Making an Apocalyptic Environment in Blender

foreign in the next few minutes you're going to know exactly how I created all of this in blender let's go first I needed an idea I just spotted this abandoned gas station on the border of Texas and I'm just like instantly this has to be a project then I found a ton of other images of this exact place on Google Images loaded up a puref full of my references and I'm ready to work this whole thing is overwhelming like where do I even start well this is just a cube and this is just a cube and this is just a plane so let's get those shapes in there adjusting them to fit our composition and of course comparing it all to the human to match a realistic scale I'll add a little bit more detail like the canopy poles and the gas station's roof also using a background image of the real place to confirm that our block out is lined up alright let's start modeling I'll cut out a reference image and stick it behind the gas station Cube this will show us what areas to separate into different pieces like the walls in the roof and also where we should add Loop cuts to Define windows and doors just adding edges to all these trims now I'll just delete the faces where the glass will be and then to create these extra borders I'll just select around the frames and bring them out okay now the windows are mostly done really all we need to do now is give the walls Dimension just extruding these planes out and then finishing everything up by adding a solidify modifier to our window frame so they're not just flat and then adding a bevel modifier to smooth out the edges I also want shattered glass on all the window frames like in this reference this is super easy just adding a plane into each window hole and then using the knife tool to cut out spiky bits of glass okay this looks amazing once we get all the materials on it like the rust and the dirt and the graffiti and all the other crap it's going to look pretty awesome but before we can start texturing we need to analyze our reference and develop a list of textures that we'll need for example here we have a simple white brick a damaged blue wall a rusty metal for the roof basic wood for the boards and also certain kinds of damage like chipped paint and worn edges of course graffiti is also a huge part of this model and one of my best friends actually had a bunch of cool pictures of it for me and also some various ones I found online we're ready the texture first I'll just UV Cube project our wall and stick this brick material on it let's rotate the tops of the bricks like this to match our reference adjusting the roughness getting a nice shine to it and now we'll fake a height map by connecting the base color of the bricks to the normal using a bump node we'll also add in some color variation just a darker brick mixing into the lighter brick using a noise texture now for the fun part let's paint in some decals to really push the realism the material for this is really simple just create a 4K image with a secondary color having full Alpha connect it to the principled bsdf and mix it with your base material using a mix Shader making sure that its Alpha channel is connected to the factor now in the texture painting mode we can plug in any decal we want into the texture Tab and start slapping down details here I'm adding in a nice scratchy dark texture a really dirty moldy looking guy on low transparency or on the bottoms kind of a splotchy light plaster around the general area and then this dark dripping nastiness from the tops of the walls all of this together really helped break up the repeating brickness of the material okay now for the graffiti it's just the same process as the other decals scribbles off here some stuff over here throwing some tags up and of course big scary monster looking things yeah we can also add a noise texture to the graffitis Alpha to break it up and make it look weathered this looks fantastic now let's texture the windows just box projecting this too and adding in a base white paint with some roughness color variations and height we'll add decals to this just like in the last mesh some Rust dripping from the tops of the frames dark scratches and dirty splotches here and there and to show some chipping paint I'll set up a dark metal material and mix it into our paint using a peeling paint mask awesome now for the roof this is fairly straightforward just a dark metal with this red strip running through it like in our reference now I'll paint in the rust decals and dripping grunge to finish it all up interior walls are very very easy too just adding an old plaster texture adjusting it until it looks right and painting graffiti all over it all right our model is pretty much fully textured and it looks sick okay also we need this thingy which apparently is called a canopy I never I never knew what that was called starting with the canopy's roof really all we are doing here is pushing around cubes with mirror modifiers and then just well adding in more cubes like for where our Chevron logo is going to be placed I'm also adding Edge loops and beveling them then extruding out these bits of detail now I'll just stick on some planes to make these weird sideboards and a chamfered box to make whatever this is lastly a beam with this Frame attached to it which I think held a sign for the gas prices back in the day so the texturing process for this guy is a little bit different from the gas station building because I'll be slapping some rough textures on and then actually modeling from the textures like here I found a really nice metal industrial texture and then I'll just push UVS around till I line up parts with interesting bits of the image now we can take parts of the image that look like they should have geometry and pop them out for the Chevron logo and other text I quickly made a mask for it in and then I used it to paint in my material now I'll just do other various texturing tasks like making these parts red and Rusty the cube thing all medley and grungy and the support posts with a bluish metal that's kind of reflective all right now we have this model finished really fast and it looks great now this grungy cool ground was one of the main reasons I wanted to start this project in the first place and I think I pulled it off pretty well so here's how I did it first I set up three main materials I have a basic asphalt here a cracked asphalt here and some gravel I'll blend all three of these guys into each other using noise textures here is the base asphalt and the cracked asphalt blending and then I'll add in the gravel too with the gravel I'm making sure to turn its displacement mid-level up to make it look sunken in alright cool we've developed a nice material and it's time to bring it on to our main terrain and then create this line between the asphalt and the gravel like in our reference this honestly took me forever and I went through like four entirely different methods to approach it until I finally just decided I'll paint it all in by hand so I started by drawing in all the little weird squiggly lines that Define the asphalt's profile and then using stencils I added little bits of rocks everywhere and then wore down the sides of the asphalt line finally I had something I was super proud of and I think I captured the edge pretty well all of this looks great so far but how do we fix things just kind of looking flat we need way better terrain and grass first I'll add a big fat plane behind the gas station giving it a good amount of subdivisions and then using proportional editing to form some nice Hills I'll also mix together some dirty Sandy textures from quixel and create this desert material now I'll do something similar using proportional editing here in the foreground creating subtle Hills and divots and then finally let's paint in the desert terrain material we made for the background into the foreground to tie everything together okay now for the plants quixel Mega scans has an amazing library of foliage assets like all of these will work super well for our desert I exported the best in the blender organized them and use them to set up a very simple geometry node-based scattering system feel free to pause and copy this setup over now I can just experiment with different kinds of plants combinations of colors sizes and densities I really wanted to mimic the way plants in the desert kind of group together and form these little dense clumps and a noise texture helps us achieve that pretty well here is the result of my final test looking pretty sick so I brought it all over onto the giant main Terrain in our scene and right off the bat it looks like way better than I thought actually it's kind of done immediately we also of course want foliage on our foreground terrain just copying the geometry notes over painting in only where I want it to appear using weight paints and making slight adjustments to densities and scales all of this does make a huge difference and I can really start tasting this world except I lost my mind and I deleted everything I wasn't happy with the progress and I started to become overly critical and I kind of just lost patience with the project I ended up sticking these like giant sand dunes all over the place which I mean they were kind of cool but they were also bad and yeah I got more discouraged to continue working every time I work on a big 3D scene I'm reminded at how important patience is and you just got to keep pushing through the annoyingness of it not looking good right this instant and keeping your eye on like that final goal after like a couple Day Break um I came back to the project reverted back to where I was and um I just added in like some very simple mountains to the scene as kind of a last resort but it looked so great that I started getting that excitement back I could all of a sudden kind of imagine the future of this environment again at first this project was set in just like a regular desert and present day but now I was like kind of all of a sudden inspired to make this post-apocalyptic like kind of like a Fallout blended with rust blended with Far Cry type of deal so I had this idea of adding in some graffitied uphold cars to the scene I found these really great car scans on sketchfab thanks to Rana Fox and then in blender I use the same decal painting technique with the graffiti to really start adding in some character honestly I absolutely love the way these came out and they look even cooler placed around the environment I'll start to add other various junk stuff around the scene too here are some tires I modeled and textured which will just get hand placed around just like in our reference and then a whole bunch of other trash like cups and bags and cardboard that will just scatter around using geometry nodes these small additions definitely add more realism to it all I also wanted a little bit of a story slash Easter egg thing happening so I added in these shotgun shells which lead to a blood trail which leads to a very subtle dead body everything I make has a blood trail in it now here's the shotgun shell that I made very simple just a cylinder with a little cap and then I textured it fully procedurally using blender here is the blood trail decal I made in just assembling blood splatters from qixel and here is the dead body I got the model from sketchfab thanks to reillusion and then edited edited him heavily by painting in dirt and a big bullet hole in his head once I added in some camera movement and rendered out a 10 second animation we have this but currently the colors are super duper boring there's no sun rays or contrast or glow or anything like that so let's throw it into DaVinci Resolve and make a few adjustments adding in blurs glows vignettes levels color and lens flares Etc gives us this final animation foreign I really hope you guys enjoyed this breakdown this was a really fun but pretty super difficult project yeah it's just so exciting to pack the whole process into like a short video for someone to hopefully learn from you guys can expect another big video just like this on YouTube in the next couple months and also I'm releasing weekly blender tutorials on my patreon all the knowledge I have about 3D and creating my projects is going to be there every single week so I will see you guys in the next video thank you so much for watching

Channel: Covingsworth

Views: 59,052

Keywords: tutorial, 3d, modeling, environment, animation, realistic

Id: t02Eo_j24sw

Length: 12min 38sec (758 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 13 2023