Relief Shading in Blender: Tips and Tricks

you you you you you all right just getting ready to get started in a couple of minutes if there's anyone in the chat who can you want to confirm you can see and hear me all right I'm not not too quiet not blowing anyone's your drums out that would be great thank you okay fantastic thank you a little quiet all right Oh No just a bit my first time with the OBS studio so we'll see how this goes see hopefully this is a bit better [Music] okay well I guess I can I'll get started now hello everyone thank you so much for joining me this afternoon my name is Peter Atwood and I'm coming to you from Halifax Nova Scotia where it's lovely and sunny today after a very late snowfall yesterday so first of all a big thanks to Daniel Huffman for organizing all of this this has just been a fantastic resource and a great learning opportunity and what I'm going to be doing is just taking a quick look at sort of how I go about shading relief maps in blender I've found it's been a really useful tool for me I've used it a bit in the past for doing animation and since sort of starting to explore map making a little bit more I've also found it a really really fun really interesting tool to use and a great way to get create sort of tactile sort of text textural Maps so how I think I'm going to go about this is I've got a I've got a relief map that I've set up sort of following along with Daniel's tutorial from his blog and that's it that's a great starting off point I've put a link to it in the description in the description of this stream I've also put a link to write up that Owen Howell did also a good good starting off point in something and something that I've learned a lot from and then I'm just going to take a look at a couple of different tricks and approaches that I use to color and bring some and liven up the liven up these maps a bit the other thing I'm going to do I put a link to the Google Drive folder with this blender file in the description sometimes I find it can be helpful to just like pick something apart and see how it works so that's available to download for anyone who for anyone who would like to use that alright so what I'm looking so what we're looking at here is Kyushu Island in the south of Japan and a couple of things just with this set up I have here so this is the rendered view which you can see up with the little shaded sphere in the top right corner and this sort this gives a preview of how it will appear when we render it out the other view the other View mode that I like to have set up is up here where we have viewport shading and if we click on this we see it's a we got a very sort of detailed preview of how it will appear this is using blenders real-time Eevee render which is much faster but it doesn't get it doesn't create it doesn't give us as accurate lighting that we would get through from the rendered preview which is which uses cycles which is a ray tracing render engine the other issue with this preview is that as you can see if we Pan the camera down it's not actually deforming the Train we don't actually have 3d terrain it's simulating the effect with a bump map whereas if we go to the actual rendered preview and look down on it now we can see the sort of the texture and the elevation elevation of the map but to just get a really quick preview and sort of see our changes live as they happen this viewport shading is viewport shading is great and recently been significantly improved in the past few updates the only thing to note of is if we go down into the viewport shading settings we want to make sure that scene lights and scene world are ticked so that means that our lighting setup in our scene so right here I've got a sunlamp just above our plane that that will be accurately reflected in our preview otherwise it just uses a default sort of the studio lighting setup so what I've got I'm gonna split my workspace in half and over here I'm going to I'm going to leave my relief map up and on the other side I'm going to switch it to our shader editor which is where we can see all that how the how the materials are set up and I've got a handful of different materials just using is show a sort of showing different ways that I can color the terrain I've got the materials set up and I think I'll just go through them and kind of pick them apart see how they see how they work and see how we can combine them to create different effect so with just this this very basic one over here we've got our terrain displacement so we're working with a de M a height map that's plugged into a displacement node which in turn is plugged into this displacement input in our material and then over here to give it the color and all the different properties of the material I'm using a principle shader instead of a diffuse shader because the principle one gives us all these other options which looks kind of scary but but we don't really use most of them but it gives us some fun options that I'll get into in a little bit the only thing to sort of note is that we want to make sure that roughness is turned all the way up so that way we'll have a completely diffuse surface and I'm gonna I'll try and keep an eye on the live chat but sorry if I'm sorry if I miss anyone as I go through so the first thing that we might want to do is tint our relief based on the elevation so for that and go to this first one here's the here's the whole thing over here we've got our displacement which is giving us the texture which will stay it which will stay pretty consistent throughout we have our principal shader and then we've got a couple of other sections over here the first one is I want to mask out the ocean so I want it to be a different color for a different color from the land so for that I'm gonna divide this up once more just briefly and go to the image editor so here I can see all the images that are part of this project the one I want to look for here if I can find it so this one so I just have a few like really simple masks with transparent backgrounds and I can use that to drive where different where different effects and where different colors appear on the map so this one is just to separate the land from the ocean so to do that we have it as an image as an image texture and over here we have a mixed note which lets us mix two images or if there isn't an image plugged in it just lets us use a color so we plug the Alpha Channel into the factor input which determines how it gets mixed and color to color and now we have we've separated separated out the land from the ocean and then over here which is where we're deciding what how we want to how we want to visualize the elevation we've got our de m and then the color the de m is plugged into a color ramp and now we're just going and I've got a few different color ramp set up to try it to sort of try different of try different effects out and it's going to map the pixel value of our pixel value of our de M into these color ramps so we just need to plug this into the other color slot in our mix node and so with this this one it's just quite subtle but it really sort of helps to highlight the highlight the elevation difference in in the map we can also do try a more sort of natural looking color scheme where we've got green in the low-lying areas turning into red and white as we get higher up or something more involved this one I used a color ramp from there's a blender GIS plugin I haven't done too much with it it seems really interesting but it's got a few a few few color ramps built in that we can get some nice effects with that and actually I'll just get rid of the grid lines overhead here and one of the things I like about Breton blender is just sort of the immediate feedback you get so I can add more colour add other colors in and just immediately see how it how them have the material responds so with this so we've got we've got our we have our elevation visualized what if we want to visualize slope so that's a little bit trickier but not not especially so for this one again we have our displacement set up and then over here to get the slope I've plugged my height map into a bump node and what that's doing is it's creating sort of an extra layer of data for every for every point in our map it's basically it's sort of the same thing as what's going on with our displacement its visualizing how light would reflect off the surface without actually deforming the terrain and it does that by assigning by assigning a a vector value of three dimensional vector value to each point which has an x y&z value and the Z value of that vector we can use to visualize slope so I've plugged my height map into a bump node a bump node into this separate XYZ node and then the Z value goes into the goes into the color ramp so now we're now we can now we can sort of now we visualize just that set just that Z value which corresponds to slope so when we plug that into the color now we can see this oops Aries with a higher slope or have a lower value on the color rant but also yeah so and so the next step after that might be to combine the two to combine both sort of elevation and slope to height to sort of highlight to highlight specific areas oh and also something sometimes it's nice to sort of switch back to the render preview to get a better idea of what the what it'll look like in the final render with the sort of more accurate lighting conditions so if we wanted to combine both elevation now I think there's a better way to do this than what I'm doing then the way I've been doing it I haven't quite figured it out if anyone has any ideas I would definitely love to hear them once again we've got displacement saying this before we've got our ocean mask over here and then we've got our height map going into the bump to create like a gradient for the slope and then for the elevation color I've got 2 color ramps and what these represent one is going to appear on areas with a very high slope and one is going to appear on areas of the map with a lower slope so it's sort of like this would be the underlying terrain and this would be anything covering the surface so like vegetation or snow in the higher areas and using the using the slope value as a factor to usually using the using the slope value is a factor to as a factor to mix them that will will be a will be able to see one color ramp in areas with with high slope and one color ramp in areas with low slope so once I plug all those in now you can see we've got zooming in this this really sort of highlights where we have these little ravines coming off of the crater of the volcano in the center of the island you can see the edges get a lot are a lot more highlighted because we're seeing the high slope color scheme as opposed to the low slope one and again we can if I don't like how it's um how they're how they're mixed I can adjust it through this through this color ramp so if I think that if I want more of the like more of the low gradient effect it effect to come through the one oh one other thing I should mention with most of these color ramps by default it's get set to ease for how it for how it interpolates between stops I find b-spline gets b-spline gets a nicer sort of smoother gradient moving along the next so the next thing i might want to do is to give get a little bit more visual variety to blend in some some other imagery Oh someone asked is there any way to render just the land area for example but yes if it was sort of if you want it transparent it for the rest of it except you just for the land I've got that in just a minute but if I wanted to add some imagery to it just to get a little bit more variety as opposed to as opposed to you just what we'd get with the procedural material for this one again it's more or less the same for for the displacement and the mask and then all I'm doing is I have two two images one is a Landsat tree canopy raster and then the other is an ortho image of an orphanage of the island and then I'm just using these mixed nodes to blend those in to the table to blend those into the relief that I already have now and then also when we have the mixed nodes you can choose all the usual suspects are here for blending modes that you'd find in like Photoshop so I haven't experimented with them too much but definitely lots of potential there so we can blend in our foliage and then blending just a little bit of the ortho imagery take it up to like 0.4 so that now we get a little bit of the detail in the built up low-lying areas but we still get the we can still really see the see the train and then because I find sometimes ortho imagery just it's a little bit too noisy so this way we still get that clarity but then like a little bit of visual variety in built-up areas and so I just have a couple more tricks that I found one might be if I want to sort of highlight an area of interest within a map what I've done with this so we're starting like sort of we're start sort of start with a blank map just with our water mask again but our displacements gotten a little bit more complicated over here I've got my elevation map and it splits and it splits and then goes into a mixed shader 1/2 goes straight into the mix and then the other half goes into this math node which is set to multiply so this node will take the input it'll take the pixel value of our height map perform this operation on it and then output the result so I multiplied it by 0.2 and then I'm using another mask to choose where the sort of dampened type map appears and where the full-scale one appears so again we'll pull that into the height node of our displacement shader and now you can see that this section sort of pops up and it has a much more exaggerated peasant has a much more exaggerated relief and then over here we're doing exactly the same thing we did before we have our our tree canopy imagery and our ortho imagery and then we're using the same area of interest to mask out mask out the rest of the map so it only appears within our area of interest um and actually one other thing I put together here just a quick example of doing a little bit of labeling within blender I've got the names of the the names of the pre fractures set up here and doing it with doing it with in blender get some we can get some nice some nice shadows it doesn't really show up with the the lighting setup that I have here and how this works someone asked about sort of having everything except the land be transparent that's one of the reasons I like using a principled shader because what I can do is I have this as another mask where it's just white text on a transparent background and we take the Alpha Channel there plug it into the alpha input of the principal shader and now everything else is transparent except for our labels and finally one last example of this so once again I've got my my area of interest and this time that's interesting okaythat's I'm not quite sure oh oh I know what I know it happened I changed that to the to the label not the yeah okay okay there we go so yes so now I've got the the border mask plugged into the Alpha channel of the principal shader so now we've got a we've got a transparent backdrop we can just see the land we have our area of interest with the exaggerated relief and then what I wanted to do with this one is just sort of see how we can use the some of these other settings within the principal shader and just like blenders strength is being able to like visualize like different material properties so what I have here is again our area of interest mask this time plugged into three different mixed shaders that each going to change a property of the material so the first one is color so for this everything within the area of interest will be gold everything outside will be black and if we plug that in we can see oh and for this one I've added labels to the area to the area of interest mask and the borders between the prefixes as well for this second one called metalness so we've got the metallic the metallic setting and every material as far as rendering is concerned is either zero or one it's either not a metal or it's a metal and so for that we've got one set to black one set to white so everything within the area of interest is a metal everything outside will be treated as nonmetal and we plug that into it we plug that into the metallic and it doesn't look like much and that's because we have a roughness set all the way up so it's very diffuse but if we use the second mix one to change the roughness based on whether or not it's inside the area so now everything outside the area of interest will be still be very diffused but everything within the area of interest will be a little bit glossy err let me plug that in and we get this really cool so sort of embossed gold leaf kind of look I don't know how like there are not all not a ton of cases where this would be entirely useful but it looks really neat and I think it's really it's a great example of sort of using blender to its strengths as a way of like being able to like visualize different materials and then we can go back to the to our render preview and get a look at it sort of how the like how the light plays off the different materials and actually if we move the camera around a bit too we can see how it's how the lights reflecting off the glossy er area of interest and so I've just got a couple of minutes left sort of wrapping up the last thing that I think I could I'll touch on very briefly I'm gonna go back to my base base relief without any changes and that's how changing the lighting of the scene can also dramatically affect the effect the final the final result because and that's that's sort of another strength the strength of blender is being able to have a lot of control over over lighting and over environment so for this scene I've got a Sun lamp coming in it what is it uh 315 degrees at a 45-degree elevation and then if we go to our Sun settings in the properties panel here we can change the strength and actually this will look better if we go back to the rendered preview we can change the strength we can change how bright it is we can change the color which has a which will have a dramatic effect and then angle which is sort of how large or how large the light sources in the sky if we take the angle down really low to like one degree you can we can see that the shadows suddenly get a lot more start and a lot more a lot more defined so depending on what you're going for it can be you might want softer shadows or you might want sharper shadows and then the last thing is if we go into the rural properties panel our scenes being lit by the Sun but it's also being lit by basically the Dome of the sky over the scene it's invite it's being lit by its environment so right now we have sort of a gray light and if we adjust the strength of it if we turn the strength down to zero we can see already that the shadows are a lot there's a lot more contrast and that's because they aren't being illuminated by their environment they're only being illuminated by our Sun lamp so one thing that I like to do change the background lighting to the blue and make it a little brighter and that might be a bit too much but now you get if you look at like a photo from the International Space Station you can see that the shadows aren't the shadows have this bluish tint from the from this atmospheric scattering that's from from this from the atmospheric scattering so you get this sort of more realistic look to the relief and as a last example I could take it I can take my Sun lamp I can make it sort of more of an orange and maybe you know let's see bring it a bit lower to the horizon say 55 degrees and then change the color to a really dark purple and you get this nice sort of sunset sunset look where the scenes being scenes being lit by this very orange Sun and they get a nice sort of purple purple shadows from the sky and they just there's a ton of potential fur for illuminating scenes you could try I was watching John Nelson's a tutorial in doing multi-directional Hil shades so I tried just for the heck of it to see well that might look like I it's there's definitely I would definitely play with this a bit more to get something that isn't quite as loud but it's a neat sort of proof of contact so that pretty much brings me to the end of what I wanted to talk about I'm thank you thank you all so much for for tuning in for listening the I'll make sure that the stream is available on this channel at this URL if you want to go back and watch anything again I've got a link to this file to this blender file in the description of the video if something down to downloads it it should work I haven't actually tested it yet but it should have all the masks and imagery bundled it bundled into it so if you want to play around with that as well and then I didn't really get a chance to look through the to look through the live chat as much as I wanted to but I'll skim back through there and read through everything so again thank you so much thanks again to Daniel for putting all this together I'm really looking forward to checking out the rest of the section sessions and if if there's interest I might do a little bit more of this either as like do some more blog posts or live streams but again thank you and have a good one

Channel: Peterincan

Views: 2,799

Rating: 4.9008265 out of 5

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Id: zBR6_llYWg8

Length: 39min 54sec (2394 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 29 2020