Mountains and Canyons in Blender: Displacement Maps and Texture Painting

foreign what's up guys it's Brad from light architect in this video I'm going to be showing how you can use displacement or height maps in order to create mountain ranges or terrain Landscapes fairly quickly in setup blender in addition to showing how you can use these displacement map textures to create these Landscapes I also want to show how you can mix in some texture painting of your own in order to create a more unique or customizable result in the Shader editor for those of you who don't know a displacement or height map is simply a grayscale texture that stores the hide data for different positions or vertices on a 3D object the lighter values correspond to higher elevation and the darker values correspond to a lower position in relative Z space creating those Peaks and valleys now you can use pretty much any grayscale texture to create these displacement Maps sometimes you can even use cloud textures or different types of noise patterns however for this specific example I'm going to be using these free displacement maps that I've downloaded from this website there are a variety of free displacement Maps here for you guys and I'll put a link to this in the description below but we'll will just be using this first Mountain displacement map pack here the diffuse materials don't come with this specific pack this is just the displacement however if you want one with the diffused material for the mountain range or terrain as well you can use this 15 free 8K height Maps one right here and you'll have the corresponding textures if you want to link those as well I just want to use this one because we're also going to be using that texture painting process in order to add some of our own customization so anyways guys let's get started here we are inside of blender the first thing we're going to do is of course just delete everything in our scene here and now we're going to do is I'll press shift a I'll add a new plane to our scene this is going to be the base of our landscape I'll scale it up a little bit just so I can see it a bit better here and now let's go into our shading tab I'll go out of solid mode here and click on new material and we're just going to be adding our displacement texture to this displacement input for our material output so I'll go ahead and press shift a I'll add texture image texture and then I'll click on open and I'll navigate to where I save those displacement Maps so I'm going to just use this one right here but again you can just load in whatever displacement map you'd like to use go ahead and open this and after we open this I want to press shift a and add a displacement node and we'll connect the color to our height input of the displacement node and then our displacement output to our displacement input in our material output and right off the bat you'll notice that nothing has happened so far in rendered View and there are a variety of reasons for that if you look closely you can see that there is a little texture here but it's not actually displacing our material so there are a few things we need to adjust before we get the effects of this displacement the first thing we need to do is actually add some subdivisions to this plane here so there are more vertices to displace we could do this either through a subdivision surface modifier or we can just go into edit mode like I'll do here and then I'll go to Edge subdivide and I'll subdivide it 10x times and then I'll subdivide it a little bit more here maybe maybe four more times and then I'll go back into object mode and now blender will be able to displace this mesh a little bit better however we do need to adjust a few more settings here before we can actually see the result of this displacement the first thing I'm going to do is go to the render properties Tab and I'm going to switch our render engine to cycles and then now I'm going to go to our material properties Tab and I'm going to scroll down here to settings and then I'm going to change the displacement setting here to displacement and bump and before we go back into rendered view I just want to go into our World Properties Tab and I just want to add a sky texture really quick and then I also want to go to our render properties and then just turn on transparent film so we don't have to deal with seeing that background and now if we go into rendered view we'll have something like this in this specific example we're not actually seeing much displacement but the reason for this is because we just need to increase the scale of our displacement node here so let's go ahead and increase the scale here to maybe five you can see we're getting some more displacement in here I'll bring our mid level down to zero you can adjust these settings so that some areas are craters and some are Peaks but mid level at zero is pretty much what we want for this example and I'll go ahead and also bring down the base color of our mesh so it's not quite so hard to look out here and so bright but now as you can see here we're getting this nice terrain just from this one displacement map and we can actually just adjust it with the scale setting here maybe increase this to 10 and now we have a pretty nice looking mountain range here now if we weren't getting enough detail in this mesh we could increase the subdivisions a little bit more but actually pretty happy with this result right now now what I want to do is actually mix in some texture painting to sort of create like a crater going through the center of our mountain range here so in order to do that what we can do is right before our displacement node we can mix in another texture that we're actually going to paint in on top of our plane here so as I mentioned before displacement and height maps are just black and white images so really we just need to paint right here in the middle of our mountain and then we can mix that data in with the mountain range that we already have so I'll go ahead and press shift a here I'll add a color mix RGB add this right here I'll get out of rendered view here for a second press shift a again I'll add a new image texture and connect this to our second input for our new mix node and then for our image texture we'll just create our own New Image texture I'll make this one maybe 3000 by 3000 and we'll call it painted Canyon click okay and now what I want to do is Select our plane here I'll go into texture paint mode and we'll go to our active tool and workspace settings here and make sure that we're adjusting the proper texture here that we've added so painted Canyon matches up with the name of our texture and we can adjust a few of our brush settings here but for the sake of this tutorial I'm just going to draw a little canyon right through the middle of our mountain range here now obviously we could be more precise with this and we could draw more Peaks and values this will technically be a peak because it's a white value but what we can do is we can actually add an invert node here so that this becomes a valley so I think this will be pretty good I might I might kind of just feather off the edges here a little bit with a lighter brush stroke here something like this and we'll go with this for the sake of our tutorial for our second displacement map that we're going to mix in and I'll go back into object mode here and now as you can see if I go to rendered view you'll notice that while we have a very large Peak here from our white values now this is obviously not what we want however what we can do is we can dial this way back so it's you know a lot less noticeable obviously those white values are very extreme we did a very heavy paint there so we can dial this back to you know way less .001 something like this perhaps and we could of course go back into texture painting mode and dial back the intensity of that brush stroke but I think for the sake of this tutorial this is the general idea now what I want to do is make this a crater instead of this kind of plateau that's occurring right now so what we can do is again like I mentioned press shift a go to color invert add this right here and now as you can see here we've added a crater to our displacement map and this is a nice way you can add some nice custom details to your mountain range now obviously it doesn't have to be this extreme we could start playing with some of these values to make it less so but you can see the general idea here perhaps a cool thing you could do with this technique is import a mountain displacement map and then maybe you want to make one of the Peaks here kind of a volcanic crater so you could just paint a little bit more displacement on the peak here and with a little bit of tweaking you could create kind of a volcano render but anyways guys there's a lot more you can do with this there's a lot more you can play around with with these nodes but this is the general concept here that is how you can use some Mountain displacement maps in addition to your own texture painting process inside a blender to create a little bit more customizable result let us know in the comment section below what you'd like to see next subscribe if you're interested in more visual effects content and I'll see you next time [Music] [Music]

Channel: LightArchitect

Views: 88,740

Keywords: blender 3d displacement map tutorial, create mountains in blender 3d, height maps in blender, how to learn visual effects, best vfx youtube channels, corridor, create procedural terrains in blender, ian hubert, lazy tutorials, landscape tutorial for blender 3.22, blender 3d tutorials 2022, lightarchitect, filmmaking, how to learn vfx, visual effects tutorials, environment modeling in blender

Id: 4WyPq6YO9U8

Length: 8min 38sec (518 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 06 2022