Part 1: Stylized Animated Forest Meadow 🏞️ (Blender Tutorial Series)

welcome to part one of this blender tutorial Series where we'll be creating this animated stylized Forest [Music] Meadow [Music] so in this six part tutorial series we'll be creating this animated stylized Forest Meadow scene and we'll be rendering this with blender Eevee and this entire tutorial series will be completely free on my YouTube channel so in this part in part one we're going to be modeling the stylized low poly trees and then we'll be adding a wind animation to the trees then in part two we're going to be modeling the grass and the plantss and the flowers and we'll also be adding the same wind animation to those objects then in part three we're going to be doing the scene setup so we'll be adding the lighting we'll also be adding the sky background and we'll be modeling the plane and the ground then in part four we're going to be using geometry nodes to place all of the nature Assets in the scene and we'll also be using weight painting to weight paint where we want the nature to be on the ground then in part five we're going to be modeling the butterfly and we'll be animating the butterfly's Wings flapping and I'll show you how to animate the butterfly moving throughout the scene and then in the final part in part six we'll be animating the camera and then we'll render all the frames to images and then we'll be using blender's Video Editor to compile the frames together we'll add some sound effects and music to get the finished animated video so as I mentioned the entire tutorial series will be completely free here on my YouTube channel and these free videos wouldn't be possible if it wasn't for my supporters so if you'd like to join my supporters and helping out this channel then a great way to do that is by checking out my gumroad store and my patreon page and on my G store and patreon page you can get access to lots of blender content like 3D models and assets tutorial files artwork project files procedural materials geometry node modifier setups and so much more blender content so if you'd like to make a onetime purchase of one of my products then my gumroad store is a great place to do that or if you'd like to help support the channel monthly then joining one of my patreon memberships is a great way to do that and if you're interested you can also purchase the finished project files of this tutori tutal and in the project files you'll get the finished blender file and all the 3D assets and the resources used to create this tutorial so if you're interested in purchasing the tutorial files the links to that will be in the description now I will be using a few different free resources online in the tutorial and I'll have all the links in the description to the free resources if you'd like to download them and use the same ones that I'm using so here on pixabay I'll be downloading this free butterfly texture and we'll be adding this onto the butterfly model so you can just make a free account with pixabay and then just just download the image and I downloaded the highest resolution now at the end of the tutorial series when we do the video editing I'm going to be adding in some nature sound effects so I'm going to be downloading this horse walks in mud on the farm Ambience and this is from freesound.org now I'm actually using the sound effect because this sound effect has a really great Cricut sound which is right about here in the audio and on frees sound.org I'll also be downloading this morning bird sound effect and again we'll be putting this in the background to get some nice ambient and if you want to use the same music that I'll be using in my finished animation then here on filmmusic doio I'll be downloading this childhood music and this is just a really nice relaxing calming music which is great for adding to the 3D scene all right so here we are in a new scen in blender and currently as I record this the latest stable version of blender is blender 4.1 so that's what I'll be using in this tutorial and I'll also have my screencast keys right down here in the corner so you can see what buttons I'm pressing so the first thing that I'm going to do is just change this over to blender Eevee so here on the render engine I'll be using Eevee and then when you change this over to blender Eevee there's a few settings we can change so to make the viewport faster I can just turn this way down to maybe just like a five and the render here I could just turn that to like a 30 and then also to make Eevee look a bit nicer I'll be turning on the ambient occlusion and the screen space Reflections and then also the motion blur so we're going to start by modeling the tree so we'll be modeling the tree trunk so let's check just select everything everything in the scene and I'll hit X and we'll just delete everything so I'll now go to the ad menu and I'll go here to mesh and I'm going to add a cylinder and I want to model these objects closer to the real life scale and blender and these default objects are quite large they're a bit larger than an average human so I will scale this tree trunk down I'll type in 0 2 and then enter and then I will press contrl a and apply the scale so that's the object's new default size let's save this blender file so let's just click on file and we can click on save as and just save your project file somewhere on your computer I'll just call it forest and I'll just click on save as and then as you're working on the project you can press contrl s to save it so let's now go into edit mode and we're going to model the tree trunk so I'll click here to go to the face select let's just select the top face and I'll bring it up on the z-axis like that and then also let's select the bottom one here and we'll scale it out just a little bit and then I want to extrude this down and create the roots so I'll extrude this with e key and I can scale the entire thing up a bit maybe make it a bit bigger and then extrude the whole thing down and then this bottom face here I don't need it so I'll hit X to delete and we'll just delete the faces and then let's select some of these faces here and I want to turn on the proportional editing so I will click on this button right here to turn on proportional editing so now if I hit G to grab you can see that the other faces nearby are going to pull around with it and you can use your scroll wheel to make the proportional editing bigger or smaller and I'm going to have some Roots which are kind of just just coming out of the tree so something like that maybe go here to the edge select and select some of these bottom edges and kind of pull these out as well and then select some other edges and bring them in maybe bring this Edge in here and then another one here kind of pull that out just to make some Roots which are kind of coming out of the tree this one here maybe bring this one out a bit maybe select these two here and pull them out a little bit and I'll go back to the face select maybe bring this in here and then bring this one out and if this bottom Loop of vertices isn't quite flat you can go here to the vertex select you can hold down the ALT key and select that Loop of vertices and we're going to scale it we're going to scale it on the z-axis and I can type zero and enter just to flatten it let's also hold down the ALT key select that Loop of vertices there and'll bring it up a little bit on the z-axis and then I can press contrl B to add a bevel just so it's a bit of a smoother transition let's go back to object mode and we'll use the object context menu to shade it smooth so now you can see we have the base of the tree with the tree trunk let's also go back into edit mode and I'm going to scale everything down on the z-axis so it's a bit more flat and then I can bring everything up on the z-axis and I want the origin point to be roughly about here maybe just bring it down a little bit so I want the origin point to be kind of here because wherever the origin point is that is where it's going to be distributed on the ground all right so something like that is pretty good let's go back into edit mode and I can go to the face select we'll select this face here and we'll hit X and we'll just delete the faces because we don't need that and then let's go back here to the vertex select I'll hold down the ALT key and just select that Loop of vertices there and I'll press one on the numpad to go to front view we can scale it and kind of move it up and then I can extrude it up and scale it down and extrude it up again make it much longer and scale it down all right something like that maybe alt select that Loop there and scale that Loop down a bit so it gets thinner as it goes up so let's go back to object mode I'll save this again and that is going to be it for the tree trunk so I now want to make the tree leaves so I'll press shift C to make sure the 3D cursor is in the very center of the scene and I'll go to the ad menu and let's go to mesh and we're going to add an icosphere and right behind me if you click on the add icosphere settings and open this up I'm going to turn these subdivisions up to four and then I can close the ad icosphere settings now what I want to do is press control1 and control one is going to add the subdivision surface and we want the level's viewport to be at one but then I actually want to apply this so that it is actual geometry because I just want a little bit more detail so I'll click on the drop down and click on apply so you can go into edit mode and you can see it's actual geometry let's go back to object mode and I'll use the object context menu and shade it smooth and then I can bring it up on the Z axis and I'll bring it up here to the top of the tree so now go to edit mode and I want to make sure that the proportional editing is turned on and I'm just going to select some of the vertices and I'll hit G to grab and I can just move some of the shapes around and I just want to make it kind of look Blobby and kind of look like the shape of the top of the tree and I actually need to select everything and I'll scale everything up quite a bit bigger and maybe bring it down a little bit all right something like that is pretty good and then just kind of make it Blobby and make it the shape of kind of a stylized tree just make it kind of random and maybe the top here bring the top up a little bit and this bottom part here maybe bring the bottom up a little bit so it's a little bit more flat all right so something like that is pretty good so I'll go back to object mode and then now want to make it a bit more lumpy by adding a modifier so let's click on ADD modifier and I'm going to search for the displace modifier and then let's click on new here to add a new texture and this texture here I'm just going to call it tree leaves and then to actually choose a texture we're going to click on this button right here and this is going to take us to the texturing panel here and instead of image or movie I'm going to choose clouds which is basically blender's procedural noise texture and then I can change the scale that texture so I might make it a little bit bigger and then if I click back here to go back to the modifiers I can turn this strength way down cuz I don't want it to be that strong and I think maybe a 0.25 is a little bit better cuz I don't want it to be too bumpy so then let's click on the drop down and we're going to click on apply just to apply that so if I go into edit mode you can see the displacement is actual geometry now I actually want the trees and the trunk to be one object so I'll select the leaves and then shift select the trunk and I can press contrl J to join it together into one object so so now let's create the materials for the tree so I'm going to click right over here to go to the shading workspace and let's click on new to add a new material and I'm going to call this trunk and then we'll be making the other material after so just for now I'm going to hold down the Z button and move my mouse into the material preview so I can see what the material is looking like cuz we haven't done the lighting yet of the scene so let's create a simple stylized trunk material so I'll go to the ad menu and I'm going to search for the noise texture let's drop the noise texture down here and then I will be using the node Wrangler add-on to preview the different nodes throughout the tutorial Series so if you don't have the node Wrangler enabled you can click on edit and you can go to the preferences and then if you go over here to the add-ons tab you can go to the search and you can search for node Wrangler and just enable the node Wrangler add-on and then you can save the preferences so that the node Wrangler add-on is always enabled and then let's close the user preferences so if you hold down the control and shift key and then select different nodes that is going to preview the node on the object that is the feature of the node Wrangler addon we can also select the noise texture and I'm going to press contrl T to add the texture coordinate and mapping node that is another feature of the node Wrangler and then I want to use the object coordinates because the object coordinates will place the texture on the object more evenly so I'll put the object into the mapping now to make this look more like tree bark I want to stretch the noise texture so here on this Z value I'll turn this to a .15 just just a .15 so you can see the Z value is kind of stretching it up and down and then there's also the Y and the X but we're going to leave those how they are I'm just going to stretch the Z value so you can see now it's going up and then here on this noise texture let's change some of the settings so I'm going to turn the scale to like a 20 and I'll also turn the detail to the max of 15 and this roughness here I'll turn it up to like a 0.55 so it's a little bit more rough so now you can see that's starting to look a bit like tree bark now I want to create some colors and then we'll add that into the base color so I'll go to the add menu and I'm going to search for the color ramp we'll put the color ramp here after the factor and let's also drag these nodes back a bit and this color here can go into the base color of the principal Shader and then let's change a few of the settings of the color ramp so I first want to make the black Parts A Little Bit Stronger so I'm going to drag this black value over here so it's a bit darker and then this black color if I click on the color I'm going to make this a nice dark brown and then also here for the white color this is going to be a nice light brown and if you want to use the exact same colors that I'm using then this dark brown is going to be a hex value of 2f 1D 09 so you can punch that into the color if you want to use the exact color that I'm using and then this light color here this is going to be a hex value of 623 c0e and let's control shift and select the principal Shader to preview it and I want to make the bark look a bit more rough so this roughness value I'll turn up to like a. 65 so it's it's a bit more rough and then you can see it's very smooth right now and I want to add some bump so let's put the factor value into the normal to give it some bump but then we need to convert the noise texture data into normal data so I'll go to the ad menu and I'm going to search for the bump and we'll put the bump here after the noise texture stick it there and then we actually want the factor to be going into the height value of the bump and that'll convert it to bump data so you can see now the bark looks nice and bumpy but it is a bit too strong so I'll turn this strength value to just like A1 five so it's a bit less bumpy so there we go we now have a nice basic stylized bark material so let's now create the leaf material so I'm going to open up the side panel here and let's click here to go to the material properties and I'm going to click on the plus here to add a new material in the slot let's click on new and I can double click on this to rename it and I'll just rename it to leaves and then I'll go into edit mode I'll D select everything and just press the L key with my mouse hovered over the top of the tree and then click on the lead and you can click on assign and I'll go back to object mode so now let's create the procedural material for the leaves so I'll go to the ad menu and I'm going to search for a noise texture and let's contrl shift and select the noise texture to preview it and also with the noise texture selected I'll press contrl and that was going to add the texture coordinate and mapping nodes now later in this tutorial series we are going to be using the displace modifier to animate the leaves looking like they're being blown in the wind and so I don't actually want to use the object coordinates because if I use the object coordinates then the noise texture isn't actually going to stay on the part of the mesh it's going to look like it's kind of moving through the mesh so I'm going to use the generated coordinates instead so that whatever part of the texture is on the object that'll stay with the object when the modifier moves it around so we'll use the generated coordinates and then we can also change some of the noise texture settings so I'll turn the scale to a 20 also turn the detail to the max of 15 and then I want to make the colors to look like the green leaves so I'll go to the ad menu and we're going to search for the color ramp we'll put the color ramp here after the noise texture and let's drag these nodes back and the color ramp color this can go into the base color and I can control shift and select the principal Shader to preview it and then let's change some of the colors here so for this black color here this is going to be a lighter green color so we'll make it kind of like a light green maybe a little bit darker and then this one here this is going to be a similar green color but it will be a bit darker and if you want to use the exact same colors that I'm using then the lighter green is going to be a hex value of 68 951 C and then this darker green this is going to be a hex value of 3D 62 0d now when I duplicate each tree I want each tree to have a slightly different variation of color to make it look a bit more random and natural so what I'm going to do is go to the ad menu and I'm going to search for the mix color we'll put the mix color after the color ramp and then I'm going to take this same color here and I'm going to put that up to color B so now I can change the colors so I'll go to the add menu and to change the colors I can just add the Hue saturation value and I'll stick this here in between the color ramp and color B and then I'll press Shifty to duplicate it and I'll drop another one here between the color and color a so now if I control shift and select this Hue saturation value you can see I can turn the value down and I'm going to turn it down to like a point4 so you can see the tree is darker and then also if I control shift and select this Hue sat ation value this one I can turn up to a 1.1 so if I control shift and select between them you can see we have two different shades of green now if I control shift and select the mix here this mix here is going to blend between using the lighter one or the darker one but I want each tree to be a randomly different color so I'll go to the ad menu and I'm going to search for the object info node and let's stick this here over the Hue saturation values and the random this can go into the factor so now I can control shift and the principal Shader to preview it so you don't have to follow along with this part but I'm just going to show you what it's doing so if I press shift d to duplicate the tree now every time I duplicate the tree you can see that each tree is going to be a randomly different color so some of them are lighter and some of them are darker and it will randomly be generated between this one and this one every time they're duplicated so I'll just delete those extra trees because we don't need them we'll select this tree again and I'll just preview the principal Shader and then I do want to make the leaves a bit more rough so this roughness here I'll turn this to like a09 so it's more rough so I now want to add that displace modifier to animate the leaves and make it look like they're blowing in the wind but before I do that I need to animate another object and that other object is going to control the noise displacement and where the noise is so I'll press shift C to make sure the 3D cursor is in the center of the scene let's actually go back here to the layout and I'll go to the ad menu and I'm just going to add an empty plane axis and I'm adding the empty object because empty objects won't be visible in the render because they don't have any visible faces but you can really use any object but it just shouldn't be visible to the camera so if you want to go here to empty and add other empties you can so I'm going to go to top view and I want to animate this so I'm pressing the7 on the numpad to go to top view so I'm going to hit G to grab and I'm going to bring this back right over here and you can see if I zoom out blender has these grids here and I want to bring it over here by one grid so I now want to insert a key frame here so I'm going to press the K key and the K key is going to bring up the insert key frame menu and that is a new shortcut of blender version 4.1 so if you're using an older version of blender then you'll press the I key instead but I'm going to press the K key cuz that's the new shortcut and I'm just going to insert a location key frame now my animation is going to be 500 frames long you could totally change that depending on how long you want it to be but here on this end frame here on the timeline I'm going to change this to 500 frames so I'm now just going to go to frame 500 by just Dr dragging right here and going to frame 500 or you can go one frame over the end frame if you want to and I now want to move this over by three blender grids so I'll hit G to grab and I'm going to bring it over on the x axis and I'll bring it over by 1 2 three blender grids so stick it there and then I'll hit the K button again and we'll insert location so if I press the space bar to play this you can see there are two key frames at the starting of the ending and the empty is moving now the empty is starting out very slow and then speeding up and then at the end it slows down so to fix this problem you can press the a key in the timeline to select the key frames and I'm going to hit the T key to bring up the set key frame interpolation menu and I'm going to choose linear this way the key frames are linear so this way the empty moves at a consistent speed throughout the entire animation let's press contrl s to save the project again so I now want to add the displace modifier to make the leaves being displaced so I'll click on the tree here let's click on ADD modifier and I can add another displace modifier and then let's click on new here to add a new texture and I'm going to rename this texture and I'm going to rename it to tree wind noise and then we actually need to change the texture so let's click over here to go to the texturing panel and instead of imager movie I'm going to change this to the clouds again and here on the size I find that a size of six looks pretty good so I'll change the size to six so let's go back over here to the modifier properties now you can see that it is displacing it and we can also change the strength but it isn't actually being animated to look like wind so to fix this we want to change the coordinates to object instead and then here on the object coordinates you can click here and choose the empty or you can click on the eye dropper and just click on the empty so I'll just choose the empty so now you can see that because this object here is moving that is going to move along the Cloud's texture and then this strength is a bit too strong so I'll turn the strength down to like a 6 so it's not quite as strong now there is a problem and that is that the trunk is also moving around and I don't want the trunk to be moving so we can actually use this vertex group setting right here to make it so just the tree or the top of the tree is going to be moving by the wind so let's click here to go to the object data properties and then what I want to do is open up the vertex groups and I'll go into edit mode of the object and then just hover your mouse over just the top of the tree and press the L key just to select the leaves I'm now going to click on the plus here to make a new vertex group and we can name the vertex group to leaves on tree or whatever you want to call it and then click on the assign button this way there's just going to be a Vertex group for just the top of the leaves and so now what we can do is go back to object mode and go here to the modifier properties and here on the vertex group you can choose the leaves on tree and now what's happening is the displace modifier is only affecting the vertices which are in the vertex group and so the trunk isn't going to be moving now here on the direction you could leave it set to normal and normal is going to move it out depending on the direction of the phase but here on the direction I'm going to change this to X instead and that way it'll move it along the xais and I think that looks a bit better for wi all right so I'll press the space bar to stop the animation and I'm now just going to create two more variations of the tree so I'll hold down the Z button and go into the material preview just so I can see the materials and I'll press shift data duplicate and bring this one over here and let's just make a bit of a variation so I'll go into edit mode and I'm first going to make a bit of a variation here on the trunk so I can go down here to the trunk and make sure the proportional editing is turned on and I'm just going to move around the ver vertices to kind of change it just to make it look a bit more unique and different so I'll move those vertices around maybe right here I can kind of pull this out and then right here I can push this back in a bit and let's go right over here maybe push this back in a little bit something like that just to make it look a bit different you can also select everything and rotate it around on the z-axis so it has a slightly different rotation all right something like that and then let's go up here to the top and for the top here I'm going to pull this out here now you can see if I pull this out too far the trunk is going to move along with it so let's click right here on the settings of the proportional editing and I'm going to choose connected only this way if I move the proportional editing it's only going to move around the vertices which are connected to the vertex which is selected so you can see now the trunk isn't moving so now let's just make it a little bit different so I might make this tree a little bit more flat maybe bring it out a little bit and just make it a little bit more random and make it look a bit more unique and I think I might make this a bit longer so kind of pull that out there all right that is is pretty good maybe bring this in a little bit and bring this in a bit but then something else that I want to do is add a few branches so what I'm going to do is zoom in here and I'll go to the add menu and I'm going to add a cylinder and if I zoom out here the cylinder has been added over here and right behind me on the add cylinder settings I want to make this lower poly so I'm going to change the vertices to an eight and we can close those settings let's now bring this over here and I can scale it down here and we actually don't need the top and bottom faces here so if we go to the face select I can select this face and we delete the faces and also this face here delete the faces and then press the L key to select that entire piece and I'll scale it down and bring it up here let's bring it here and kind of rotate it we're just going to bring it in here and stick it in the trunk so something like that bring that over there scale it down and then I can go here to the vertex select and I'll hold down the ALT key and select that Loop of vertices and I can extrude it and scale it we'll make it a bit smaller all right like that and then extrude it again and kind of scale it down and extrude it up here into the tree all right just like that and if I go back to object mode I can use the object context menu and we're going to shade that smooth and then I do want to have one more Branch so I'll go back into edit mode first though I'm going to go to wireframe and I'll select that Loop there and kind of scale it up a little bit so it's a little bit thicker and then what I'll do is press the L key to select the linked vertices and I can duplicate this and let's rotate it around on the z-axis and we'll make another branch and this Branch could be maybe a bit smaller and I'll kind of bring it up here maybe rotate it a little bit like that I can also press crlr to add a loop cut and I can left click and then left click again and maybe move that over just so that it's a little bit more smooth all right so something like that maybe also select this entire thing here and scale it down a little bit more and I might want to bring all the branches down just a little bit more on the z-axis all right let's press contrl s to save that is it for the next one and then I want to create one more so I'll select this one here again I'll press Shifty to duplicate it and bring it right over here and then let's actually select this one here and I'll go into edit mode and I'll deselect everything just press the L key to select that one branch and I'll press Shifty to duplicate it and we're going to bring it over here on the x axis and then to separate this into its own object I'll press the P key and we're going to separate by selection I can go back to object mode so now you can see this object and this object are separate so I'll select the branch and then hold down the shift key and select this tree and I'll press contrl J to join them together so they're one object and then let's select the entire branch and move it over here a bit so it's out of the way so then for this one here I want to again use the proportional editing and I'm going to make it a bit more random so I can scroll my mouse wheel to make the proportional editing bigger let's also bring this back a little bit and this Branch here or this tree I want to have a bigger branch and then I also want to have another clump of leaves so let's just move these over here move this over here just make it a bit more random and unique and then I will press the L key with my mouse hovered over that branch and I'm going to scale the branch up let's stick it inside the trunk there and I'll hold down the Z button and move my mouse into wireframe and I can just box select some pieces here and kind of rotate them just so they come out a bit farther so they're out of the way here so kind of bring that over and to bring the entire top of the tree over I'll press the L key to select the top here and then I can press the b key and click and drag and select the top and I can bring it over a little bit kind of bring it over like that and then go back to solid View and I want to bring it over so that we have space here to make the other Clump let's also hold down the ALT key and select that Loop right there of vertices I can press contrl B to add a bevel and I can scroll out my mouse wheel till we have a few cuts of the bevel and then we can also rotate this and kind of bring it over and rotate this and kind of bring that over just so that the tree trunk kind of Curves over a little bit all right so now what I'm going to do is press the L key with my mouse hovered over this piece and I'll press shift d to duplicate and we can scale it down and I want to stick it here and just stick it right there on the top of that Branch maybe rotate it give it a random rotation and then we can just change the shape make the shape a bit more random and I want to make this be a bit more of a circular shape all right so that's going to be it for my tree so I'll go back to object mode and I'll press contrl s to save and now I just want to organize the scene before I finish up this part so what I'm going to do is open up this outliner here and I'm going to rightclick we'll click on new collection and I can double click on this collection to rename it and I'll rename it to trees and then if I shift select all the trees I'll press the m key and I'm going to move them into the trees collection now this collection here this has the empty so I'm going to double click on this to rename it and I'll just rename it to empties because we will have one other empty later when we do the depth of field so now we have an empty collection and then a tree collection and I can also rename these trees so I'll double click on them and I'll rename it to tree 1 and also tree 2 and tree 3 all right I'll press contrl s to save and this is going to wrap it up for part one of this tutorial Series so I hope you're easily able to follow along and I hope you've been enjoying it so far and thank you for watching so I'll be uploading one part each day on my YouTube channel so when the next part is released it'll be right up there on the end screen and also the link in the description and these free videos are made possible thanks to my supporters so if you'd like to join my supporters and helping out this Channel then some great ways to do that are by checking out my gumroad store and my patreon page where you can get lots of blender content like 3D models and assets tutorial files artwork project files procedural materials geometry node setups and much more blender content and you can also purchase the finished project files of this entire tutorial series and you can get all the 3D models and the finished animated scene and the different resources like the sound effects you can find the links to that in the description if you're interested in purchasing the project files thank you for watching watching and I'll see you in part two

Channel: Ryan King Art

Views: 8,896

Keywords: Ryan King Art, Blender Tutorial, Blender, Ryan King, Tutorial, forest, meadow, blender tutorial, ryankingart, woods, low poly, nature, blender forest, stylized forest animation, relaxing animation, Stylized Animated Forest Meadow, blender tutorial series, trees

Id: N8wd6DDa4JM

Length: 30min 3sec (1803 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 11 2024