Making Assets For BIG Environments In Blender!

over the last couple of weeks i've been making a load of assets for an upcoming project and i recorded the whole thing and i thought i would share that process if you're interested all of the assets that i've made as well as this scene with the animation is going to be available in the one dollar tier on my patreon this is a really quick test scene that i just set up this morning to put everything into one place and give a good demo of it i used pretty much every technique under the sun to make all of this stuff and my main goal was just to work as efficiently as i could to make an environment from scratch is a huge amount of work and to do it traditionally by the book will take a really long time so i tried to work as efficiently as i could and as you'll see in this video i put lots more effort into the things in the foreground and as it gets more into the mid crown and the background they have less and less detail for the objects that needed more detail and would be closer to the camera i decided to model them the traditional way and then once the models were finished i projected some photo textures onto them to add some of the micro detail that you don't get in the model at this point there's loads of blender tutorials floating around on youtube about using photo textures people like ian hubert have made it really really popular and there's a good reason for that it worked really well for a lot of it i just modelled the basic shapes and then the materials add lots of detail i found a really good way to make fences really quickly you can go into edit mode select all of the vertices around the edge that you want to turn into a fence then i extruded it upwards to make the actual faces for the fence and then you can use a load of loop cuts to make all of the different sections of the fence once that's done you can add a wireframe modifier and turn down the thickness of it until you get the size you're looking for i was also using decimate and set it to planar just to get rid of all the extra geometry so that the fences were as low poly as possible some of these photo textures i found were really awesome but they had some things in the textures that i didn't want for example the red tape in this so instead of just not using the texture i decided to take some of them into nuke and do some clone painting just to remove the stuff i didn't want from the texture so that i could use the whole thing how i was originally intending it's really simple takes like two or three minutes and then you can use the whole texture instead of trying to avoid a certain area i made this really cool metal structure i don't even really know what it is or what it's meant to be i find it quite challenging to come up with cool designs for things off the top of my head just from scratch so i often use a lot of reference images and just base things on that instead then at the very least even if it's not exactly the same i'm still pulling from some real world references which usually turns out much better and looks more natural i based this off of a photo texture that i found on textures.com that i'll show here for the chimneys and tubes and stuff right in the background i found a few things on textures.com that were really perfect for this these are just 2d photos and then what i did is i took them into nuke and keyed the sky with a luma key so i could cut them out i had to do a little bit of roto as well just to draw some masks for where the key wasn't quite working and then i exported these as png so i can put them on planes in blender in the background with the transparency this is a really cheaty technique but it works really well because it's so far away that you don't really notice any difference in parallax and so instead of having to go in and model all of this interesting detail i can just use a photo texture so saves loads of time [Music] i made some really generic piles of trash just by projecting some rubbish textures onto a plane i made it a bit bumpy with a displacement modifier then i modelled a few bits of geometry like some rebar and some concrete just to stick out to make the chunks of concrete i used a cell fracture modifier on a cube and then just selected some bits that looked cool and then i did a cube projection unwrap and just put some concrete textures on them once all the assets were finished i threw them into a scene this morning as you see here and i just made a little test just to see how they would all work with an hdri and with some animation i used a seamless sand texture on the floor and then made some really ropey looking cliffs and again projected some photo textures and some cliffs onto them i know in my head that all their stuff is going to be in the background and slightly out of focus and very motion blurred so it doesn't really need loads of effort and then i start dragging in all of the assets and placing them in places that i think look good this part's really fun it's like a puzzle and you can start combining loads of different assets you've made to make loads of combinations of different things so for example i use the same building a few times but i put things like tanks and air conditioners and cables and stuff on top to make it look a bit different you can rotate it in the scene so you see it from a different angle all these things are really good because it means you don't have to model loads and loads of different things you can just be smart about the ones you use i really like the cables in this i don't know why but it just makes it feel a bit more dynamic a lot of the assets felt a bit separate and isolated before but linking a load of the stuff with cables really made it come together and felt a bit more cohesive when i do this for real for the final video i'm going to do a few things like sculpting the floor a bit better around the edges of the building so there's some build up of sand stuff like that there's lots of little details in the gaps in between all of the big assets that will really help to tie it all together and then once the environment was set up i bought in the rig of the solar surfer and the photo scanner of me that i've made in the last few videos on my channel i made the hands and feet into ik system so they would move with the solar surfer once they were parented to it and then on the root bone of me i added one key frame for location and then added a noise modifier so that my core would move around procedurally and i also put a noise modifier on the rotation of the sail on the solar surfer so that way the sail and my core are procedurally moving on their own without me having to do any animation but the hands and feet are sticking to the sail and the board so basically from a wide shot it looks like my body is reacting to the way that the wind is moving and everything and actually i don't have to do any animation and it's all being driven by the noise modifiers which looks really cool i dropped in an hdri found a lighting angle i liked and then hit render and this is the final result i'm really happy with how these tests turned out and i'm super excited to get on with the final video and i'm hoping to be able to crack on with it and get it out fairly soon thanks very much for watching consider liking and subscribing if you enjoyed the video and i'll see you [Music] know how it soon to be someone you love and it gets me down

Channel: Alfie Vaughan

Views: 5,500

Keywords: blender, environment, 3d, modelling, texturing, material, shading, animation, projection, photo, tutorial, design, timelapse, lighting, art, creation, how to, concept, desert, apocalypse, sand, treasure, planet

Id: N8YZrP2A7Kg

Length: 5min 21sec (321 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 21 2021