Making a Photorealistic Animation in 10 Minutes - Blender

okay so right now I'm going to show you how I got from this Cube to this final animation as quickly as possible let's go I started off in Google Earth literally just wandering around looking for inspiration when I found this tiny little church right here in the middle of nowhere all of a sudden I'm like obsessed with creepy churches like look at this one in Kansas and then this one is really scary I also explored some cool Landscapes that would totally work for one of my environments so now I'm imagining like field creepy Church Mountain now with folders full of street view screenshots and other random online references I dumped everything into a pure ref and got to work so we gotta make the church first we'll start with basic shapes and then slowly develop them into the finished model those first shapes are called a block out and it's kind of scary because the entire project is ahead of you but you have to start somewhere throw in some cubes around and like just trying not to be afraid if it doesn't look right I'll extrude some shapes adding Edge Loops pulling bits out like the porch in the roof and then using a man scale at six feet to make sure the proportions are accurate for Speed and symmetry I'll toss a mirror modifier on it and then start separating parts of the house out to work on them individually I'll make more details like roof editions Eaves pillars trims and Floors checking out in rendered view to feel the shadows and done now I'll bring the block out all the way to the finished model by slowly refining individual pieces of the house starting with the walls first so I'll make a board throw an array modifier on it tilt it and apply rotation and scale until it looks right and then just cut these access bits off with a Boolean and add Window and Door holes onto the porch I'll extrude these Boards out to form the underside trim small pillars are super simple just lining them up and extruding them out and the fat outside pillars are just cubes I'll create by snapping vertices mirror modifier on X and Y to divide in the four and then with bevels and extrusions to create these guys that stick out other additions here and there like these boards these blocks the floor and this ornamental trim using Loop cuts and around modifier and then trims make a huge difference to a house so let's throw some in on the sides and the eaves snapping some rough window and door frames in two that I will refine later so pretty much done into the high poly stage to make everything look smooth and detailed using mostly bevels so the porch first I added a bevel with a 0.01 a mouth three segments shading smooth Auto smooth and then hardening the normals is a cool trick to fake a high poly count I also use the bevel to Define separate objects like these trim boards and then I'll repeat that process for all of these objects like it's very copy and paste super lazy we can just use Ctrl L to copy the modifiers we can also hold down alt and adjust multiple objects at once so the porch is done now we'll move on to the walls and we can get a little violent I'll add edge Loops to give myself geometry to work with and then with proportional editing I can pull Boards out warp stuff Bend stuff and then just bash Boards out completely now out of bevel oh God we made a Sausage House I'll just make the windows starting with a plain inset and extruding bits out for depth and then bevels for that detail same process for the doors I'm paying close attention to how a door is actually nailed together plank by Plank and that is a door right there finally a chimney and some gutters I think our house is finished but we cannot texture until we UV unwrap which is basically taking a three-dimensional object and breaking it up into flat pieces for 2D images to sit on it can be daunting but I'll make it easy so we'll work on the wall first I'll just apply all my modifiers and then I'll go with a cube project I'll highlight all of the UVS average the island scales and then pack the island now with text tools which is a free add-on I'll add a checker map to make sure that everything is clean and then the wall is done so I'll move on to some other objects like the windows same process the porch trim same process the doors the same process and then I'll start combining different parts of the house into more manageable and optimized pieces I'll assign materials to the meshes so substance painter can divide them into separate texture sets so it knows they're separate objects and then we are ready for texturing which is absolutely my favorite part of any project and we will use substance painter for that so always the first step I'll toss my model in for a quick bake this gives substance painter curvature normal ambient occlusion and other data for us to work with all right let's develop the first material but first I need to analyze my reference and write down a bunch of characteristics that I noticed like chipped paint kinds of wood kinds of metal areas that see weathering and stuff like that starting with the paint I'll drop in a base color mix in some dirt for variation adjust the roughness for a nice reflectiveness and then height using a wood grain and grunge I like to keep each feature separated for the most flexibility texturing is really just about layering and stacking nastiness up until you form something realistic I'll make a wood material using the same workflow just base color to roughness to variations to height and this looks really good okay now let's really make this house look abandoned and grungy by painting in the detail of the weathered wood using stencils I'll pay super close attention to the reference try to mimic the chipped and weathering effect of this wall and stencils are just so cool because you get all this realistic data right into your mesh you can see the undersides have less weathering because they are protected by the roof so let's finesse the edges a bit and then huge difference is to add some height between the two layers so now I can push the paint above the wood and make it look super realistic I also want some nasty crevices and edges using an edgeware generator here and a dirt generator connected to a grunge texture here let's tackle the porch with the materials we made for the wall I'll just literally copy everything over and then I'll repaint all of the details using stencils also doing the porch floor I'll use this nice wood grain which is so much fun and I think the porch is done texturing the rest of the house follows the same process here I'm doing the windows the doors the other walls and the eaves for the roof I found this sweet PBR material from quixel I'll adjust it to make it my own with projection painted decals I'll get some nice rust going on I'll break it up with some grunges and then adjusting the blending modes then I'll just export everything in the blender I'll adjust my textures a little bit with levels and curves also I'll add in my glass and let's admire this house okay now we are really getting somewhere let's start laying down some land I'll divide up a big plane and then start pushing geometry around to form Hills and divots I kind of like it looms over the viewer and then adding a simple material I'll just blend the grass and rocks using a noise texture it can be lazy everything will be covered in real grass anyway speaking of grass you know my work you know I am obsessed with it now no matter what foliage assets you are using personally I use grass weld the Knowledge and Skills that go into creating a realistic field stay the same first I'll analyze my references for foliage types and then I'll bring those assets in for optimization and focus I like to grow a small ecosystem first on a plane and then transfer that geodata over to the final terrain all right let's start scattering our plants using geometry nodes using a distribute faces to an instance on points plugging the meshes in and then spinning them around with a random Vector value connected to the rotate Euler then a noise texture to make realistic size variations a new float input connected to the weight paint to paint the plants okay now I'll just work from the ground up a dense wall barley and then a rye grass flower and then a tall blue grass flower poking above and then when I saw this Orchard Grass I actually wanted to prioritize it instead so I added more finally I'll add a dense under layer with creeping bent grass and some nettle clumps really nice complementing shapes colors and reflectiveness I really like this field now I'll just append that miniature field into the real scene and then transfer the geodata over by copying the modifier I'll just make further adjustments like weight paints and overall adapting it to the new terrain and then of course what is a field without wind I'll create a grass animation system using geometry nodes basically just an infinitely looping noise texture connected to the rotation gives us this okay our scene is missing something really big trees but where the hell do I get those well I made mine in speed tree it's really just all about analyzing the way trees behave in real life and then replicating it I'll work node to node adding features like branches twigs and leaves and then adjusting their properties to form a spruce Branch now for needles my PC would die if I scattered millions of individual ones so I faked it by mapping a 2d twig image onto a plane and then rotating them around each other to look three-dimensional after adjusting how all the branches behave together I finally formed a spruce tree I was pretty damn happy with and then in blender I'll add translucency so the sun actually shines through the needles and then scatter them on a giant Terrain in the background the scene is looking really good at this point but I really wanted a barbed wire fence going through my field first I'll make a wire with two planes a screw modifier and a subdivision barbs are kind of just like a spiky donut so I'll smush down a coil and I'll add depth and then I'll stick the barbs all over the wire and make some posts posters is a cylinder about that high and I'll use sculpt mode to give it natural edges now I'll make some curved paths for the barbed wire to follow with an array on a curve mode and a curve modifier to dynamically adjust in this area I bent it way down like a goat tried to curl through it texturing phase I'll just stick some wood on our pole and and a rust on The Wire now in the scene I just added these posts along the terrain and then used the same curve path technique to string the wire cool we are now this close to completing the render first We'll add a mist and adjusting it to the span of the world then compositing it in with a mix node and color ramp this adds atmosphere and depth which is super essential for outdoor environments before and after huge right the simple hdri lighting allowed me to get away with a low sample Cal of 64 and then I'll use a 200 upres factor for super high resolution also of course animated the camera with an approach and a tilt and then I hit render 30 hours later the last step color grading color grading gets us from this to this but how using DaVinci Resolve I can non-destructively build up a grade using notes some blurs to defeat that 3D sharpness blooms for subtle atmosphere and contrast vignettes to narrow in the point of interest and make it moodier and tons of color profiles using contrasts Hues temperature is saturations Shadows all that after tons of layering we actually finally have the render okay I know that was a lot of info probably overwhelming and that is why I have a 13 hour long course releasing alongside this video detailing every single step I take for this project in full that includes things that I didn't even cover here it's a legit tutorial going through everything you need to know on a technical level about each software so blender substance painter speed tree DaVinci Resolve but also just on a conceptual level about 3D art in general it's designed for both experienced 3D artists that are curious about my workflow but also especially beginner artists who need that initial boost it's all neatly organized in the chapters tried to make it as fun as possible it's also cheap um so yeah the links are below for that and uh thanks for watching

Channel: Covingsworth

Views: 336,261

Keywords: blender, tutorial, 3d, substance painter, davinci resolve, photorealistic

Id: FNPCr2fD0kg

Length: 11min 24sec (684 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 19 2022