Making a Cabin in the Woods in 15 mins using Blender

ever since i saw this photo as a kid i've been obsessed with the idea of isolated houses i drew pictures of them in my school books i subscribed to cabin porn and lately for some reason working from home i felt the strong urge to escape to one virtually of course because the chances of getting to see one during this pandemic probably pretty slim and while most of the videos on my channel show you a step-by-step process on how to do something this video is going to be a little bit different because i recently started a podcast and let people send in questions and i realized that a lot of artists have a lot of self-doubt when they're going about creating something and i can't help but feel like tutorials like mine are partly to blame because the tutorials that you watch are like a perfect speed run of how to do something but when you watch it you don't realize the hours of experimentation building rebuilding and then rehearsing it multiple times that led to that perfect short format that you watched so in this video i want to show you the truth every mistake every slip up every dead end every waste of time that artists usually spend creating scenes like this you will learn the overall workflow for creating a complex environment and animation like this but more than that i hope you'll see just how little i know about what i'm doing and why that's very common when you're making something for the first time so with that out of the way let's get started every new project begins with an inspiration search and i personally like pinterest because you can keep clicking on the related results until you find exactly what you need i then paste the images into pure ref which is free software designed just for this purpose and then i generally move that to a separate monitor while i work it makes things easier when you work in real world measurements from the start so i made the ground 100 by 100 meters and then a two-story a-frame cabin i guess at around six meters high and i also like to add a human to give me some reference scale at this stage i'm restricting myself to only the big shapes the medium to small details will come later once i know that the scene is headed in the right direction i do need a ground material though so i browsed a bunch of the new scans from polygon i like the look of this one and then i use the beta toolbox add-on to automatically create the material for me along with adaptive displacement and speaking of keeping things to a real world scale the texture scale is just as important as the scale of the objects a polygon most of ours are labeled so you just take the size of the object in this case 100 meters and then divide it by the size of the texture which in this case is three meters you'll then have the correct texture scale for that object and yes in case you didn't know you can do any calculation in any field of blender and as i mentioned in my tiling tutorial even seamless textures like this will look repeated when it's tiled 33 times so using the uber mapping node that the add-on gives you i randomized the placement and effectively erased any noticeable tiling now normally i would light a scene like this with an hdr but i wanted to try the new sky texturing node that blender comes built with and having now tried it i can say it's awesome you can set the time of day the direction the size of the sun the air quality even the altitude of the scene it's basically like an hdr that you can control without needing to download anything for the trees i estimated it being far too time consuming to create any myself so i just bought a collection that i found on maxtree i then used it as a particle system across the ground i also like the idea of having god rays coming through the trees so i created a big box to cover the whole scene and assign a tiny amount of volumetric density to it and this is what i got which as a proof of concept showed me that the scene might actually work i experimented with a different aspect ratio increasing the number of trees i made one lie down which didn't look good so i removed it then i added in some lumpy hills as well as overlaying a root material over the ground but the big missing ingredient was plants so that's what i added next i started grabbing random plants and logs from mega scans along with a few free items like sticks from the sketch fab add-on which downloads creative commons assets and imports them with one click that's here really impressive resource that you'd already know about if you were on my this week in 3d mailing lists you'd also know about the d-lit photo scan rocks from polygon which i also used for the scene at this point i realized i was going to need a lot of particle systems and all this clicking was said to give me carpal tunnel syndrome i'd heard good things about the scatter add-on so i decided to give it a shot it basically automates a lot of the steps required to set up particle systems you set the ground select the objects you want to scatter choose the scatter preset and hit scatter you can also do batch operations like mask out a footpath and then apply it to multiple particle systems and honestly it saved me hours of work it's great really but i'm very excited about the next version of blender because it's supposed to have geometry nodes which brings proper scattering through the use of nodes instead of particles so i'm hoping that the next forest i make won't need any add-on at all but for the time being the scatter add-on is a godsend so i played with the lighting the plants just trying to improve upon it each time and then i did something that a lot of you might find odd and that's to start the scene over from scratch now the reason i do this is that when you're in the discovery stage you end up making lots of little mistakes that compound on top of each other but by literally starting a brand new blend file and redoing everything you're forced to revisit the decisions you made and almost always improve upon each one resulting in a scene that is significantly better for a while i thought i was the only one doing this but turns out it's a very common technique used in production so with a fresh scene i started switching up the foliage i tried out the grass realized that didn't work for a forest then played with the lighting more foliage changes less trees and a square aspect ratio just trying ideas but the biggest unknown variable i needed to experiment with was the position of the camera and the lighting and even if i spent all day moving the camera and lights then waiting for a render then doing it again i probably still wouldn't find the perfect shot because the perfect shot might not be somewhere i'd choose then i hatched an idea for how to speed this up so what i did was i created a keyframe for the camera then i went to the graph editor and selected the x channel and added a noise modifier so now every frame in that will move to a random place on the x axis now if you repeat that for the y channel then it'll move to a random place within that area then if you track the camera to the cabin the camera will move but it will always be locked onto the cabin but why stop there i wasn't sure what focal length i wanted either so i randomized that and since we're using the wonderful new sky texture node i also randomized the sun placement and the sun's size so what this meant was all i had to do was hit render animation overnight and then when i woke up i had 250 unique renders with different camera positions focal lengths and lighting ideas to choose from the point wasn't for this to be a final render just to present possibilities and yes while most of them are duds with like a tree blocking the camera or the camera in a tree a surprising number were a combination of factors that i wouldn't have picked myself but look good for reasons that are hard to pinpoint like shrouding the cabin in shadow but everything else in light or the opposite of that or a really wide shot with dappled light stretching across the ground or almost no lighting with stark silhouettes against the horizon or the cabin being barely visible behind rows of trees i was happy the idea worked but what excited me most was how much time this saved because moving the camera changing the light then waiting five minutes to see the results was a process i've always despised but with this method not only does it happen while i sleep but it often shows more interesting ideas than i would have found myself so i use this scatter gun technique multiple times while creating the forest the one downside to the sky texture is that unlike an hdr you get an empty horizon which looks pretty fake now the massacres out there might stretch their scene kilometers in all directions but i opted for a cheaper substitute just make an angled plane then assign the same tree particle system to that and then the tops of the trees block the horizon in much the same way it would if you're on a mountain i also increased the number of trees and rendered another set and it was finally starting to look interesting like a kind of mysterious forest the night walker was scaring me though so i swapped it for this sitting dude from render people which actually made it into the final render and i gradually started adding detail to the cabin improving the ground cover with larger ferns and more dead stuff like logs the biggest issue i noticed though was the trees as nice as the tops looked the base looked comically bad which is a problem that almost all bought tree models have don't know why but the tree trunks always look terrible and while you can find photo scan tree trunk bases they are extremely difficult to blend with the model and i would know because i wasted the best part of two days trying every method for blending them you could think of and eventually i just slapped it over the top and it looked as bad as you'd expect then by chance someone on twitter mentioned a blender addon i hadn't heard of before called m tree which generates as you'd expect trees now as i said earlier i know from experience how difficult trees are to create so i was very reluctant to pick up a new tool but given how important trees were to the scene i gave it one last hail mary and loved it unlike the sapling add-on which is menu bound m tree is node based so you can create as many levels of branches as you want it's also super responsive in preview mode which is great and then in final mode it properly blends the branches together with proper uvs and everything it's great the only missing feature was the ability to create a proper lower trunk but i modeled it easy enough with proportional editing and i also remembered from that far cry 5 houdini video that trees tend to raise the ground around them which is hopefully something that might be possible with geometry nodes one day but for now i imitated that with a little dirt mound attached to the base and that worked surprisingly well at this point i've been working on the scene for so long that i honestly couldn't tell what it needed next so i knew it was time to get some feedback so i posted a few frames to twitter and just let it come in now every artist has different opinions on receiving feedback mine is this the general public's gut reaction about what looks odd is usually right but they're often wrong about what they think will solve it so what i mean is if someone says the lighting looks weird maybe add some clouds the first part has merit because it's their gut reaction especially if it's said by multiple people but the second part may or may not be the solution to the problem if they're an artist themselves there's a higher chance than it is but i generally just listen to the gut reaction from non-artists now in this case two comments stood out to me the first said that the phones looked weak which was a fair call they were low-res models for gaming so i instead replaced them with these ones from polygon and they came out much nicer and the second comment was that it was lacking the chaos of normal forests which was also a fair so i duplicated the trees deleted the leaves laid it down on its side and then scattered it in a few places and as well as that i multiplied the amount of logs rocks etc i kept experimenting with the amount of trees and lighting as that seemed to have the biggest impact on the scene i also added a pathway to see if that helped with the composition and not surprisingly it did so i locked in this angle to shoot the cabin with because i felt it was the strongest feedback is free so each time i posted the results to twitter to gauge reactions and more than one person didn't like the trees which was a shame since i went to all the trouble of making it myself so i was going for those large redwood trees but i didn't really have the right texture for it so the trees look like large boring blobs and that was a fair call so i remade the tree with a much smaller radius and while i was at it i also redid the entire scene for the third and final time and straight away it was looking better i also went for a bushwalk that day and noticed that ivs were pretty much everywhere in nature so i added some to the trees using the ivy gen add-on that blend it comes with the annoying thing is you can't like change the angle of the leaves so that's annoying but whatever it came out okay posted those online and many people called out the path for looking fake which was a fair call so i completely swapped out the texture for this forest debris looking one and also hand painted a mask which i used to blend in this separate rocky ground texture i also noticed in a lot of photo references there were always these like smaller bushes scattered throughout the floor that could survive with less light on the ground uh so i generated some with m3 and my dad dropped by one day and said that the cabin looked like some sort of alien artifact because it was perfectly triangular and i took that to mean that it should be rotated so that you could see the roof and identify it's an a-frame cabin and i knew the cabin should be the focal element so i played with the lighting until it's shown directly across the front and that was my lighting and as much as i really loved god rays cycles really struggled with volumetrics right now so i removed it and instead enabled a miss pass which i comped in so that way you get the atmospheric falloff but unfortunately no god rays while i was there i also added the tried and true lens distortion chromatic aberration glare and sharpening now at this point i was feeling pretty good i felt like the scene was coming towards a logical conclusion and then i asked my wife for her feedback and she said the floor looked too green and that bugged me because the forest floor is very integral to the believability of a forest and that comment told me that maybe the foliage wasn't suitable so i stripped the floor back to nothing and then slowly started adding elements one by one and it turned out that the missing ingredient was sticks pine debris and leaves when i added those it improved immediately and i probably would have learned this a lot sooner had i been working more closely from reference photos anyway i posted it online for one last round of feedback hoping there was nothing but of course there was apparently the pathway that i created now looked big enough to be a road but it didn't have any tyre marks i wasn't planning for it to be a road but eh what the heck you got to get there somehow might as well be by car so i sculpted in some tire rods and added in this 10 suv i found on blender market and for the final camera motion i happened to spot this animation by my friend colin levy and i liked how the camera started looking down and then panned up so i shamelessly copied it i then rendered my first ever animation in 4k which at 300 samples plus the optics denoiser came out to 15 minutes per frame or about 62 hours of continuous rendering on dual titan rtx's now you could absolutely render this sort of animation on a cheap laptop but it would probably take weeks or months rather than days and when you factor in all the creative decisions made after rendering you can see why serious artists invest in beefy machines and really serious artists like jama durabeef buy four thirty nineties because they can so with the massive lead up here's the moment you've been waiting for the final animation [Music] and yeah that's it was it worth it i don't know took two to three weeks of full-time work which is pretty lengthy but i did overcome a lot of challenges and i learned a new workflow so i could create another forest now in maybe two to three days instead of weeks now that i know the process which is really what the career of an artist is all about you try something you hopefully achieve it and then you grow and then you make your next work even better at this moment right here right when you finished a project most people's instinct is to drop it and start something else but if you really want to improve you can multiply your learnings by spending a few minutes doing a mortem while the information is fresh this is where you write down what you would improve if you had to do the scene again so in my case i probably should have started with some thumbnail sketches because i don't think the layout that the scene had was that exciting in the end and i also would gather more reference of forest floors before starting so that i would have learned you know that i needed sticks and leaves in order to make a good forest floor so those two things probably would have resulted in a better image faster so if i save this postmortem somewhere that i can find it later then the next time i start an environment i'll have my past self talking to my future self with some sage advice scratching my itch with this cabin scene is exactly what i love about being a 3d artist when you have an idea about something you want to create you can do it and with blender the free open source 3d software you can do it for free and using youtube tutorials you can learn it for free so if you're curious i have a beginner youtube playlist for complete beginners where you'll learn the essential functions of blender while making your very own donut it is the number one beginners course which millions of people have completed it is 100 free if you want to get started click that little i button up there to start watching and if you're already a 3d user and you want to create better environments download some of the new 8k photo scan assets from polygon we've got new grounds rocks and plants that are optimized and ready to use in all major software and renderers we spend thousands of dollars per asset so that you can have peace of mind that they'll work in any scene so go to polygon.com to get started and if you enjoyed this breakdown hit a like and then check out some of these other breakdown videos on the screen right now thanks for watching see you in a future video

Channel: Blender Guru

Views: 1,246,865

Rating: 4.9578671 out of 5

Keywords: blender, tutorial, forest, foliage, trees, environment, scatter, particles, cabin, house, woods

Id: iFQokXmqmVQ

Length: 17min 53sec (1073 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 21 2020