Making a Crazy Surreal Landscape in Blender

right in this video I'm just going to show you how I made this render right here so I've just recorded myself creating the whole thing and you just get to see me make this a big part of this one was making these um I don't really know what these are but these big floating Rock pillar formation things so I used some sculpting to make those I'll show you how I did that in a second but yeah basically we're just gonna go through sculpting one of those using it to create the rest of the environment texturing how to get edgeware like this and the entire environment creation actually in this video a lot of the techniques that I used in sculpting this rock stuff here it came from this video here by this guy weighted normal uh so he just made this video called making a rocket blender I used pretty much the exact settings that he talks about in this video I just applied it to a different shape so that's where I got that from a lot of the inspiration for this render came from actually mid journey I was just messing around with it and I got this right here I don't really know what this is but it looks cool and so that's where the idea for like some I think I had another one in here too but these these big like flat kind of rock formations on either side that's where I got the idea for that and that's just kind of what I was going off of uh I know it didn't turn out looking very much like this at all but it's okay you know it just led to something different which I think turned out fine so yeah if you want to see me make this just keep watching that's what the rest of this video is I think what I want to start with is Cube so I want the shape of this I'm going to just make one of them to start off like one of these big chunks over here and I could probably get away with duplicating it a few times and just adding some minor variation to switch it up but yeah I'm gonna start with that and uh I'll just kind of bring this into sculpting and then just make it a bit more rock-like and then take that and then bring it back in here and then make a scene out of it so I don't want to spend too long sculpting but I will just quickly run through a couple of things before I sculpt I'm actually going to do this uh using the bisect tool it's underneath the knife if you just press and hold on the knife tool in here this is the toolbar press T to open and close it in edit mode and then just go to the bisect thing right here the way this works is you have to have the entire mesh selected for this to work then you just click and drag and you can see it's just kind of bringing up some points here if you click on clear outer and then also fill uh let me just try that again let me check those before I do this and then yeah there we go then do it and then you can just kind of move it around with this that's how you can get some interesting it's it's basically you do this booleans too but this is a this is a faster way that I've found again from that video I just showed of how to do this kind of thing and this will just give a good starting point for the sculpting workflow I'll show in a second okay that should be fine to start off with now let's apply the scale and then jump into jump into the sculpting workspace here and then the settings he was using that worked really well is you just use the scrape brush turn on Dynamic topology and then there's a few settings you've got to change in here to make this just work really well first of all strength should be up decently High and then there was this weird setting here so the first thing to change is switch this from from smooth over to constant and that will just give you a really harsh fall off so the brush will just basically be uh you'll see in a second but this it won't be like a smooth brush it'll just be a very hard um constant falloff and then the other thing to change is there's this one option here this right here if you check original normal that will just basically make it I think so that when you when you're sculpting on say you are kind of you start on a flat surface wherever you move throughout the mesh it'll stay aligned with the original surface that you had it lined up with so for example if I just kind of do something here if I start at this angle it kind of just continues from the angle I started with for some reason when you check this setting here it just makes it so much easier to just destroy the mesh and create a very Rocky texture so you can see if I turn that on it just cuts through a lot deeper than if you don't have it on so that's going to make it a lot easier to make this Rocky kind of shape the other thing too is I'm going to turn down the um the dynamic topology uh the uh what's it called the detail size I'll turn that down to like five maybe so basically half of what it was before and that will be a good amount of detail I think could even go lower I could even go like two or three if you want to go really in detail but it starts to lag a little bit so I'm Gonna Keep It on like five so yeah I'm gonna keep doing this I could fast forward this section because we don't really need to see this but that's I'm just going to use only this brush nothing else I just keep going through out here and just kind of make some more imperfections and just end up with something interesting sometimes I get lost in daydreaming okay I've got this I don't know if this is the best shape ever but I think I can make it work in the context I'm going to use it in so here's what here's what I want to do now is start texturing this just very very basic texture so I'll just hit new I'm going to grab a texture from quicksole you could also just use I was testing this out with free rock ones from ambient CG yesterday you can totally use those but here's the setup I want to do you can just take any Rock texture you want something Jagged that's already uh has a lot of detail in it is going to be good sorry for this to load and then we'll bring one in so I'll just search for rock in here go to services and just find some kind of thing that looks like a Cliffside maybe this kind of thing or like actually this is kind of more like what I was thinking let's try that and uh see if that gives us a better result so this has more like more uh smooth surfaces on it and it's less I don't know Jagged which I know I said I wanted a jagged one but I think that was the wrong choice so just wait till that shows up in here there we go come on and again just fix the texture because quixel bridge is incapable of exporting a texture correctly for some reason so there we go maybe let's rotate it like a little bit sideways just to switch it up a little bit and that I think is going to be a better option than the other one I was using okay let's add some edgeware so it's just a bit more fun and you can do that with a ambient occlusion node so I was messing with this yesterday and I think this is the best way to do it for using inside blender if you're going to export this as a game asset or export it to another software this is not a good idea because we're going to be using just nodes to uh to actually add this detail but for just using inside blender this will work really well so I'm going to take an ambient occlusion node and multiply that in to the color so normally ambient occlusion is for like adding a natural kind of Shadow into small crevices in uh it's kind of like like uh if you just Google the word ambient occlusion you'll see what it's doing but I want to use it kind of the inverse of that to add a brighter Edge to the outside corners if that makes sense and here's how you do that so I'm going to use a color ramp drop that right here and we can just preview that I'm just pressing Ctrl shift and then clicking on a node to preview it and I think you need to have the node Wrangler add-on enabled to be able to do that so if I do this if I actually flip the color ramp around and invert it and just bring it up like this and there's if I check only local and also check this box here inside that will actually make it so that it highlights the edges only so we're inverting the color ramp and checking these two boxes inside and only local and then if you adjust the distance down now we can control exactly where this comes in so this is really useful for adding this kind of stuff and if I just take the distance way down and then crank the color ramp a little bit more like this I think that's a good starting point and then I want to multiply that in you can actually switch this to Overlay and then I don't necessarily want this texture to be that dark right now it's making it very very dark and just leaving the the edgeware like the color it was before but I'd rather have it so that it leaves everything else the color it was before and then just makes the edges brighter the way you can do that is just by changing the colors of the color ramp so if I make the black value instead of being fully black if I just make it like 0.3.4.5 something like that and then make the white one you can actually take the value here and turn it up to past one and that will just make it brighter than one and so that's kind of an interesting result that you can get from that and then you can adjust how strong that effect here is with the uh the mix Factor so maybe multiply is a better option but I think overlay does also look cool and it might make this a little bit darker so that's kind of an interesting way to add a bit more detail in here and I could take this down to maybe 0.03 I think it's a good amount and if it's too if it's too clean here you could actually mix in a noise texture there if you want to I don't think I need to do that here but uh yeah that's looking much better so it's a bit more natural feels a bit more worn and just better so put it around with that and let's maybe take metallic up specular down it's not the most realistic settings ever in fact if you want realism don't do that but I think it looks kind of cool doing that the other thing I might do too is make it kind of damp so I might take a color ramp in the into the roughness and just crunch this up a little bit like that until I start to see where it's coming in and then just bring this handle back a little bit so that's kind of a bit more interesting and then adjust the other settings accordingly I think I think that's a good starting point this is a bit much here but I think it's maybe fine yeah that's that's cool okay let's start setting up a scene with this I'm just going to use this one a bunch of times I don't need it to look exactly like my reference but that is just going to give me a good starting point for some ideas so I want this huge let's make a big landscape and let's go to like 24 millimeters zooming this in so you can actually see what's going on and yeah so I want to just block this out so the camera's gonna be low to the ground looking kind of upwards this will just kind of be up here or out here like this and then I want some light in the distance I think I'm going to increase the camera view distance to like 12 000 meters Maybe increase this and let's just make the light of it bigger and maybe kind of blue or cyan like it was in the reference photo increase the strength a lot and then yeah maybe let's just put that rock material on here for now I'm going to change that but just so the floor isn't fully white it's kind of bothering me let's throw in volumetrics because it definitely needs that so just plays bounds new texture delete this volume scatter in 0.001 scroll in and out to refresh that and then just turn up the anisotropy this might actually be oh sorry 0.001 not 0.1 so yeah I want uh let's add a cube in here just for the scale of a person so it's two meters tall scale it down slightly so it's like just under two meters it's kind of the height of a person right there just so I can get an idea of how big all this stuff actually is and then yeah we can just throw it in this rock thing it's not the greatest uh sculpting but it's good enough I think especially once I layer on other assets on top of this like from quixel rocks and stuff or some some of my photo scans even too this light is way too close let's move that into the distance a bit more and yeah I just want to have these big towering kind of pillars all over the place I might scale up the UV map on the normal map or on the scale of texture a little bit on here and I could even duplicate this over itself and layer that on top of itself to add more detail maybe flip it upside down like rotate it around this way just so that the like on these areas where I need more detail I can just kind of fake that a little bit like this I'm just gonna have that poking through a little bit like that and these ones maybe I can actually just make the texture a little bit smaller to match the size of the other ones so that is a bit more consistent throughout here and then I could do one big one in the middle if I wanted that might be cool but it might not need to be there could just do this by like duplicating this over itself a few times not really sure about that but could be nice just have a really blocky shape here [Music] and I need a sky back here let's do a moody some kind of Moody sky and let's just pull this over this way you can just get one of these from unsplash I'm just going to use the one of the packs included in the course because these are just photos I've taken and it's always fun to use the Moody Skies pack so I'm going to take one of these just some cloudy kind of thing that doesn't really matter which one but like just some just some cloudy thing run that into the emission and Alpha apply scale just unwrap it so it lines up properly kind of copy the rotation of the camera and then just kind of move that in place make sure the Horizon is lining up here and then just move it down like this now that's a bit bad so I need to maybe just mess with the color like maybe just desaturate it a little bit and then even mix in kind of a blue color let's take a mixed color node multiply multiply in some of that like cyan kind of color a little bit if I can not too much where it's like annoying but just a little bit and it might be cool to not actually have this light at the bottom it might be cool to just have it in the sky like maybe it might be nice to have a what if I add a big area light up here like let's do light area and then just make this like really bright up here like this that's that's too much 23 million is way too much let's turn that down make the size like 50 meters and then just pull that way up like this maybe make it actually a little bit of that cyan color but not too much it's a little bit bright so maybe let's make it like one million bring it back down a little this sky is getting in the way so I'm gonna take that and then just go visibility turn off Shadow and now I can move the area light around wherever I want and not worry about the sky getting in the way that's kind of a cool lighting setup there might be nice too to have like off coming in from uh off to the side like what if it's uh like this let's desaturate it slightly and then make it just really bright like 12 million and then do something like this where it's just off to the side like that is pretty cool I really like that actually that's a really interesting lighting where it's like pretty surreal but kinda looks a little bit real yeah let's do that that's really sick now I could have these floating it does look cool I don't know if it makes that much sense but it is actually really cool what might be nice is having a floating but then adding a lot of really small kind of uh like particles to to supplement the uh to kind of make it feel like everything's kind of surreal and floating and like okay we need smaller rocks so I think I'm going to go to quixel Bridge and take some let's actually starts rocket again I'm just going to take some of these 3D rocks and use these and just kind of scatter them into a cluster of floating rocks and then use that to just add some more surreal detail around the scene thank you on the floor I actually don't want this the changes I do to this one to affect the other meshes with this texture on it so the way to make this its own unique texture is you click this button at the top the seven right here just tap that and now any changes I make to this one like if I just make it red it won't affect the other um you wanna it won't affect the other Textures in here it's its own texture now effectively that actually looks kind of cool I wonder if it would be cool to do like Star Wars kind of thing where it's like red at the bottom let's take this right into the height not hold out uh this displacement map displacement height rather control one simple adaptive and then we want to turn on distillation on bump apply scale and there we go so now we've just turned on adaptive subdivision we've enabled displacement and now it's actually displacing the mesh as you can see which is perfect so let's do this noise texture mix that together with this and then increase this to like two maybe and then I also want some water at the bottom let's try and do that uh so if you haven't seen my video on making water this is just that you basically just make the water Shader once save it as an object in your asset browser and then just add that in anytime you need water so I'm just going to try that just see if it makes sense uh this sucks so I need to fill in more detail here so let's do that right now um bring this in maybe or just kind of duplicated downwards or I don't know that's fine ish there this needs some more detail here though maybe flip this on the Zed yeah that's fine cool I like that now maybe let's get some more rocks in the on the ground so let's take like see how the ground the ground is very Rocky here this is not what my picture is looking like at all but it's okay kind of went a different direction but it's totally fine let's go to purchased in a quick sell purchased 3D assets and just find nature and just go to like let's get some of these rocks I've used these in a lot of renders but they're good ones so I'm just going to take these [Music] sometimes I get lost oh okay so I kind of just paused and then went to Mid Journey generated a bunch of these characters by just typing in like robed figure facing away from the camera white background that kind of thing I'll show you the exact prompt in a second but I just made a bunch of these which are going to be super useful I think I don't know why I didn't think you'd do this a long time ago but anyways I took one of those threw it onto a plane just ran the color into the base color and then the alpha the color as well into the alpha and then just use the color ramp to invert the mask so you can see what that's doing just to make the the white section of the image transparent and the darker sections of the image opaque and then that just leaves you with the outline of the character which is super handy I think we'll be okay so yeah let me just render this and I'm going to take a break come back and then edit it edit this in Photoshop when I'm done or when I'm uh done taking a break yeah okay I saved the Miss pass but I don't I don't think I'm gonna actually use it in here because I tried adding it in with uh just using it as a mask to brush in more cloudiness but I don't think it's making it any better so I'm gonna leave it off I'll delete that and I'm just going to duplicate the background layer let's just go and do my usual process which I've showed a bunch of times before I have videos on exactly what I'm doing in here there's one called how to add that special look to your renders that's one of the videos that I've done mostly about Photoshop it's mostly in the second half of the video I think there's also another video really old on my Channel that I talking about editing stuff in Photoshop that one's pretty old though so I was just going with the newer one or just watch me do it here and uh explain it a little bit less in depth than those other videos so I'm just gonna throw on one of these blur layers which is again kind of the same things using the glare node and then what else should we do let's do some dodging and burning so I'm going to throw in a curves adjustment layer and make some areas darker and some areas brighter oops just tapped into blender so yeah I need some of these areas to be nice and dark I could probably run the outside of the frame maybe a little bit in the sky and then actually looks kind of cool having that there but I don't really want to take that down too much in the middle just because it's kind of a weird dark spot I think what I might do actually is this new curves adjustment layer bring it way down and then double click it that brings us to the blend if section right here and then I just want to bring the Shadows down basically so I want to say okay anything anything below this point we can make that darker so I can just kind of spread the uh if you hold alt or just click alt while you're clicking this it breaks the handle up into two pieces and then that way you can you can actually get a nice gradient fall off and where this is masking it in so this is obviously an extreme effect I've just put in here and I'm going to brush it in very lightly so doing that I can just invert the mask and then take a brush and just brush in exactly where I want that effect to show up so basically we're just taking the dark Parts making them a little bit darker and doing it in a very controlled way so it's kind of like you could probably just take the Shadows down and it'll do kind of the same thing but I'm just doing it now instead of in the camera raw filter and I think it doesn't give you that strong but that's going to be good right there I think I could try making some areas brighter I don't think it really needs it though like maybe this section right here I think that's all that that needs maybe a little bit down here and over here maybe not even that much so get rid of that just a little bit on the sides yeah that's good there let me just save this as this edit and I'm going to take one of these lens dirt things if you just search action VFX lens dirt you'll find this exact pack I'm going to drop one of these on here because I think it would be cool in this one so let's throw that on there throw it on screen create a mask and then just brush it in to wherever it seems right I don't want this effect to be too strong but just a little bit on like five ten percent I think it's gonna be cool not a huge difference but I just like doing it okay let's also get some particles so I have uh the particles like the dust particles pack let me just get that in here I think I put a new one in here yeah the 2.0 uh here it is let's take let's see this one's kind of nice uh number one on the new section right here cool drop that in put onto screen and then we can also double click this layer and just kind of remove it from the darkest areas of the image and then hit okay and just turn the opacity or the fill way down to like 20 30 40 percent and that way it's barely it's barely noticeable here but then as soon as I run it through the camera raw filter and sharpen it that will be much more noticeable so I'm going to keep it very subtle for now and same thing with the the lens dirt I'm actually going to take that down a little bit as well so we haven't done very much although that is actually quite a significant difference when I hide everything and bring it back on just look at the difference there all those all those subtle effects actually they add up to make it quite a lot nicer I think so again let's just run through what we've done so far blur layer you duplicate the background layer blur it throw it on screen some burning making the edges a little darker or whichever areas seem like it should be darker making those darker making a little bit of the Shadows a little bit darker as well lightning uh just dodging like brightening up some areas and then adding on that lens dirt and then particles and then all of that combined each one of those each one of those things doesn't look like a huge difference on its own but all of them together actually does make a big difference and yeah so let's bring this to the Springs to the camera filter now so Ctrl alt shift e with the layer with the top layer selected Control Alt shift e d duplicates and merges all layers together filter convert smart filters and then camera filter and let's just go through here and just see what is going to look good I'm not exactly sure what it should be doing here but Clarity always looks good and uh I'm just gonna go through one by one and just if I I've explained this many times before my videos but in case anyone's new here basically my strategy here is just if it looks good one way or the other I'll do that and I'll leave it up or down if it looks better in the middle I'll just leave it in the middle so I just kind of go through Thing by thing move it a little bit if it looks worse keep it there or rather put it back keep it in the middle if it looks better then then go for it basically just do whatever looks good in other words and I like the kind of Frosty look we're getting here and so I'm going to keep that up it almost makes this look like ice instead of rocks or like dirty ice or something it's kind of cool let's add sharpening that's nice maybe the masking doesn't need to be that high I like this rock texture here it's not very realistic but it is cool so I like that a lot let's turn up the grain to like right here nice vignetting we don't really need it because I kind of added a vignette manually by doing that that dodging and burning earlier so I'm not too worried with that you could mess with this I like the colors though so I don't think this is going to make it better or worse maybe just increase the saturation slightly yeah cool that looks really nice I like that a lot good mess with the highlights if I want to make it really bright or blown out or anything or maybe bring it down to like right there so it's not blown out you know it doesn't it does actually look really cool having this um totally blown out like this so I like that a lot that's actually really cool I'm not gonna lie let's do that a little bit maybe not that much but just just a little bit more you know right there and then the highlights can just come down so it's not blowing out this background as much I think that's good right there and then bring the black slider down so that we're actually still getting pixels in the image that are fully black and then let's see Shadows I think it looks cool bringing that down slightly so I'm going to bring it down a little bit not too much but just a little bit I wasn't I wasn't planning for this to be ice but it kind of turned out that way I guess it kind of still looks like rock so maybe it's fine but yeah this is sick though I like where this went let's say okay I think that's good for the camera I filter and look how much of a difference that makes that's just so awesome so the first stage is like doing the basic adjustments and the second stage is the camera raw and then those two things together gives you like the ultimate result that's just so sick I like this I like how it's turned out a lot the color on these rocks I should have made that a little darker but not a big deal let's do one last thing a color lookup bring that down here and just choose any one of these that looks good let's just see scroll through them and find one it's cool this one's interesting I could just bring that leg right there see let's put one of these on here um this one's kind of cool I might just do that I don't want it that intense but I'm just trying to squeeze like the extra five percent of quality out of this image and then maybe let's do a curves layer again just trying to maximize every little thing I can because even though these last couple layers don't make them of a difference themselves like I said it's all those things that came before it that add up to this final thing and so if I can add a couple extra things that boost it even more it's uh you know it's that kind of Compound Effect where the all these little things that you don't really notice them until the very end and then you kind of get this exponential boost and quality at the very end let's take that down a little yeah nice I think we're good there I think this is done I'm happy with this so I don't really know what this is but it looks sick and uh I'm I'm very very stoked about that so sweet so yeah hopefully that uh gives you some ideas for I don't know making rocks or making like surreal Landscapes or just how lighting does not need to be complicated or you know it's this stuff doesn't need to be like overly complicated you can get away with like simple shapes and and just use good lighting good environment you know just keep it simple and a lot of the times that's the way to go and you'll end up with better results if you keep it simple if you look in the description of this video there is a link to a course that is for the people who want to go really really in depth into my environment creation process if you want to see me just make things unedited start to finish like just zero percent start all the way through everything to the very end and you also want to get a bunch of 3D models that I use in my own work and a bunch of other stuff access to a Discord server with everyone who's joined the course all that stuff is just linked Below in the first link so you can go check that out if that sounds right for you if you don't want to spend money probably not for you but for the guys who want to go really in depth with this that that link is for you okay I will see you in some other video then cool thanks for watching and yeah bye

Channel: Max Hay

Views: 176,383

Keywords:

Id: WOtnOdXAVcc

Length: 36min 23sec (2183 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 09 2023