Making A Snowy Environment In Blender

right so in this one I'm going to show you how to make snowy environments like this or at least how I approach it um so this is one of the things that confused me a lot when I first started out because I I always wish there was some button you could just click it would make snow perfectly fall on top of objects unfortunately that's not really how it works um but there are some things we can do to easily like add snow to things and make things feel cold and yeah snowy so I'll show you how I actually do this in an environment so here's what we're making I'll I'm not sure what this looks like yet because I haven't made it yet when I have the time recording but here's what that looks like and in this video I'll just show you whatever I did to get there so let's start uh I'm I'm in blender here and we have a camera and a cube and a sky texture the sky texture is just this right here comes with blender just using these settings this will actually be a good starting point for our for our snow environment I don't know if I'll stick with this in the end but that's a good starting point the idea I have in my head is like a snowy plain with like maybe some rocks or Hills or something and then some kind of artifact type thing in the middle could be like an archway or a piece of a temple or maybe in a whole Temple or I don't know but some kind of artifact thing in the middle that's covered in snow and then like a snowy landscape around it and I think that'll be a nice easy snowy environment to do so let's start off with a plane because it's going to be a snowy plane there we go our camera lens is just default for now I'll change it later and let's just switch this to object so let's hit new and on textures.com I found this texture right here just a free Texture from textures.com if you just go on the site and just type in snow you will find it so you can get that here and so let's just drop that on to this so easy way to import textures uh well first of all put it in the asset browser but I'm kind of lazy and I just use qixel for most of my textures but I'm not going to do that in this video so uh if you want to just quickly import this click on the principled Ctrl shift t with the node Wrangler add-on drag any one of these into the blender file manager there we go select import done and we can just throw on some subdivision so control 1 for a subdivision modifier let's switch that to simple so it's not curving it and then throw on adaptive make sure in experimental cycles for that to be there and I can probably turn this up to like two the higher the dicing scale the lower the resolution so I don't need it back crazy for now I can always change it later too right so now let's go to the UV editor and just scale this up because right now this 1080p texture is being applied to this massive thing and like stretching all the way across so I don't want that let's just go into the UV editor and scale this up like this it's going to be repeating right now I'll worry about that later there's some easy tricks to not have it repeat like this but for now I'm okay with it repeating I can deal with it later not important the ambient occlusion didn't get plugged in again that's not really important for now I'll touch that later for now let's turn on the uh the displacement because you can see it actually imported the displacement map when I press Ctrl shift T but uh it's not activated it's just flat still so to activate this one adaptive subdivision needs to be on which it is and then two let's just turn on displacement and bump in the settings here material settings and so now it's on but it's insane so just let's apply the scale and there we go standard adaptive subdivision setup if you don't know how to do that there's other videos just type in like blender how to use adaptive subdivision or whatever you'll find videos on that easy way to somewhat break up the pattern quickly take a noise texture mix it together with the displacement map and I could make it like turn it to multiply or whatever but it's easier to just not deal with that for now and now it's slightly better so uh again I'll deal with that later I'll make it like not super obvious that it's repeating but for now it doesn't really matter I just want to get the basic layout of things for now so this texture is 1080P and if we look at the foreground this is what that effect is going to give us uh if I shade it smooth it's a little bit better but it's still like you know this is not good over here in the distance it's not bad it looks pretty nice but up close especially here this is very bad we don't want this um and honestly the easiest way to deal with that is not some like intricate setup it's literally just take any object and slap it in the foreground so some sort of different ground plane or different snow texture or even duplicate the texture and like just move it closer except on a smaller scale there's just plenty of like workarounds for this but uh I'm not again I'm not going to worry about that kind of thing right now because I just want to get the main idea out and then I'll refine all these little weird looking things later where do I go from here I don't know um you know what might be cool actually is getting like a sky in the back so this uh let's let's do that let's add a sky now I don't have a specific reference photo for like the type of thing I want to do I just know that I want to do something snowy you know if I was going to fully optimize this process I would go and find an exact or like sketch out an exact idea of what I want to do but I just can't be bothered right now so I'm not going to and I think it'll be fine without it but uh Just Dub it if we want it to be fully optimal I would do that anyways let's get a sky image on this uh background so this will be included in the course soon I'm not done this yet but I'll just use one of these for now just go to unsplash and download a free sky from there uh Works basically the same as just higher resolution so let's just drop any one of these in mission Alpha maybe not Alpha actually because Sky the background is blue so maybe that doesn't matter let's just take this off and yeah so let's just put the camera like there ish copy rotation if you haven't seen my video on making Skies you can watch that but basically you just do this take a take a picture of a sky like this and then slap it onto a plane like that and then put it in the emission and you know maybe the base color and then actually what I'm kind of feeling like is this type of thing like I did for this uh like illenium art is the uh where it's like Moody sky but then sunlight coming through but not like bright sunlight it's kind of like this Moody uh cloudy type sunlight I don't really know what you call that but the sky texture is not uh not giving me this effect so I'm just going to take that out and let's replace that with a actual sun lamp and that way I'll get less Reflections from the sky which usually is a good thing but in this case I don't really like it so I'm gonna have it so sun lamp I'll adjust the strength later just turn it up like this for now and I want uh some like light rays coming through and I could do that by just adding a plane like this and then on this plane just take it like a a noise texture or something and use that to drive the alpha which means that some of it will be transparent and some of it will be opaque and then that'll like just cast some really interesting Shadows on this so you'll see what I mean in a second if I turn this up that pattern is going to allow me to have just nice Shadows like this and that looks pretty cool from the camera's point of view not this extreme maybe that's a pretty intense but something like that will be nice let's take this up take this down and then increase the scale of the noise but that's not really doing what I want I'm not going to worry too much about like the SE little details right now okay let's throw in some volumetrics because that makes everything look better all the time I don't want it to be so extreme but something like this would be fine I want to move the sky back and then I can't see it anymore so I just need to turn like the the render distance of the sky or the camera I mean so here clip end just turn that up like this scale this up sometimes it just looks better if you have the sky a bit like further back from the camera just makes it seem a little bit more realistic and also I might want to make this bigger so it's casting Shadows all the way through to the end just make sure this isn't like in the frame like you can see here I don't want that in the actual picture so I'll just kind of rotate it and move it out a little bit okay back to here this might actually look good now if I run this into the alpha let's see if that makes it look better and then if I adjust the strength sometimes it's better sometimes it's not in this case I kind of like that that's pretty cool actually let's see what else could we do with just you know what actually might be really sick is um having like a massive structure here so I think I want to do that really quick let me just go to my uh this folder of like fantasy stuff this is from the pack that I mentioned in the last video like it comes with the course just use whatever models you want just in case you're wondering that's where I'm getting this from so let me take anything and this might just be a placeholder I'm not really sure for now but just anything like this I'm gonna I'm gonna just Chuck that in there and this would actually be a good point to show you that trick I mentioned of getting like snow to show up on different objects in the right place and by the right place I just mean like on the top only okay so here's how you do this uh let's say we have an object with a regular texture on it let's just bring this down to uh demonstrate this so this is uh the wrong one but it's this one so ignore all this stuff at the top this is like to add a bit of a just extra fluffiness to the texture really it's just a normal map roughest map and then a base color and that's running through like a bit of ambient occlusion stuff that's not like this is not important here at all just think of this as like base color roughness and normal like your standard texture setup um and so let me show you like how to deal with this and add a bit of snow so this line coming into the top here this is going into it's kind of hard to tell but that's going into the base color so just think of this right here even though it's all random nodes it's basically just the same as if I took the base color image and just dragged that straight into the base color socket with some extra fanciness that doesn't really matter for this part what I want to do is if I take this out it actually kind of looks like it's made of just pure snow almost um not quite but a little bit so I want to get that but just only from like the place where snow would fall and like land on this or like in the in the crevices and stuff too so the way you do that is we want to have like wherever the the faces that are facing the direction of like upwards this way I want that to be just pure white and then everything else to be our normal texture the way you do that is actually a very easy way and it's using two nodes a few nodes one is the separate color node and I'll explain what this means in a second but also what is it texture coordinates I always forget until I actually plug in the actual nodes uh yeah I think it's this yes it is okay let me take a mix node instead of float I'm going to change that to color so I can mix in the color and I'll just drop this into where the base color is going in here so we have our our standard color which is this this texture I'm just going to mix in in this case uh just white so just put that on white now we have zero is our regular like rock stone texture one is white and I want it to be mixing I want our factor to be so that only like the faces that are facing the like the top or like facing upwards get this white like snow part on it and so how you do that is this if we take the normal node what this is normal in this case just means like which direction is each face facing so depending on how I rotate this these colors will change uh based on I guess have to apply the rotation so if I like rotate it this way and apply it it's going to give me different colors based on the direction that each of these faces is facing if that makes sense so I don't I don't actually know that much about normals and how it all works but that like that's really all you need to know is like normal information is just information about which way is the face facing so we can use that to tell us okay I want the faces that are facing this way to have snow and the other ones not to have snow so if you notice here the faces that are facing more upwards so like this this upside here and like all of all these faces down here these are all blue uh so right the faces that if I go to like top down it's mostly blue and if I go to the other side this is like mostly not blue so that means the faces that are facing more upwards are going to have like more blue than the other faces so we can use that to run into our mixed Factor here so if I look at the if I if I run this uh normal output from the texture coordinate through this separate color node the separate color node does exactly what it says just separates out colors so we run this in here and then output only the red that means like wherever there was only red before that's where it's going to show up like white in here so if I look at this you can see where like blue is obviously not going to have this it's going to be like opening black and then everywhere else whether it was red or uh like red was included in that color it's going to be outputting that same with green like uh and then same with blue so it's just it's just different directions that the faces are facing so if I output uh if we look at like the normal information here like I said blue is going to be the faces that are facing mostly upwards so I if I run that through here and then output only the blue which should get like white mostly on top if I just look at what that looks like uh if I just kind of use our preview here okay so we can use this as our mix factor in short uh that was kind of a long way to explain it but hopefully that makes sense so I'm going to take this blue so right now it's just this this blue is going to be our mixed factor between white and our regular texture and then I could like take a noise and mix it in if I want in fact maybe let's try that let's take a noise texture and like um let's just see what it looks like if I if I plug this in here so I'll mix that together run it into the factor and let's see if we can get a bit of a nicer result and I might just crunch this too with a color ramp so yeah this is kind of that more like stylized video game type snow but I actually do kind of like how that looks so I might run with that um and you know you can adjust how much of that you want here and also what's really nice about this is if you have a really strong normal or displacement map that will actually influence the the direction of the normals and you'll get really intricate results when you do this kind of thing um and it'll it'll start like showing up on the texture itself I guess it's not here it might only be with a with a displacement map in fact maybe I can find that and throw it on here and see if it makes a difference yeah this texture right here so if I take the uh the displacement and then just run that actually into the height displacement height so this is for the stone texture not the snow but if I run that in there now okay there we go we're starting to get those really intricate results so the displacement is actually turned off uh so it's running out into the display of an output but if I look here the displacement is set to bump only if I turn displacement on it kind of messes it up but if I just leave it off it you just get this effect without without worrying about that and now we actually have some pretty nice uh intricate looking cool results and I can take the normal the normal map actually back down so that's kind of cool and let's just see I might crank this a little bit harder here too oh that's what's wrong is the red is going out so the blue is supposed to be in here I don't know how that got changed but there we go and so let's just look at this so yeah something like that right so we want the snow only collecting on like the top part of this I don't know when that red got changed but yeah it's supposed to be blue it's supposed to be opening here I don't know why it got changed but whatever uh so yeah that's that's what I want like the bottom rock middle Rock and then top snow there we go that's pretty nice Okay and like I said if you just throw the displacement map onto that like whatever base surface so not the snow but whatever other texture you're using if it's a rock or you know brick or whatever like I'm using here put the displacement map on that in the Shader editor so you just literally take the displacement map run it through a displaced node and then run it into this displacement output on the material output here and then don't turn on the actual don't enable displacement here so to keep it on bump only it'll still work but it just won't actually displace it it'll just like use that information in the in the normal so like this and then that's how you get that extra level of like detail in here so that's pretty sweet and I think this is a good place to stop I don't need to like make this insane I just need to make it like look somewhat like snow and then I can kind of go from there cool make a new copy of this apply rotation and then I might uh just like duplicate this a couple times and make a cooler type thing here uh maybe duplicate this scale it by negative one and then just kind of flip it up here okay let's join that and then now we've got like some big wall type thing like just a big object I can use okay nice and then just kind of put that here so that's awesome I like having like this massive looking effect here um that like the volumetrics helps so much with this um so you know look at that so I kind of want this effect of like these massive ginormous ruins and hopefully I can get that by uh just like layering on these models and kind of just duplicating duplicating them in the right place 50 millimeters a little bit more than I want so maybe let's do 35 and then obviously I'll have to like adjust the sky here and I kind of want this uh like hallway effect of like uh like a place where you could like walk through the center of this on the ground sort of uh so that's true it's kind of what I'm trying to do here like I want it to be going up on the sides and then in the middle like have a yeah like a pathway that you could like walk through and just when I zoomed out I noticed that that plane that's casting Shadows is now back in here so I'm just going to take that out be very careful like you do not want this thing in the render it's gonna basically ruin it and you will forever regret that so do not have it in there okay so like I said I got these models from the course I'm not like trying to sell this to you if you don't want to spend money like don't buy this this is not for you uh but I have other videos on modeling if you want to learn how I made this type of stuff you can go watch that here it's free if you do want to buy these it comes with the course plus a bunch of other stuff too I'll just leave a link in the description of where you can find these exact models if you do want to use these exact ones that I'm using here you don't have to buy mine just get whatever ones you want just get some models and use them and look at how much faster we're getting through this and how much cooler it's looking just by chucking in one model and just duplicating it a bunch of times and let's see what else can we do to make this feel like snowy and cool I think a foreground would be nice uh so I might just take a plane and let's just Chuck that here and I want this to have this material so Ctrl L material for Linked material and then I also want to take just some some tiles uh so I'll just take my tiles here this is just uh this is very simple I have it in here like in the pack but it's just literally add some squares and like make some of them like broken like I don't know go into edit mode and like delete some of the faces and stuff like that and then extrude it or whatever I might have used like you can also use like the OCD add-on like the free like one click damage add-on um just to adequate damage to things like this that could work I don't want this tile texture on here but I might just copy the snow setup so it's just these nodes right here ignore this uh just these here so the texture coordinates separate color mixed with the noise texture into the color ramp into a mix node take that copy or uh yeah copy that and then in this other texture I'll just paste it in there same thing I ignore these it's not really doing much uh so just paste that in there this is our base color run it into slot a run this into the base color and cool sweet and now we've got some like broken tiles like I said it's literally just squares just whatever method you want to use to like get a bunch of squares do that and you'll get a similar result it's not anything crazy uh let's just rotate this around get some variation okay cool and I might make these smaller like these tiles just feel too big and like out of place so I'm just gonna make this let's just scale that by 0.5 and that looks a lot better maybe just more of these things is the right move I think it might be so honestly maybe I can just duplicate this up again over itself and then like uh just Join This Together and then put this on medium point and then there we go just have like another piece like that or even like duplicate it one more time this way so it's more symmetrical and then just have like one ginormous piece that's just made out of the same smaller piece duplicated 16 times which is honestly kind of cool and then in here there's kind of a space in the middle so maybe it'll look cool to just quickly fill it out by adding a big Cube copy the location I guess I should put the origin to the geometry and then Cube copy location so it goes to like the origin point and then just scale that like this so it's like just filling out the inside space and then just Ctrl L material and then just Cube reject and take this and like scale it uh I guess I should apply scale unwrap the cube project now scale that up so it's like a bigger thing and then join that up and let's just see what that looks like Okay so we've kind of made this uh Mega pillar out of these smaller pillars and it looks kind of cool so I'm just going to Chuck that in here like this and you know what might look sick is having it uh like rotated this way like just really it's a little bit sideways leaning over that's that's super sick and maybe one over here too let's just see what this looks like so I don't know if it makes sense to have it like this way or this way it does look kind of cool having it like out this way because it's just this kind of flows better if it's like just curving down and then curving back up I kind of like that but it doesn't really make that much sense like if this one if you think about this like if this pillar fell to the left why would this one like fall to the right it doesn't really make any sense but it looks cool so I'm just gonna run with it and uh whatever it's not like it's you know it's it's so big that it's not realistic anyways that I don't really care if it's like you know the like the way like some earthquake would have caused this doesn't really make sense but yeah it doesn't matter we're going for like the coolest result not the most realistic so I don't really care um that's cool there that looks really pretty sick so just gonna Chuck it there here let's do another one over here and look how far you can get by just using one model spammed around 100 times like that's pretty crazy actually this this image oh sorry not this image plane but this this plane uh this Shadow casting plane makes everything feel so much bigger um just having like those Shadows that are just so massive in the distance it just looks so cool yeah that's nice there and is there anything else we need I feel like it needs more like something in the middle I'm just not really sure what but that would be a good thing to figure out right now what might also look cool is just using a spotlight for this so I might just hide the Sun for a second and then try a spotlight and see if that looks good and we're also getting a lot of light from the sky itself so maybe I don't even need it but let me throw it in here and just check so one two three four five six and then point it like this way let's do 50 million why not um I'm going to turn the Sun for a second just so I can select that exact color press Ctrl C hovering over the color put it back in the spot so I want to delete that exact color and let's just move this into a place that looks cool that's pretty nice right there I might just take this down a bit just to have a bit harsher shadows in there looks pretty nice and let's just take this sky and just turn this down I might swap this guy for a different one too let's just see if another one fits this scene better yeah that that fits better it's just more like evenly distributed clouds it seems like so I'll just kind of put that there duplicate this and just put it in the foreground a little bit more so it's just a just make it smaller be careful like duplicating the same object moving it closer to the camera and then making that same object smaller because it can kind of ruin the perception of the sense of scale because it's like oh this object is this far away and it's this big but then it's also this far away and it's like a different scale that kind of messes up your perception of how big things are sometimes so just watch out as long as you can't really tell what it is it's kind of fine doing that and that really helps I think maybe not really helps but it helps a little bit sell the uh the sense of scale because it's like if we're contrasting this super dark uh shadow in the very foreground with like just a really light shadow in the background because like the farther in the distance this stuff gets like the lighter all these Shadows are going to look like it it really puts into perspective how far away and how tall the stuff actually is because of how like dark the close stuff is versus how light the far stuff is if that makes sense really I think rocks would work better here so I might just pull some rocks in here let's go to the photo scans pack just take some of those uh this thing just kind of shook that in here I don't know why the roughness is looking kind of weird I might just turn that all the way up for this scene and kind of Chuck that in there like this and I might actually just put the same snow uh set up on here so just take those snow nodes and then run the base color into slot a from the result into base color there we go apply scale apply rotation and there we go so just adding random rocks to just make it feel more natural unless uh like the more natural stuff and like more stuff with like variation that you can just layer on top of each other I find that always just makes things look more complex and nice and intricate and natural and just good what about a bell like a ginormous Bell I wonder if that would be interesting and I just want the light to be actually hitting this so I'll just kind of put it in a place where some light is hitting it at least I think that just looks really nice that's pretty cool I really like that actually um I might want some like ginormous chains in here too let's see if I can do that okay so let's take uh a what are they called Taurus isolate this default's good enough and let's just take these kind of pull it out this way uh it's not really like the perfect shape but it's going to be good enough it doesn't need to be amazing let's just take this select all the geometry in edit mode and then press alt s that'll let you scale it like this like thickness wise so I want these like really uh quick thick chain links so I'm just going to put this here out the this over here I guess we're gonna be like arraying this or enjoying it so we can press Shifty it doesn't really matter just line up this section rotate 90 in edit mode I'll just kind of do this really quick boom done and now my plan is just take this make it follow a curve and then put a texture on and make it huge so let's just quickly do that bezier curve scale it up Sy zero so it's flat rotate 90 degrees and we'll just kind of um take this and like flip it this way so let's just kind of this one will be like this and then this one will be like this and then this will be like a raid here like this so one on the Y 0 on the X and then I don't want this happening because it's like disconnected I want this to be like in side like this as best I can so just point nine like three five that's good enough maybe like one more and then to get this to follow the curve you just add a curve modifier so modifier curve pick the curve and then just kind of put on here sometimes you'll have to change the deform access if it's like rotated weird and like not lining up but this is fine so you got to be careful with like oversized objects like this sometimes you just make it huge and it it looks huge and sometimes you make it huge and it just looks like you took a random model and just hit s and like scaled it way up and it just looks really dumb so try not to get that look I don't really know what causes that but um I think just the main thing here is going to be the positioning where I choose to actually place this okay so added a few more change I made them I made them a bit smaller and uh let's just shade these smooth so that's what that looks like I just duplicated the same thing a few times to positions that seemed like the right place I'm I might want to try the panoramic lens now let me just try it and just see if this actually looks good or not maybe let's switch it to instead of fisheye Aqua solid fisheye lens polynomial and then K1 is the focal length now and then K2 is the amount of distortion around the edge so I could just like not go crazy but have just a little bit of that that's pretty nice and I'm probably ready to render this but I I do just want to try out some other camera angles because I feel like it's just not quite there okay so I'm just going with another camera angle here all I did was just duplicate the camera I still have the old one so I haven't like lost that angle but I'm just going to do two separate renders and have them kind of post them side by side um so anyways I'm just taking some extra pieces layering them on top and like kind of creating a foreground for this section right here let me show you what this is before I drop this thing in here I just took the camera ignore these platforms here but this is just floating in space here it's at 87 millimeters but just happened to look good and it's pointing down at this thing instead of like over here where this one is so it's just a different angle that kind of looks like we're up on some ledge looking at this thing down here and then I just turn on I turned on depth of field F 6.6 looking at the focusing on the bell and then that's just blurring out these like tiles here and then I'm just chucking in one more piece from the pack just to throw on like some nice railing or some type of thing here so I'll just see if I can kind of layer this in here a little bit like that and then maybe just put the same material on so it's snowy and there we go and I might just kind of move this along and I like having this like Blurry foreground here okay and let me just go back to my original camera angle and make sure I didn't like mess that up just make sure to check on the original just make sure it's still fine and it is looks like cool I might just want to add like one of these in the middle because the middle of this is like very empty seeming I think it just needs like yeah something right there you know what that's pretty cool I think I'm just gonna call it there and just render this and get it done so let's just turn on depth of the field on this one Focus decently far away render settings 3000 by 3750 100 percent let's do 512 samples we've got a little bit of time here to take a break so I'm just gonna Crank It Up decently High okay so after a bit of Photoshop here are the two renders that I got from this one so I just set up two separate camera angles rendered them both and then just process them both separately in Photoshop yeah so like I mentioned if you want to check out that course plus a bunch of assets link below and hopefully this video was useful I'll see you around bye

Channel: Max Hay

Views: 41,032

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Id: ERoqpbJ535U

Length: 32min 44sec (1964 seconds)

Published: Wed May 17 2023