Making a Photorealistic Environment in Blender 2.9

hey guys this is james from james films and today i've got a bit of a different video for you i've been getting a ton of requests to make a tutorial or a breakdown of one of my larger more complex scenes and i've worked on trying to get this into some kind of follow along tutorial but it's a little bit hard to start out for now i kind of want to make a longer more fleshed out series but for now i want to give you a bit of insight into my workflow so i figured i would record a longer form video here so i'm just going to have my screen recorder running and i can show you how i made this really cool scene here which i will pull up i just made this yesterday afternoon just as a bit of a it's a nice fun render but there is quite a bit going on here and i'd like to break this down for you and show you how i did it so this is the scene in blender the finished scene i will start a fresh one in just a second here so you can see exactly how i build these from the ground up but i mean at a surface level it's pretty simple you don't have too much going on if i go below my ocean plane here you can see that there's a bit more going on underneath in order to get these more realistic looking rocks underneath the water and then if i zoom in here uh you can't see this right now in this view because i have it turned off but if i go over i use uh groswold pro it's a really fun program to help scatter realistic nature assets in your scene it comes with a bunch of uh pre-made ones but you can also bring in other ones i use uh kwixel a lot they've got a lot of great assets here so you can bring these in to your scene as well and scatter them on the surface in a couple different ways got like a lot of really great scattering growth options which always work well but yeah so this is a different form video and there will be time stamps on the youtube description here and in the video that you can just skip ahead if you want to go to a specific section and learn about how i did a specific part of this but let's just start this from the beginning so here is the scene we always start with the default cube in this case i'm actually going to get rid of this guy i usually try to incorporate it into my architectural scenes but for this one i really don't need it and to start the scene out i actually want to go over to kwixel where they've got like a lot of great assets like i was talking about and there's a couple that i used for this scene in particular uh these rock assets i thought looked pretty great so let's just start with this guy for example the icelandic lava spire this syncs up really well with blender you can actually just export it directly and then bam your asset is already in your scene and it's super easy to just move this around and populate your scene with it a quick tip if you don't want to bog down your scene with just a ton of extra geometry extra polygons what you can do is hit alt d that creates a loop or sorry a linked duplicate that you can use which is referencing this original one which is great um or if you want to do something a little bit different sometimes i'll do is make a new collection let's call this rock and now you can go to shift a and then collection instance and you can instance that collection i think i've talked about this in previous videos but i usually like to do that a lot to reuse the same asset over and over again without adding too much extra geometry so i'm just going to put this into my scene and kind of turn it a certain way that i like it and i'm going to start to set up a camera angle even with just this limited amount of stuff if i reference what i did here before you can see i kind of have this little bit of a low angle look over on this rock and i'm going to hit ctrl alt 0 and it's going to snap my camera to this view as i mentioned before instagram plays really well with 1200 by 1500 so i will set my resolution to that drag out my viewport to show you a little bit more what's going on and then let's click on my camera and then sometimes when you do ctrl alt 0 it messes up the rotation of the camera in this case it actually didn't surprisingly enough um sometimes this y will be like tilted oops it is actually maybe tilted let's see here yeah there you go the y rotation is sometimes tilted so i just like to fix that and then i'm gonna set a bit of a wider view for this let's say like 35 mil for the camera pull this in a bit and then let's turn on composition guides i think these are super helpful to get your scene looking really nice you can see what that looks like we have rule of thirds and center i think are my two favorite ones i use so i usually like to line this up so that this takes up maybe about a third of this screen there's gonna be some stuff obviously on the ground here populating in my scene i'm gonna move this a little bit closer maybe pull it down a little bit and that's looking pretty good so actually let's just do alt d and then duplicate this guy you can scale a little bit maybe and then let's rotate it around so it is looking a little bit more unique than before so now i've got this up against here it's kind of rock formation and i'm going to bring in some rocks for the underwater part of this and we can switch this over actually let's just start defining some lighting before we add some more stuff in here just to kind of get an idea for where stuff is hitting in the scene so this will take a second to load as it just processes the textures for those rocks and now it is loaded let's just turn on nbn inclusion screen space reflections and bring in an hdri and i've got these linked in the description if you want to use the exact same one that i used i usually like to use this one from freehdri skies.com i think it works pretty well gives me some nice lighting and let's just drag this up here switch to the shader editor go to world settings and then if you have node wrangler enabled control t will give you a nice mapping node connected to a texture coordinate a coordinate node and we can now rotate this around and what i really liked was the light just perfectly hitting the edges of this rock you can kind of see it just skimming that edge right there giving it like a nice orange glow and in the final image that really read very well i thought we've got this nice glow on the edge there so let's just play with that a little bit more we can always revisit this in a second a little bit later and what i usually like to do is just amplify that setting a little bit more with a sun lamp in my scene so let's just add in a sun lamp and this is what's going to really give you that nice edge glow there so if i rotate this up and now angle it a little bit over to the side you can see it's adding if i really crank this up you can see what it's doing let's add this to like 10 so you see what we're doing so we're adding like a nice edge glow to the rocks which i think will look really nice case in point i really like this orange glow obviously that color doesn't match with the hdri as much we don't have this random white spotlight so i'm going to bring the saturation a little bit over here to the oranges should be enough you don't want to go too crazy because you're going to get this like mars looking effect so just ever so slightly into the uh reddish orange channels here and then let's take the strength back down to like one or uh it's not quite reading enough let's get it up to like two maybe increase the saturation a little bit more okay i think that's a good start again we can always revisit this i also really don't like this hdri as the background so let's just take that out for now and turn off the viewport overlays so this is what our scene looks like so far it's not much but we are going to get to something like this in just a second so i'm going to head back over here to quicksill again and for the rocks you see under the water here i'm going to use a scattering of this same plague here and you'll be surprised i literally used just this one plate for all the rocks that are underneath this water and it's very easy to do that because it's hard to tell what the difference is between things when you're looking at it uh at such a scale like when you keep duplicating the same thing over and over rotating it slightly scaling it slightly it's hard for your eyes to tell that it's the exact same piece being just used over and over again so what we're going to do is just use this to populate the scene so i have this rock here it's going to duplicate it again alt d let's rotate it scale kind of patch that corner there it looks good to me let's duplicate it again bring it over here rotate and scale it up a little bit zed rotate it again duplicate again attach this hole this takes some time i mean just go through and do it it really it's not that difficult but it will get a great result once you successfully patch up all the holes in your image so i'm just going to start with just this for right now as my scene which i think looks pretty good so let's save this out too as a tutorial rocky scene so this is what we have so far and what i'm actually going to do is add in the water plane now so i actually have been developing a couple different shaders that i use for my water in a lot of scenes this one in particular is this kind of glassy one that i think i got from blender guru originally and then i kind of modified the idea of it but the way you want to start with it i'm going to actually use a plane for this because it's got some volumetrics based into it so you'll see what this looks like in just a sec so i want it to be around there i think looks pretty good we're going to call this my water plane let's just scale this up at like something crazy like 50 to really just take up the entire scene and then make sure that my camera is not clipping because sometimes that happens um it cuts off at 100 meters let's just crank up something crazy and there you go you can actually see that it was clipping a bit so i'm going to name this our water planes that's good and let's just group these assets so that we don't get kind of stuck in the weeds looking through just tons and tons of layers let's call these tons of rocks i don't know just to get this out of the way because i just think it looks a bit better i'll call these side rocks let's make that's a bit better so i'm gonna save this again and then now i have a shader that i've been developing called ocean shader and i might put this up somewhere i think i mean if you can i believe this is from blender guru if not mistaken but i've kind of modified it a bit it's my liking uh and it's a really simple one so if i just bring this in you can see this is what the ocean looks like and then i'm noticing that the hdri is actually projecting on our render so i'm just gonna switch the cycles really quickly just to see how this looks and the shader it's not too complex there's just a bit of math going on uh with the light paths to make sure that this can actually be see-through and you can kind of color it a little bit too so i'm adding a bit of uh bluish turquoise tints to it and then there's also this volume absorption which is kind of helping with uh the depth so as the deeper you get the darker the water will get and the further away you get the darker the water will get as well so what you're noticing is this hdri is still reflecting in there to get rid of that go to the world settings ray visibility and then turn off uh glossy and that will make your scene very dark for the reflections because nothing is currently reflecting off that anymore so this is a good time to bring in the sky background that i used here so if the mountains were like a key focal element of this piece then it would be good to actually make these in something like world creator which i use quite a bit to make uh some really interesting displacements i've posted these in one of my previous tutorials before where you can actually make really nice dunes mountains craters volcanoes very quickly procedurally as well which is really nice and then you get these nice displacement maps like this is one that corresponds to a volcano and you can bring these into blender this one is one that i used for kind of this funky mountain render i did a couple months back [Music] but the thing is these are very intensive for your viewport because there's a lot of geometry that you need for this displacement to make it look nice so it's not a focal element of this piece it's something away in the background so there's no point really making this an actual 3d geometry so instead what i'm going to do is actually use a 2d image just to really speed up my viewport and it also look much more realistic um because you won't have um the add-on got disabled for images as planes um just make sure that this is enabled to go to your add-ons images displays somehow disable that one not sure why um but yeah so you'll you'll have much faster render times without having all this extra geometry that you really don't need in the background so i'm going to change that to emit go to my skies thing here i've got a ton of images that i downloaded from unsplash royalty free i'll link it in the description if you guys want to go and browse for yourselves it's a really awesome site lots of really great images and then the one i used for this was it's like icy mountain image let me see if we can find it yeah so i used lake mountains one this image that i got so what i want to make sure is right about this image is that the plane of it is at the exact uh it's exactly parallel to the plane with this camera here so i usually go to top view by hitting seven on my numpad and then make sure that it aligns with my camera plane otherwise it'll get some kind of weird distortion and it will look just off to your eye somebody's in a bit here just to make sure we're good um yeah so now that is exactly parallel to the plane of the camera which is great and i'm going to bring this way back in my scene and then scale this guy way up and bring it up just a little bit here so that it is aligning with the crest of the water let's actually switch over to eb so we don't have this constant refreshing if you have nvidia rtx graphics cards which i don't care they have on my computer you can do with the new 2.9 blender this really great denoising viewport denoising for cycles usually you have that in ev it's an option you can check on and off it doesn't really do too much i feel like but cycles you really do notice it so you're not looking through noise it just will refresh your image very quickly and looks great but i currently am not rocking an rtx graphics card so my view for denoising i have to opt for um if i were to go gpu compute there's these uh different denoising settings which one is automatic which is okay optics is the one that's really great uh it works with oops and it crashes my computer this happens see uh yeah i'm using an old system here so i am going to be upgrading this soon so i won't have to deal with that kind of crashing as much hopefully but you get the idea you would be able to go over viewport automatic or open image denoises one that i use sometimes with the cpu i like to use that sometimes with the renderer which i think looks pretty good you can also use uh optics like again if you have an nvidia gpu but i usually do not use that and i'm just going to be using the cpu right now it's not a deal not as fast i feel like but it will get the job done as you hear a dog barking in the background okay so i'm going to go back to evie for a second here just as i um get my camera adjusted apologies for the background noise um so i will have to re-import that image as a plan for the background and it was the mountain one which is a mountain lake mountains one so this is the image let's once again make sure this adjusts with the plane of my camera looks about right to me so it looks good okay so i'm going to bring this back into my scene and scale up like crazy again raise it up so that's good and then scale up a little bit more and then it's looking pretty good to me i think maybe slide it over a little bit let's see what i did with this guy yeah it looks pretty good i'm showing a bit more sky this time in this render but it's not the biggest deal i think it looks pretty cool so i save that out again and then let's actually adjust this emission a bit because i'm noticing it is not quite matching our hdri as much so if i were to go over my shader here and just crank the emission up just a little bit like 1.8 instead so it's like a little bit brighter and i think that matches a bit better with our scene so there's one more thing you can do with this plane too um to actually make the water look a little bit more realistic is add in like a little bit of ripples to it so the shader that i have actually has this noise texture baked into it pumped into the uh the displacement output of the water it's very subtle um and it's not really doing too much for me just now so what i'm going to do is actually make uh going to edit mode here and then just subdivide this plane just like a little bit just make it like a little bit of subdivisions like that i don't think on the scale you'll really notice as much but actually yeah you know what let's not do this it's not going to work as much i'm just going to focus on this guy you can actually crank this way up here and you can see that looks like choppy ocean um which is like maybe a bit too much for a scene but we can kind of play with this a bit because i have this noise texture feeding into a math node which is multiplying and i'm kind of halfing the effect of this so i can actually bring this down like a little bit more so the bump is not as severe maybe let's just give it ever so slight i want this to be a very calm lake so you can see just ever so slightly these nice ripples in the water and they kind of fade off nicely into the distance so i can actually crank this noise texture up just maybe a little bit let's put up some 2000 instead i think that looks really nice you can see this looks like natural water you got these nice ripples to it so something that happens in the reflections i'll show you this in a second let's switch over to cycles when you're reflecting this plane you're going to have a little bit of an issue in the further back regions of it it's a little bit hard to see here as this refreshes but there's this kind of bizarre bright patch right here compared to this foreground element here we don't really see that as much as the nice uh underwater part that you see let me just cropped it just around the region um so if i were to pull up this final image you can notice this looks much better there's not really that random bright patch there and the reason you're seeing that is actually because i was a little bit lazy here to start and i left this large patch open between the rocks in the foreground and the image plane where the mountain texture is so what i need to do is actually fill out this little bit of range between the foreground and the background to kind of cut that off so you don't have this bizarre random portion there so if i actually disable the water you can see what i mean there's just this open part between here in the background that needs to be patched up so i'm just going to switch this over to our regular view here again solid view and then let's just duplicate more of these a few more of these guys scale them way down in the zen so that they're not as extruded in the background because i really want to cut this away too much if i go to top view you can see what this is looking like it looks pretty good [Applause] just doing some patchwork this is like a lot of fun i mean i really enjoy filling up the scenes like this and just kind of making a realistic looking place and just kind of putting in all those details you really respect just how detailed and complex nature is once you spend a little bit of time doing these renders it's a real blast to do these honestly and you really notice a lot more stuff about the outdoors around you once you're looking around again it's pretty cool so let's put that water back in and we have solved that problem most likely but there's one more problem actually uh that has come up since adding in this image plane that we need to address so now there's not that random bright patch if you remember before and this looks much more realistic however the scene looks a little bit dark and you'll notice you don't have that edge light on the rocks and that is because this image plane that we've put in here is actually somehow gone into this collection is actually blocking the lighting that's coming in so if you were to go to the object properties tab visibility and then uncheck from revisibility shadow that allows our sun lamp to work again and actually penetrate through this plane as if it's nothing and not casting shadows from that plane on our scene and now this looks much better you've got a much more realistic looking thing uh scene so this is like a little bit too bumpy still i think so let me just really pull this down 0.05 i don't want this to be too uh intense looking i want to be able to see all the rocks that are underneath which i am actually much better able to see underneath which looks really nice and let me actually just for now take off this volume just because it takes a little bit longer to load and looks pretty good so this is what we're working with so far i think this is a pretty good scene and it is pretty comparable to what we got as this final thing however this rock was maybe a little bit closer to the camera so let's rearrange this a bit pull this over and scale it up a little bit and turn this guy a little bit more maybe bring him in a bit closer okay so i think i basically completed the work for the water and for the rocks and everything in the background so now i'm going to be adding in some nature to the scene some plants some grass and a tree so i often get asked how i do this i don't actually make my own nature assets usually i have done a couple photo scans in the past however is extremely time intensive and i recommend that you if you can try to leverage assets that are already available on the internet because it will save you a ton of time and the result will look much better so there are a lot of different things out there that you can use to do realistic-looking nature assets there's a couple specific add-ons for blender specifically which i think work really really well and i've experimented with all of them so i can kind of talk to the strengths and weaknesses of each one but recently i've gravitated a lot to graswall pro the pro version gives you some really cool settings in terms of the physics of objects which basically allows you to add in this noise displacement modifier apologies for the trash truck going outside i'll pause for a second while you hear the wonders of the outdoors as the trash is slamming around um but what grass will does is it allows you to very quickly add a system on something it's their way of calling their particle systems you add a particle system to any geometry so in this one i'm just adding it to this whole rock feature and you just see a bunch of empty hair particles and what you'll next want to do is create new settings and that will put like just this kind of default um representation of its particles on the system and then you go to species and you can choose from a number of different species that they already have preloaded and you can actually load in your owns own ones or what i like to do sometimes as well is actually use some assets not from groswald but from something like quicksole where pixel's got a really great plant library so let's for example uh go into here and let's pull some of this nice little plant right here so i'll just export this to quicksilver take er to from quicksilver blender it'll take a second to load and then once it's into blender the fun begins so this will take a minute to load and it is now loaded in so we let me pull this out of this collection here and put it in the main one so we have 12 different varieties of these plants let me just turn off rendered mode for a second slowing down my viewport a lot and i'm going to right click and then select hierarchy so i've got all of these plant guys ready to go and i'm just going to move them out of my viewport for a second here so they're not going to be in the camera plane just move them back here i'm going to hit m and then new collection and let's call these uh i don't know quicksilver flowers example so these are our flowers and they're now in a collection called quiksil flowers example so what i want to do now is let me actually move these all out of the hierarchy that are coming in here it's okay so here's all our flowers let's move out of my viewport here for a second so we have all of these guys here zoom in and show you what we're working with there we go so these are the flowers that we have in our scene and what i can do now is go to this rock for example and then under the collection tab it's kind of a little bit hidden here it took a little while to figure out where this was at first it's scattering a groswold custom collection which is including all of these kinds of guys but i actually want to change this out to our quixote flowers example so if i select that and then i'm just going to turn the density way down just to start here so it's not going to log down my scene when i open this up in the viewport i can hit uh to show these in the viewport and now you see it is scattering these flowers from kwixel so that's really cool and we can do a lot with this but first i actually want to add in kind of a grass texture because right now i'm scattering this on a rock and i feel like you don't really see plants or grass growing um as much on rocks it's kind of a little bit patchier and what i wanted to have kind of happen is this a little bit of a grass plot on both of these rocks where grass is growing and not as much as in the rocks so what i'm actually going to do for this is i'm actually going to delete this system and go back over to quixl here and then there is a nice moss asset this one actually it's one of the first ones that you can download it's free when you open it up i think a lot of these assets are now free if you have an unreal engine account which i use unreal engine a bit so i have these guys for free so i'm going to import this moss into my scene and then i'm going to pull it up a bit and then rotate it a bit rotate a little bit more and i'm going to put this in material view just so i can see where stuff is overlapping in the scene okay it takes a second to load here and while this is learning i just want to thank all of you guys for following along i just hit a thousand subscribers on youtube it's quite an awesome amount of you guys already following along which is really awesome i'm so glad that you've joined along for this adventure hope you're learning something from these tutorials i really enjoy uh sharing this stuff with you guys and getting your feedback on it and inspiring you to create your own pieces like this it's a lot of fun 3d is quite intimidating at first i feel like even still now that i've been doing it for a couple years there's still so much i have to learn which is great because there is so much out there and the learning never stops you can keep going and it's just a blast it's a lot of fun to learn this stuff and i'm glad you guys are following along on this adventure of mine where i'm continuing to learn more and more so this is loaded in now you can see what we're working with we've got this grass moss here and i'm actually going to just duplicate this guy rotate him around and bring him over to the other side here for this rock and again this just takes a little bit of time take your time placing these things it'll really look nice in the end if you place it well so here's what we're working with we've got these two grassy moss spots and they look terrible right now but give it a second and a couple grass assets from groswald will do the trick to make this look really nice so i'm going to select this guy uh go into the roswall pro settings create new settings and now i'm going to use one of their built-in grass for this one so let's use the orchard grass so you can see it's using a kind of a low poly representation of what the grass would be um to kind of save you some time in the viewport so i actually want to increase the density and then decrease the size let's make some like 0.3 instead i feel like that looks a little bit more reasonable maybe even like 0.27 for the size and what you can actually do here i don't want this scattering like inside this rock because you're not even going to see these particles i just want them to be scattered on the surface and there's some great settings in here that you can actually use to optimize your scene and make sure that you're not showing particles where there really shouldn't be any because it's just going to slow your renders down the first one i like to use a lot is the distribution and actually allows you to do a custom weight paint density layer where you can scatter particles in just one specific place by painting over that section so i'm just going to do some nice painting here on my scene anywhere where i think the grass will be visible you can see from the camera view where this stuff will be scattering and i'm just going to paint over all of this here no reason to paint on the other side because there's that could be a viewpoint over there that you're going to be able to see and so this is basically good get a bit more down here and just paint that guy in there a little bit there a little bit there okay so that looks pretty great so let's go back to object mode and then i'm going to go to grosvald again and then if you go back down here recalculate density it will scatter particles in just that one area which is pretty awesome i'm going to increase the density quite a bit for these guys because i wanted to cover the entire surface area of my scene and then what's great about grosval too is when you adjust the size of the particle it adjusts the density as well the number of particles as well so you're not having so many extra ones it's all about optimization for grosval which is really great i like that feature about it i think it works really well for a lot of purposes and so i'm going to switch back over to renderview to show you what this looks like so now this is actually going to show what the particles actually are in the scene and it's these really cool it's really cool grass and it'll take a second to load here and while it loads we will just be patient again and relax so this is really cool once it actually shows the suspense is incredible we'll see how this is in just a second again i always say this in my videos too 3d is all about patience and slowing down and taking your time there's a lot of stuff that really will slow down as you're working through the process and it kind of gives you just a chance to take a break and not just be trucking so quickly through something so you can kind of take a look at the the whole scene and really see what's working what's not working maybe even come come back to the next day and see what you might have missed in the first pass through it um so it's a lot of fun and it does take some time it does take some patience and now that patience is paid off and we have a scene that is loaded in so if i turn off this in the viewport let's save this again just so that we have that loaded in i'm going to do some material work in a grass wall on this grass particle so with groswald's grass they actually come with a pre-built texture that you can actually adjust in the material settings in grosser which i really like as well and specifically you can adjust the age so if i were to push this over to the right further it would look a little bit more yellow a little bit more dead you can also change the translucency of it so like how much light is passing through it and it makes it shinier or not as shiny and the one i'm going to adjust for this scene is the wets which will actually add in a little bit of these kind of water particles like almost like do like morning dew the grass so if i zoom in a bit here you can really see it you've got these like water particles on the grass which look really nice and apparently you're not really seeing that as much over here and i want to have that look really nice like it's a morning view of this place so i'm just going to crank this up like quite a bit and you'll see what this does to the grass it's got this nice dewy wetness to it i'm going to increase the translucency just a little bit so they're a bit shinier and that's looking pretty great it's taking a second load but you can already see it's getting closer to that really nice dewy look that i had over here before so i'm going to close out of this for a second this is going to be a bit slowly so apologies for that but yeah so that's that's the scene for that right part and i'm going to do the same thing and add this over to the left side of my image but first i'm just going to disable this particle system so it's not bogging down my scene as much go over to solid mode again and then actually let's go to material view you can even do this in ev2 sometimes i'll just start working ev if i already know what the lighting looks like and then come back to cycles for like the final render just because it will be much slower operating in cycles um case in point it's a little bit slow right now as i'm moving between viewports this is all part of the process you kind of learn as you go and again you take your time going through these since it is not always the most efficient thing okay so we're over here in materials view i'm just gonna again put this over to evie let's go to render just so we see we're working with particle wise so i'm going to be workshopping that left side of the image over here so i'm going to select this guy and then add in a new particle system create new settings and i'm going to use that same grass as before the orchard grass so again it's scattering all over my thing which i don't want and so i'm actually going to go back down here density create a group turn on my viewport display here and see here create a new group there we go okay i was somehow still using the vertex group from the other one which i didn't want as much so let's just paint over this stuff here and that's looking pretty much good let me put a little bit more on this northern edge a little bit here okay let's go back to object mode and then i'm going to recalculate that calculate density okay and it only has like one particle so it's not really doing too much for me right now so i'm gonna put this back down to 0.27 and then now you can see how this works so it's looking pretty great so i kind of know what this looks like already so i'm just going to disable this and then add in one of the last couple features here is a tree so if you remember in this guy we had a nice tree in that scene right there and a chair so we're going to add in those two last ones so i'm going to go to something called botanic bow 10 iq i've got a bunch of great tree assets that i use for a lot of my renders which i think are pretty great and i'm going to be using a deciduous tree which i believe the one i used was a little bit further down here you can see all the different varieties of these trees quite a few really cool ones um i think these all work really well in the scene in general um they light very well they look pretty cool when you're putting uh putting them in your scene i believe i used i think the linden one here if not mistaken it doesn't really matter um a lot of these i think look pretty comfortable so let's add this one in here it's a little bit large to start out so i'm just going to resize him pull him up and then i'm going to move him over to this mossy patch on the right side of my frame so let's angle them a little bit too looks pretty cool and then turn off the overlays yeah so i think that's pretty much what i want for that one maybe it's turn a little bit more so you can see the trunk a bit better so that looks pretty great and then i'm going to add in the chair too which the chair model you can actually get from sites called 3dsky.org they have a bunch of both free and paid models that you can use for your scenes i'll link this again in the description as well as all the other uh add-ons and stuff i use i have a a nice page linked with everything so yeah there's like a lot of different assets that you can use from here from anything from dressing tables to musical instruments to tvs whatever lots of great 3d models i think they're pretty high quality a lot of them are designed more so for 3ds or sorry for um yeah uh what's some of the other software's like um like i don't know cinema 4d or other things they come as like max files or these other file extensions usually ones i look for when i'm downloading it are fbx ones which are pretty good or objs with the materials included and then usually i'll have to spend a little bit of time cleaning the models up to make sure that they work properly in my scene um just get them looking okay because sometimes they don't always come out of the box looking perfect for the scene and you'll see what i mean once you start experimenting around with them a bit they don't always work as well but for this one i've got this chair model that i used and i'm just going to pull it directly from the blend file from before because there's no point in you watching as i go through and make this happen just because it's a little bit boring it's just a matter of messing around with nodes and getting stuff working and it's just like little tweaks to like the saturation or to the bump or okay so that's loading a bit too slowly so i'm just going to import this a different way as a fbx i have these in my models plastic chair blue and that's why i wasn't showing up because it's a different name all right so i imported this in i've already cleaned this model up a bit before in the past but this one's a pretty good model it's like a nice like kind of plastic deck chair like beach chair or whatever i feel like i used to sit in these a lot when i was like at the beach when i was a kid they're like at a party you pull these over the table i think it just looks like a good chair it's quite nice so i'm gonna go in it's a very simple thing here it just has a little bit of um color to it like kind of like a plastic shader i'm just gonna adjust the color a bit so that it's like this just plain white deck chair color so it looks pretty nice and then what i'm going to do is make sure that this is aligned with the rocks below here so it's not just like floating in the water floating in the air which could be possible but let's make it look a little bit more realistic and scale it up a little bit and so it's sitting in the water like a chair should be so that's looking a bit better i'm gonna pull up these rocks a little bit so that they're aligned with the base of this chair so that's looking a bit more reasonable so yeah that is basically the scene there's one more thing i forgot to mention about the renders here to really improve the quality of your render and that is before you render i'm just in a default scene here so just ignore that for now but if you go over to the view layer properties make sure to check in mist for the passes and miss pass and then once your render is rendered out you can go over to the compositing use your nodes and then if you hit ctrl shift and click on this you will have an image here and then you'll have the ability to plug in the mist channel so you'll be able to put that into the image and then export that out and there's a couple ways to actually change this so if i were to just go back over to the layout here for example um and let's go one of these is the camera view i'm just gonna talk about how this works so if i just bring my camera down here and let's just angle this at 90 degrees just to show you how this effect is looking like so if i just let's just duplicate this box like a whole bunch of times um in the scene put this one over here scale that up duplicate this one just even further back in the scene just like have a whole bunch of these in the scene somewhere just to illustrate what this is doing so we've got a whole bunch of these boxes in the scene and let's show you how this works so these are all separated in 3d space you can see our cameras here and these are all in different regions so when you have the mispass enabled you can go back over into your camera if you click on your camera and scroll down all the way down to uh your camera guy here open data properties hit viewport display and then now you can actually show the mist in the screen and what that's going to do is it shows you this line and this is where it's actually clipping for your mess pass so if i go over to rendered view now and click on the drop-down for shading of render view and instead of showing the combined render view show the missed pass and so you can see what it's doing actually it is uh anything that's really close to the camera is is really dark really dark contrast and then anything that's further further back away is really bright white so it's actually clipping like the whitest portion of this image is at this distance from the camera is this point right here and the darkest point is at this point closest to the camera and the way to affect that is actually in your uh your world settings so if you click on the world settings and is in here it's miss pass if you click on miss pass you can see it's starting at 5 meters so if you want to start that a bit closer you can pull that a bit closer and you can see it's actually already fading that guy out a bit if you want to start a bit later so let's have this cube be the darkest portion you can start it there and then i want this to go really far back so you can see everything in the screen so that is where it is ending now so you have this stuff really far back here and if you were to pop this render off really quickly let's just render this scene so you can see this is what that looks like as a rendered scene and if i go over to the compositing you can see this is what the scene looks like it's this really dark contrast scene but if i were to plug in my miss pass into the image you can see that's what it looks like and you can actually export that out and what i recommend doing that for for landscape scenes you have atmospheric scattering atmospheric falloff the further away you get away uh the further away you are from the camera the the more kind of low contrast and washed out the images can look if you just look at any photos of of nature of real nature um that's what you see you're going to see this kind of fading off effect into the distance of the atmosphere and that's just the nature of just how light scattering works in the real world so you want to mimic that and it really had a bit of realism to your render so i did that actually for this render that i popped off so i have two different views i have this chair mispassed here and you can see what it's doing so this dark region is the chair and some foreground and some of the rocks and stuff here and the further away you get the lower contrast i guess and this is the actual render that came out directly from blender it looked like this so what i want to do is actually composite these two together in post-processing so i'm just going to start anew with these scenes and kind of walk you through my process so this is the scene that i actually ended up coming up with this is the final image and i can kind of walk you through the layers here in photoshop that i did it's a pretty simple breakdown here just to kind of add some contrast and adjustments to my image so this is the original image right out of the blender and i've composited in that mist past you can see what effect that really has it's kind of adding in that nice atmospheric falloff to the image and the way i did that is actually by having this as a blend mode setting setting it to screen and then adjusting the opacity so if it's full opacity it's a little bit way too washed out for me so i just brought this back just enough so that it would look uh acceptable in the screen so that's what i ended up looking with as the final image i wanted to brighten up this horizon just a little bit more so i added in a brightness and contrast just added the brightness up a little bit more and then just dragged across right as at the point where the ground meets the sky or where the water meets the the mountain rather i added in a lens flare to this just to add in just a subtle brightness to the edges of the rocks coming in headed in levels to add in a bit more contrast and what i usually like to do is pull down the rightmost edge of this which is the brightest parts image and makes it like a little bit brighter a little bit more washed out there and then usually to compensate we'll push the mid levels up just a little bit to add in like a little bit more contrast the images and getting so washed out and then also you can pull up the shadows just a little bit here so that it's darkening the blacks just a little bit more which looks nice with the levels and so i also went to the hue and saturation and then just kind of added a little bit more to the uh it's the reds of the scene which is this edging of the rock which i thought would look really nice and the way you can actually do that is by using a targeted adjustment in photoshop so if you click on this hand this finger pointer thing here it gives you an eyedropper you can click on a specific part of the region so if i click on this it says that okay this is cyans and you can just drag this to the left and right to increase the saturation of your of that specific thing so i'm just gonna leave that as is because i don't really need it to be super saturated for the mountain so i just did some adjustments targeted adjustments that way i added in a color lookup just to add a little bit more uh oranges to this and what i did for that one is add in this nice lut that comes with photoshop called fall colors so i added that look in and then it just did some dodging and burning just to add in a little bit more contrast to a little bit more brightness to some of the highlights of the image the last thing i did was actually add in this filter which comes with something called the nik collection and i have linked to this in the description as well um it is a really great uh post processing software that you can use i think it's from google originally and it allows you to do some really cool effects so i just did some uh adjustments to really add some kind of dreaminess to the image and do some saturation and color adjustments and then this is the final image that i got to so from humble beginnings uh to this it looks really cool a lot of fun to make this so if you found this format helpful or enjoyable please let me know in the description i'll try to make more of these in the future if you guys like these i feel like the longer breakdowns and the kind of workflow process videos are very helpful to see just because it shows you exactly what the creator's doing i definitely learned a lot from watching other people's workflows even if you're not actually following along uh piece by piece it's just helpful to see what other people are doing how they're thinking through problems how they're adapting how they're adjusting things what they're using so hopefully this was enjoyable to you if so please subscribe for more and i hope to see you on the next video thank you for tuning

Channel: James Tralie

Views: 22,057

Rating: 4.9838219 out of 5

Keywords: blender, blender 2.9, blender 2.8, blender tutorial, blender landscape, blender environment, world creator, environment design, concept art, concept art tutorial, photoshop, learn blender, ducky3d, blenderguru, blender walkthrough, blender beginner, quixel, megascans, nvidia, art, tutorial, education, adobe, adobe creative cloud, cinema 4d, octane, render, adobe cc, blender render, blender donut, environment art

Id: T9LO301d84Q

Length: 49min 44sec (2984 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 30 2020