Realistic Snowy Mountains 🏔️ Part 1 (Blender Tutorial)

[Music] welcome everyone to this two-part tutorial Series where I'm going to show you how to create these realistic Snowy Mountains in blender so in part one we are going to use blender's landscape add-on to create the mountain Landscapes and then we'll also add a camera and do some scene setup and we'll also use some modifiers on the mountain objects to give them some more detail on the surface and then we'll also be adding in some hdris to set up some nice realistic lighting then in part two we're going to be creating the material for the mountains and the material of the mountains are going to be completely procedural using blender's procedural nodes then we'll also be creating a subtle atmosphere and we'll animate the camera and we'll kind of animate the atmosphere so it looks like there's some wind blowing in the scene and then we'll render the image and do some compositing and then we'll render out the full animation to frames and then we'll Video Edit that together into the final video and if you'd like to purchase the finished tutorial files as well as help support the Channel then you can get that on my gumroad store and my patreon page I'll have the links in the description and some great ways to help support the channel here on YouTube are by checking out the YouTube memberships by clicking down there on that join button and you can also send me a little tip by using the super thanks feature here underneath this video and after this tutorial if you'd like to learn how to create more nature scenes in blender then definitely check out my blender nature tutorial series playlist with the links in the description where I show you how to create many different nature scenes like a Rocky River a birdhouse and a Rocky Mountain as well as some mushroom scenes and some other nature tutorials so definitely check out that playlist if you'd like to learn how to create more nature in blender now as I mentioned the mountain material will be completely procedural however to get some nice realistic lighting I am going to be using two different hdris so this is the first hdri that I'm going to be downloading and this is a free hdri from polyhaven.com I'll have a link in the description if you'd like to download it and we'll be adding this into the scene to get some nice realistic lighting and Reflections to light up our scene in blender and then over here on the downloads I am just going to download the 1K version because we really don't need it to be that high quality because we're just going to be using the lighting data from the image and then also I just like to download the HDR version and then you can just download this so that other hdri will be really good for the lighting however it doesn't really give a good background image so to give this a really nice background image I'm going to be downloading this sunflowers pure sky and I really like this one because it has some really nice clouds in the background and it'll look nice behind the mountains so I'm going to show you how to set up the HD Horizon blender so that one of the hdri's light the scene but then the other hdri will be previewed by the camera and this is the one that the camera will see so here on polyhaven.com again link will be in the description if you'd like to download this for this one I'm going to download the 8K version so it is going to be a bit higher quality but I do want it to be higher resolution because the camera will actually see it in the background and then I also use the HDR version and then you can just download this so again link is in the description and while we're on the topic of Sky lighting and blender I wanted to let you know about amazing blender add-on for getting realistic skies and Sky lighting and blender and that is the physical Starlight and atmosphere blender Adam physical Starlight and atmosphere is an amazing blender add-on for creating realistic skies and Sky lighting I've used the add-on myself and I highly recommend it you can customize the sun atmosphere Stars clouds fog and more the add-on also provides some outstanding Sky presets such as daytime and sunset fog and Haze Mars and even retro wave you can also change the time of day just by rotating the sunlight check out the add-on with the link in the description and by purchasing the add-on through my link you'll be helping to support this channel alright so let's get started with this part so I'll be having my screencast keys right down here in the corner if you want to see what buttons I'm pressing so I'm going to start off by enabling two blender add-ons and they are both built into blender so to enable the add-ons let's click here on edit and we can go to the preferences and then over here on the add-ons tab you can go here to the search and you can start to type in land and we're first going to be check marking the ant landscape add-on we'll be using this to create the mountains and then also I'm going to be using the node Wrangler add-on to preview the different nodes when we're creating the procedural materials so you can check mark that as well and then if you want to save the preferences so that these add-ons are automatically turned on just click on the save preferences button right there and then we can close blender's user preferences so I'll just start now by selecting everything with the a key and I will hit X to delete we'll just delete everything so I can now press shift a for the add menu and we can go right down here and add a landscape and then right behind me you can see there is that landscape setting so before you click away or move the landscape around just click on that little arrow there right behind me to open up the landscape settings so there are so many settings which you can use to change the landscape however I'm going to click right up here on the operator presets and there's a bunch of different cool presets to choose from and I'm going to choose the canyon preset so I'll click on Canyon and then I can zoom in there and you can see already it's making some pretty cool Mountains for us but I do want to change a few more for the settings so right over here you can see that there is a noise type and we want to click on this marble and we're going to change it to another noise I just find that this one works really well for what we're making I like how it looks but you can change it to any of these and use whichever one you like so you can see this is giving us some really cool mountains especially if you look kind of right down here on the side then there also is this random seed here so you can just play around with the random seed and it'll generate different Landscapes so you can just find one that you like now because these mountains are going to be in the background I do want them to be longer so right here we have the mesh size Y and I'm going to turn this up to four so that it is double as long going back and forth on the y-axis and I'll just leave the X size at two now if you zoom in closely you can see they are pretty low quality so I want to turn these subdivisions up so that's higher quality so here on the subdivisions y I'm going to turn this to 500 and now you can see there is much more detail and then here on the subdivisions X I'm going to turn this to 250 so I'll add a little bit more detail that way as well and now you can see the mountains are quite a bit more d detailed so you can go through here and you can play around with all the different settings there's many settings here like the effect type and there's some different mix types there's also the soft and hard and many other settings you can play around with these if you want to but once you have some mountains that you like you can just click on this area here to close the mountain settings and I now want to rotate the landscape around because if I press one on the numpad that is going to go to front view and you can see the mountain is pointing in the wrong direction so I'm going to hit R to rotate I'll rotate it on the z-axis and I'll type in 90 and then enter now you can see since we've moved this right behind me we don't have those settings anymore so if you want to access the landscape settings then you need to do it first before you move around the object because once you move around the object you'll lose those settings so I'll now hit G to grab I'll bring it back on the y-axis so that we have a bit more space for a new landscape it's all press shift a I'll go here to mesh let's go down here and I'm going to add a new landscape you can see it's going to load up the same settings so if I go over here you can see it's loaded up the same settings however I can click right here to go back to the landscape settings so this landscape is going to be some more flat landscape and it'll be closer up to the camera whereas the other landscape will be the big mountains far in the distance so I'm going to click here on the operator presets and I'll go right down here and I'm going to choose mounds and this is a pretty cool landscape for the bottom of the scene now I do want to change some of these settings as well so for this one I'm going to go here to the mesh size X and I'm going to turn this one up to four and you can see now it's a bit longer and so we'll be rotating it and then the camera will have more depth to kind of see into the landscape I also want to turn up the subdivisions X to give it more geometry so I'll turn this one up to like a 300 then the subdivisions y I'll turn this up to 150 so it has a bit more detail alright so you can play around with all the settings but this is good for my scene so I'll hit G to grab kind of move this up here into the center I can also hit R to rotate I'll rotate on the z-axis by 90 degrees and hit enter and if I go here to top view I can move this over here I just want to stick it about here in the center of the scene and I can also select this Mountain here and I can scale these mountains up because they're going to be bigger and farther back so I'll scale them up really big and kind of move them back here and then we'll be adding a camera kind of about here looking into the scene so let's add a camera now so I can press shift a and I can just go right down here and we can just add a camera and then you can just locate to wherever you want the camera to be I want the camera to be right about here and I'm going to press Ctrl alt numpad 0. so Ctrl alt notepad 0 will bring the camera to where we are and I can hit G to grab and I can move the camera around if the camera is selected now I do want to change how the mountains look quite a lot in edit mode so I'm first going to be changing the bottom object here so I'll select this object and I'll hit the Tab Key to go into edit mode and then you can click right up here to turn on the proportional editing so with the proportional editing on you can select a Vertex you can hit G to grab and then you can scroll your mouse wheel up and down to change the size of the proportional editing and you can select a few points here which are popping out a lot and you can move them down and you can just kind of fix that and make it flatter because a lot of these places are bumping out quite a lot and I do want them to be bumping out a little bit but not quite as much and what I can also do is I can go right up here kind of go to the top I can select a Vertex here or you can even press B for the Box select and you can click and drag to select some of the vertices you can hit G to grab and then you can scroll your mouse wheel out and you kind of drag these around and you can select a few points and just hit G to grab and you can kind of pull them out so that the landscape is covering all the camera view and also like right over here you can select this point hit G to grab you can kind of bring all these out so it's a bit longer and also just make it a bit more flat another thing you can do to make it more flat is to select a vertex and you can hit s to scale then you can hit Z and you can scale it down on the z-axis just to flatten it out a bit so I think I will do that so I'm scrolling my mouse wheel up so that more of it is affected I'm just going to make it a little bit more flat so now you can see we have a nice flat landscape I can also navigate here to the back and then right here on the very end I'm going to hold down the ALT key and just select that Loop there and I can navigate here to the side and I will hit R to rotate and then scroll my mouse wheel so that less of it is being affected and then hit G to grab and kind of pull it down just so the bottom of it kind of goes back down a little bit so the camera can't see it dropping off all right so that is looking really good let's also select this point here hit G to grab kind of move this over and maybe move it down a little bit so I'll now hit the Tab Key to go back to object mode and I want to do a similar thing for these mountains here so these mountains I think I'm going to scale them up a little bit more and bring them a little bit back so I'll now hit the Tab Key to go into edit mode and I think I want to scale them out a little bit even more because I think they look a little bit better when they're a little bit stretched so I will scale this and I'll scale it on the x-axis and let's just make them a bit longer like that and then I can navigate you over here I can hold down the ALT key and I can select that Loop of vertices there and I will hit G to grab and then I can hit Z to bring it up on the z-axis and I'm going to scroll my mouse wheel out just to bring all the mountains up quite a bit so that I can see a bit more of them so now if I go back into the camera view you can kind of see what it's doing so I'll just hit G to grab again move this up a bit more something like that so if you go into the camera view now you can see a lot more of those mountains and let's also save this project we should definitely do that so if you haven't saved the file already you can click on file and then click on save as and I'll save this in a folder with my other files as mountains.blend and then I'll click on save as so then you can press Ctrl s to save the project as you're working on it so I want to make these mountains look a bit more random and I want to have some bumpier parts so I'm going to select a Vertex here I'll hit G to grab kind of bring this up a bit then I can select another Point here hit G to grab bring this up a bit maybe select a point here hit G to grab bring this down and bring this down something like that so that some parts of the mountain are coming up a bit more and other parts are coming down a little bit just because that really makes it look more like Snowy Mountains so I'll maybe bring this up here select this point kind of bring this down and also kind of a few points here and there I might bring these up and down bring this up here and bring that down also select a point here bring this up and select a point here bring this down just kind of play around with the shape of that all right so something like that is pretty good just to make it a bit more random you could also go back here and select a few points and bring this up if you want to be able to see a bit more detail and see a bit more of those mountains so you can see already that is looking much more organic and natural and also I think I might bring the whole thing back so back in object mode I'll hit G to grab move the whole thing back a little bit just because these mountains should look very large but I might also scale them down a little bit and I could rotate it a little bit so that you can see more detail in the mountains now I also want to make some of the mountains look like they're higher up in other mountains farther down so I'm just going to pull around the vertices using the proportional editing and just making a few of the mountain peaks popping up and then in between the mountain peaks we'll have a few other spots going down and that just makes a nice mountain range in the background alright and I really like how that composition is turning out so I'm now going to be doing the lighting so to do the lighting let's click right over here here on the world properties and then we can add in the first hdri and I mentioned the hdris that I'm going to be using at the beginning of this video and the links to the hdris that I'll be using will be in the description so if you don't already have a new world you can click on the new button and then let's click on the yellow dot here next to color and I can choose environment texture and then I can click on open so here is the first hdri that I'll be using again link is in the description if you'd like to download it from polyhaven.com and I downloaded the 1K HDR version so I'll click on the hdri and then click on open image so I can now hold down the Z button and I'll move my mouse up into the rendered view to preview it in the rendered mode and then I am going to be using the Cycles rendering engine to get more realism so if you click right over here on the render properties here on the render engine I'll be using Cycles Render and then while we're over here on these settings I also want to go down here and open up the color management and I want to change the view transform to filmic for more realistic lighting and then here on the look I'm going to change this to very high contrast to pop out the colors and make it more contrasty and then also if you you're in the camera view you can press Ctrl B and you can drag a box around the camera and let go and then it's only going to render what is in the camera view and that'll just speed up the render preview when you're in the camera because it won't render anything else out here when you're in the camera it'll just render what the camera can see now I do want to edit the World Lighting quite a bit because I do want to rotate it around so that it's shining at a different angle and then also if you go into the camera view I don't want to be able to see these mountains in the background so I'm going to be adding in a different hdri in the background which is going to have some clouds and it's going to be higher resolution so let's click right over here to go to the shading workspace I can go into the camera view and go up into the rendered View and then to see the world nodes you can click here on object and you can choose World instead so this way you'll be able to see the world nodes instead of the Shader nodes so here is the hdri that we've added so with this hdri selected I'm going to press Ctrl T and that is using the feature of the node Wrangler add-on that we enabled at the beginning of this video and so it's going to add the texture coordinate and the mapping and I can now use this mapping node to rotate the hdri around so we have this rotation Z value and I can just rotate this around and you can see it's going to change how the lighting is so I'm going to change this to a negative 30 I think negative 30 is pretty good so you can see those mountains have that nice blue shadow on this side but then they are nice and lit up on this side and that really gives the scene more depth and gives the mountains more depth now this hdri is going to control the lighting but I want to add in a different hdri that we'll be able to see in the background so let's make this a bit smaller so that we have more space and I'm going to click and drag to box select all of these nodes except the world output and I'm going to press shift d to duplicate and I'll drop it down here and then I can click on this button here to get rid of this hdri and I'll click on open to open up a new hdri and then here's the other hdri that I'm going to be using again this is a free hdri from polyhaven.com and the link will be in the video description if you'd like to download it and I downloaded the 8K HDR version and I downloaded the 8K so that it's much higher resolution because we are actually going to be seeing it in the final render in the background so I'll just click on this one and then click on open image so now we can take this background here and we can plug the background up to the surface just to preview it for now now it is going to change the lighting and it might be a little bit laggy because it's higher resolution but you can see it looks much more detailed so I want the world to be lit up by this hdri but then I want to be able to see the clouds in the background using this hdri so this one is going to light the scene but then this one is what we're going to preview so to do this I can press shift a I can go to the search and I can search for the mix Shader let's drop the mix Shader right here and then we can take this background we can put this into the top one and this background here this is going to go into the bottom one so now we are mixing two different worlds together and you can see they're overlapping and then this Factor value is going to blend between one or the other however I want to make this one affect the lighting but then actually see this one in the render so to do that I'll press shift a I'll go to the search and I'm going to search for the light path node let's just drop the light path node right up here and we want to take the is camera array and we want to put that into the factor so now this is in the factor this hdri is lighting the scene you can see we have that original lighting but then we can actually see the higher quality hdri with the clouds in the background now if you want to change the rotation right here on this mapping you can change this rotation Z and this will move the clouds around so that you can see different clouds so you can change this around to wherever you want I'm going to change this to negative 280 so negative 280 I think that just looks nice I like some of those flat clouds being in the background but you can just rotate the rotation Z value to kind of change what clouds you want in the background let's press Ctrl s again to save the project so now let's click right back over here to the layout to just go to the original layout and we'll go into the camera view by hitting the zero on the num pad so when we add materials it will look more detailed because we are going to be adding like a snow material and a rock material so these will look more detailed but you can see if you kind of zoom in here it just doesn't look that detailed so I'm going to be adding some modifiers to the mountains to make them look more detailed so I'll hold down the Z button go back to solid View and I'm going to select the closer landscape right here and let's click over here to go to the modifier properties so let's click here on ADD modifier I can go to generate and we can add the subdivision surface modifier and then I can turn up the viewport and render levels so I'm going to turn these up pretty high to like a three however in the viewport it might be a little bit laggy so if it is a bit laggy for you then you can turn the levels viewport down to just like a 2 or a one or a zero but then when it renders it'll actually render with three for now I'll just turn it up to three so I can see all the detail so already you can see that looks much more smooth however I do want to make it more bumpy so let's click on ADD modifier and I can go here to D form and let's add the displace modifier so the displace modifier is going to displace the mesh you can see it's popping it up and I want to add a texture to make it kind of bumpy so here on the displace modifier let's click on new and then I can click on this button here and this is going to take us to the texturing tab now right now the type is set to image or movie but I want to add in a procedural noise texture so on the type here let's click on this and we can change this to clouds instead that is very similar to the procedural noise texture in the Shader nodes so now I can change the size so I'm going to turn the size way down so that you can see a lot more detail so I'll turn the size to like a .03 and then I can also turn this depth up to the max of 24 so that it is even more detailed so now that is looking really choppy and that's because it's way too strong so if we just click over here on the modifiers we can turn this strength down so I'll start by just turning the strength to like a .01 so it's much less strong and that is looking a lot better I do want to make it even less detailed though so instead of this being a .01 let's turn it to a point zero zero seven so now it's even less detailed but now you can see we have some nice detail all over the surface now I do want to add these same modifiers to the other mountains up here however this will make the viewport pretty detailed if we add the subsurf to these large mountains so let's turn the levels viewport all the way down to just like a one so that it doesn't appear as though it has as much detail but in the render it will render with a lot more detail so I'm now going to select the back mountains then last I'm going to hold down the shift key and select the front landscape so the back mountains first and then shift select the front landscape so I can now press Ctrl L and I'm going to click here on copy modifiers so now the modifiers of this landscape is copied to the other one and then to see all the detail you could turn the levels viewport all the way up to three you can see how detailed that is so that has a lot more detail however it will be a bit laggy in the viewport because there's so much geometry now so I will leave the levels of viewport just down to one so I'm going to press Ctrl s to save the file again and this will wrap it up for part one of the snowy mountains tutorial Series so I hope you've been enjoying this and thank you for watching and in part two we are going to be doing the materials and the materials are going to be completely procedural and then we're going to be adding a bit of an atmosphere and then we will do some basic animation and just have the camera move through the scene and then just render that together to a final video so when part two is released it'll be right up there on the end screen and also the link will be in the description and if you're enjoying this tutorial series and you'd like to help support me and this channel then there will be some links in the description to my gumroad store and my patreon page and the YouTube memberships and those are all really great ways to help support this channel but thank you for watching and I will see you in part two

Channel: Ryan King Art

Views: 10,757

Keywords: Ryan King Art, Blender Tutorial, Blender, Ryan King, Tutorial, snow, mountain, landscape, realistic, realism, rocky, mountains, blender mountains, environments, blender landscapes, blender environments, snow mountains, snowy, blender 3d, 3d mountains

Id: 7IP6Qp5UX_k

Length: 21min 20sec (1280 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 22 2023