to penetrate through these guys it's going to make them look really nice i'm also going to affect my camera a little bit try and get a nicer nicer view i think i'm gonna shoot down the barrel maybe let's do some gradient ramp stuff so i'm gonna get a color ramp and then i'm gonna get a gradient texture and a texture coordinate and i'm going to use the object coordinate i'm going to use the factor into the color ramp plug this into the emission just to start with so we can have a look at it and then i'm going to grab this and i'm going to turn it into a spherical gradient and then what i want to do is i'm going to grab a mapping node drop it here and then i'm going to move it up on the z so that it's kind of like up inside the top of the cap set this to ease so it's a bit of a softer fall off so i'm gonna take this and i'll go for let's see the white i'm gonna go for like kind of a warm color and the black i'm going to go for a whitish kind of blue color i think just subtly like they're kind of shifted off each other i'll take this and plug it into the base color right see if i pump a little more saturation into this what does it look like okay we're going to lose a lot of it because of the subsurface scattering so i might plug this into the subsurface color and then i'll take it out of the base color i also might shift data actually i'll create a new color ramp drop it here i'll take the factor into the factor i'm going to set this to b spline and then drag this in and i'm going to bring this color into the emission and then i'm going to make this a little bit of a rng kind of glow color i'm going to turn the emission strength up so i start to get some blue i think what i'll do is i'll create a different gradient texture and i'll plug this factor in and i'll create a different mapping node i'll use the object coordinate like this and so i've got a little more control over what's going on and i'm going to take this i'm going to go value plug it into the scale and now i can scale it a little bit i kind of want to do this like just sort of like hint at it like just get it somewhere so it's not that big it's just a little ways position it right over the stem down so it's in the stem that looks really really really cool let's do the same thing but with like a noise pattern now so let's go for a veroni we'll just start with this i'll shift d duplicate this in i'll take distance i'll plug it in there and then i need to create a mix rgb node and i'll drop it right here and i'll take the color and i'll plug it in and i'm going to add these together and i'll turn this one up so i can really see it factor down now let's take a light in this like let's come right in here shift a light point light and let's grab it move it around i'm going to turn on my controller so i can actually see this thing stick it right in here and we'll give it like a blue color really saturated blue color it's just going to help like kind of eye all these things together let's go a bit more saturated with this blue as well that'll help it feel even more like a night scene shifty to duplicate and i don't want behind the mushrooms there we go so i can get these little glints thanks again for watching i really appreciate you tuning in and checking out this video i hope you found it really great don't forget to check out the patreon where you can get this project file along with the full uncut live stream version of this which ran for about an hour and 40 minutes we covered a lot of extra details went down a lot of rabbit holes it's really worth your time if you want to check that out you can also find it on youtube we've become a channel menu menu if you become a channel member at the all access pass level and higher choosing to support me one of those two ways is really awesome it goes a long way to help me continue to make these tutorials and uh what i'll do is i'll uh edit this and turn it into a 20 to 30 minute long video tutorial that you're probably watching now and i hope you really enjoyed it thank you for checking it out i'll catch you in the next one until then don't forget to subscribe hit that like button leave me a comment and ring the bell for notifications i'll see you in the next videos wow [Music]

Channel: CBaileyFilm

Views: 16,817

Keywords: blender, blender turorial, blender beginner tutorial, scifi, create a short film, create a fan film

Id: FwkYULJ17GQ

Length: 35min 15sec (2115 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 15 2021