Make stunning 3D environments in Blender - Botaniq addon review

g'day blenderheads today we're going to be doing some 3d gardening and checking out the botanic add-on for blender first off let me say that i've been playing with this add-on for the past couple of months and i love it i've always wanted a vegetation add-on for my 3d work and now that i have one it's everything that i wanted it to be botanic has also recently received a really big update so now there's even more for me to like about it so let's jump in and see what this add-on has to offer installing botanic is the same as most blender add-ons simply go to edit preferences add-ons and install the zip file from your hard drive botanic is quite a large add-on and you may have a moment where you think your computer has frozen but give it a moment or so to install fully and you should be good to go botanic is found under the polygonic tab in your side panel that's the panel that you press n to bring up the majority of our buttons and tabs are grayed out until we add an asset so let's start with the big spawn asset button at the top clicking this button brings up a new window with a bunch of categories clicking on the actual image will bring up all the assets under this category which by default is the deciduous category as you can see there's a lot of assets available here to make it a little bit faster and to find the asset that you're looking for you can use the seasonal check boxes to limit your options to one particular season at a time under the categories drop down we have even more options so deciduous refers to trees that lose their leaves in winter coniferous trees are those that don't lose their leaves in winter and will instead come with a bunch of snow attached to their branches keep in mind that the deciduous and coniferous trees are the only two categories that allow the trees to be animated you can't for example automatically animate a cactus and botanic will throw an error if you try to just to quickly go over the other categories because there are a lot of them there's a variety of flowers including the new rose asset the garden category which contains a bunch of wooden structures to grow plants in or around a variety of grasses including dry and snowy assets a whole bunch of different growing ivy presets i love these and used them extensively in my post-apocalyptic animation the miscellaneous category has a bunch of random assets to scatter around your forest scenes such as dead leaves twigs pine cones and the new mushroom assets there's a bunch of plants which are mostly ferns but also include some random things like coriander bamboo and tomato plants a random assortment of pots either to put your plants in or just to decorate your architectural renders a large number of rocks some younger saplings shrubs including finely trimmed hedges and just randomly growing shrubs the previously mentioned succulents or cactus a bunch of tropical palm trees and ferns a variety of ivy and vines and finally a bunch of different weeds all up there are 583 assets in the full pack the full pack currently costs 129 dollars which is no doubt one of the more expensive blender add-ons there is a cut down version also available for only 49 if you just want to test out a cheaper version but it's worth mentioning that each asset is being sold for only 22 cents now it's not that long ago that a single tree could set you back around 10 each in fact if you jump on turbo squid you can still find individual trees for around about this price so getting all of these assets at what is collectively a ridiculously cheap price is frankly unfathomable to me remember you can also check out the entire collection via the blender market page if you want to get a closer look at each individual asset so now that you know what you're actually getting for your money let's go through how this add-on actually works let's spawn a lovely maple tree oh it's also worth noting that these assets come at real-world scales so they'll fit into your scenes perfectly all these assets also spawn in as instances which massively saves on memory and reduces your render times the downside is it does limit your ability to tweak the asset as you can see i either don't have the material or the modifier tabs available to me this is where the convert to editable button comes in this effectively appends the assets to your scene breaking the instance but allowing you to edit these properties you'll also need to convert to editable if you want to animate your tree so we'll come back to this in a moment the snap to ground button is a great time saver you'll notice that if i try and use it right now it won't do anything but if i add a ground plane i can now use this button to plant the tree what's really nice is that this also works for deformed ground planes so if i sculpt some hills in here you'll see that we'll snap to whatever height my polygons are currently at just keep in mind it snaps to the exact bottom of the tree so if your ground has some sharp inclines you may need to adjust it slightly you can also snap multiple assets at once the random transform does exactly what it says and gives your assets a random rotation and scale value this randomization is restricted so you shouldn't end up with upside down trees or anything stupid and as one would expect resetting the transforms zeroes out your rotations and scale the randomized variant is one of my favorite features each asset has several variations so if we look at the chestnut here you can see that there's one two three four five six seven nine different versions available and clicking the randomize variant button will randomly cycle through the available variations just keep in mind that sometimes you can get the exact same variant that you've already had so press it a couple of times and like the other buttons you can use this on multiple assets at once these next two buttons are mostly for cleaning up scenes to reduce your render times i won't go over them here because it gets a little bit technical but just know that having this process automated rather than having to search for these files manually is a huge time saver the brightness function is a new feature in version 6.2 and it allows you to add even more color variety to your trees you will need to be in material or render mode to see this change and again if you select a bunch of assets and choose randomize you can change the brightness value of all of your trees at once while we're talking about brightness this is a great time to mention that most of the assets have received a massive color tweak in the last update now this might seem like a relatively small change but in previous versions most of the trees just looked a little bit too saturated which means that you needed to tweak them if you wanted to composite them into live action footage now you should be able to add them to your film with significantly less work now we get to talk about probably the coolest part of this addon the tree animation now as i said before animation is limited to the deciduous and coniferous categories you'll also need to convert to editable to ungrade the animation options once we do that though the animation button becomes available and clicking it gives us two options either default or loop now these animations do use up a lot of processing power so i'd recommend being in solid mode to try and watch your animation loop is another new feature in the latest update and as one would expect it allows you to loop the trees animation this could be extremely useful for adding these trees to say game engines the default option just produces random movement over a longer animation and will look more natural by default your trees get a nice casual wind which looks quite natural but you always have the option of cranking up this animation to much higher levels which will give you more dynamic and stormy results you also have the option to turn on and off certain tree limbs or crank up the amplitude to get some really crazy results just keep in mind that there's no hard limits on what you can do here so pushing them too far will yield some interesting animations i won't go over all of these settings individually as there's far too many options but i suspect you will have some fun playing with them that takes care of adding individual assets so let's now turn our attention to the scattering options for this you will need to have some kind of object selected so let's use our ground plane if you click the little plus button here you'll see that we have even more category options these are all pre-built collections of the individual assets that polygonic has put together to help speed up your workflow so for example you can add a grass preset with some dead leaves scattered throughout if you want a greater balance of dead leaves to grass you can come down to the objects section and tweak these numbers to add more or less of certain assets this field is looking a little bit bare so let's add some trees now there's no presets for trees but we can create our own custom system let's add a couple of birch trees maybe two so there's some variety and very quickly you can see that we can build a nature scene this looks quite nice but what if we wanted to group our trees in one spot and sort of make it look like there's a field in front of a forest to do that we can jump into the density paint section this works by painting vertices so your ground plane will need to have a reasonably dense mesh to be able to use this you can do something similar with the length control which allows you to control the scale of your trees so for example if we use the gradient tool here you can see our trees grow and shrink depending on how much paint we give them this will make smaller trees growing out the front which helps mimic how a real forest would grow and considering that we've spent all of about 15 minutes putting this scene together this looks really really good i am seriously loving how quickly i can put together really nice realistic nature scenes in record time that said there are a couple of features that i'd like to see added to botanic as well as some general tips to keep in mind when building these nature scenes one thing that is both a blessing and a curse here is that some of these categories have so many assets it can be a pain to scroll through them for example trying to find these cherry trees at the bottom of the deciduous list actually takes a really long time to scroll down using the seasonal checkboxes is almost a must for this category another thing to keep in mind is that all of these assets are designed to be scattered and have many many copies of them they're not necessarily designed for close-ups so if we turn on the wireframe here you can see that these trees are actually quite low poly now this is fantastic for scattering large number of assets which is exactly what botanic is built for just remember that if you want to do close-up shots of these assets you may want to make one editable and add a subdivision modifier probably just to the trunk i wouldn't recommend adding it to the branches unless you really need to as there is still quite a lot of geometry in those you could also consider replacing the bark material with ones from some of the free material sites i have a video which goes through some of the best ones available here it is a little disappointing that not all of the assets animate now most of the time this does make sense however some categories like saplings it would have been really cool to have animatable some of the rock assets don't seem to be optimized so for example if we grab a basalt rock you can see that it has a stack of modifiers still attached to it this can really slow down your scene when you're scattering hundreds of these things so consider applying this modifier stack before scattering to help reduce that overhead on the plus side these rocks do have a lot of additional detail so they do work quite well for close-up shots botanic uses blender's particle system rather than geometry nodes this is a bit disappointing because particles are notorious for clipping into each other and your ability to prevent this with particles is almost non-existent now this isn't an issue for stuff like grass it's unlikely you'll ever have the camera close enough to see this clipping but some of the larger assets like rocks or trees it can become quite apparent that they clip especially when you have a lot of them geometry nodes is awesome because it allows you to get around this as you can tell your instances to leave a certain radius around each other and prevent that clipping there's absolutely nothing stopping you from adding the botanic assets to your own geometry node setup which is great but it would be nice in a future update to see something like this as an automated process all in all though despite these handful of quirks i have really loved using botanic i've spent many years trying to create my own trees and grass assets and it takes forever personally i'm a character creator i want to spend my time creating and animating characters and i want to be able to quickly build scenes and worlds for them to inhabit having such a massive library at my disposal to almost effortlessly create large-scale environments has really been a game changer for my work and with tools as cheap as botanic available i can't imagine ever creating my own nature assets again if you're interested in seeing how an entire animation can be put together using botanic and its partner add-on traffic check out this link and of course if you want to grab your own copy of botanic there is a link in the description below this is an affiliate link meaning if you purchase a copy i will get a small percentage of the sale which at least until i get a patreon account set up is the best way to help support this channel until next time happy blending you

Channel: Jamie Dunbar

Views: 1,654

Keywords: Blender, Botaniq, Polygoniq, Environment, Vegetation, Addon, Review

Id: Oa-GUIFGwjA

Length: 12min 42sec (762 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 20 2021