Stylized Alien Landscape w/ Geometry Nodes (Blender Tutorial)

all right so the blender market spring sales started today all the way through monday which means all of my products are 25 off so if you want to get real-time materials for a discount you can get that now along with my shading course getting comfortable with shading and my intro to motion graphics course is also discounted so if you want to get that hit the link in my bio all right so in this tutorial we are going to be learning how to make this render right here we're also going to be animating it so it's a lot of fun having fun with lighting some really cool things happening so let's go ahead and delete this whole scene i'm going to go ahead and get a plane in the scene and go over here to geometry nodes so now that we're in the geomet geometry nodes workspace i'm going to go ahead and kill that window and get a new tree and i'm going to go ahead and delete that node there go to mesh primitives and get in a ico sphere plug that into geometry and i'm going to give myself one subdivision now we need to kind of break this up a little bit so we're going to get a separate geometry and get a random selection which is a actually random value not random selection to kind of randomly pick what faces we're going to delete we're going to hear from point to face we're going to go from float to boolean which just gives us one value here and one seed has nothing to do with like the boolean modifier that kind of thing it's just a similar name and we'll plug the value into the selection and of course it's going to give a random selection here but now what we can do is kind of play with these gaps with this inverted because the inverted is that it's quite literally the inverted selection that it randomly picked so we're going to go ahead shift a and search and get a join geometry plug the inverted there and then we're going to get a subdivide mesh so shift a search subdivide mesh put it right there you can't visually see anything yet but here you can so you can actually see it happening just like that i'm going to give my viewport here level of one now that we have that we're going to go ahead and get in a triangulate so you might say it looks triangulated now but if we go here it's kind of triangulated but we want to kind of goof with a little bit so we're going to get a real triangulate node see what this little fun thing it does now so that's what we want because we're going to be adding a dual mesh node dual mesh really likes those triangle faces depending on the style you're going for now we're going to plop that there and it's going to give us this craziness and we can go ahead and play with this probability to tell it small ones big ones or have a healthy mix of the two and then now we're here we can really have some fun so i'm gonna go ahead and maybe goof with the random seed as well till we get a selection that we like and of course being that this is node based and procedural you can always change this later so let's go here to the modifiers and we're going to go ahead and add a wireframe modifier bring that thickness up and also click boundary and then we're going to get a subdivision surface modifier to smooth that out you can get your levels and your viewport like this i'm going to say bring my viewport and my render down to two that seems like it's going to be enough and then the last thing we're going to do here is get in a simple deform i'm going to go on the z axis and just kind of stretch it a little bit and gives that this gives it this really cool circular look now go back up here and click on the geometry nodes modifier and we're going to go add one more node here which is a translate i believe it's called yeah transform not translate and then what we're going to do is this is how we're going to animate it so it's really cool when you animate it you get this really weird looking thing and it's very alien looking i'm gonna go ahead and get a smooth uh node so set shade smooth that's the way it works here in geometry nodes and then what i'm gonna do now is get another one so i'm gonna go and highlight everything here i'm gonna hit shift d i'm gonna get a join geometry node put that drag that down and plug that here and then right here on the scale i'm going to go ahead and click and drag and then scale it out a little bit and then goof with rotation so now we have two of these so we'll animate this one here and we'll animate this one here and you get this really really cool look of course you can click and drag and maybe bring a little bit closer um but that's it that's our look that's our animation and it looks awesome um and then we can go ahead of course get a icosphere right here and then i'm going to go ahead and subdivide him shade smooth put it there and we have the geometry notes portion of this scene completed so it's really cool and it's relatively easy too so now we're going to make this look really cool an alien environment looking with some displacement so let's go ahead and get a plane i'm going to hit s5 control a apply that scale and i'm going to hit tab hit u and click unwrap and that's the only bit of unwrapping we're going to need to do now what we need to do is go to ambientcg.com right here ambientcg.com used to be called cc0 textures and we're going to go ahead and go ahead and type in rock and go and just pick whatever rock material you want if i'm remembering correctly i think i picked this rock material here but you can pick any of them all of these are totally free open source not open source um i think they're royalty free if i'm not mistaken cc0 so go ahead and you'll pick one and once you click a rock you'll go ahead and get your 4k you can get ak if you want of course it'll make it more high quality but it's unnoticeable if you use 4k right here and i'll show you how to import that into blender next so now we have this right here i'm going to hit tab i'm going to right click and i'm going to go ahead and give my number of cuts at 100 so that's going to give us some pretty good baseline shading now let's go ahead and get our render settings set up here first so i'm going to go from ev to cycles i'm going to go my devices go to my gpu my viewport render samples i'm going to go 32 and then here on the actual render i'm going to go 300 for now we may need to up that later now that we have that i'm going to go here to my light paths and we're just going to go ahead and click and drag and make everything one turn off reflective reflective clock reflective and refractive caustics and we're done that's really just going to make your render super super fast all right let's go to shading and implement this uh this whole thing here so i'm gonna click new i'm gonna bring this up a little bit now if you have the node wrangler add-on enabled it comes with blender by default we're gonna go ahead and hit ctrl t right on this principle and hit g to move this up now we have a no image texture mapping node and a texture coordinate with the uv very important uv connected i'm going to go here to open and i saved my file here as rocks so let's go ahead and get that color so now we have our color implemented here and then i'm just going to bring this up i'm going to hit shift d plug this in i forget the shortcut to duplicate it have it connected you can let me know in the comments um and then now i'm gonna click this number two and i'm gonna go here to non-color because now we're gonna do our roughness so roughness is gonna get plugged straight into the roughness here so now we're gonna have a little bit of roughness fun and we need displacement which only happens in cycles so let's just go ahead and get a displacement node i'm gonna put it down here and then plug the displacement into the displacement and of course i'm going to hit g move that down i'm going to duplicate this which is going to be our displacement node so bring that down like this i'm going to click the number 2 button i just noticed my my roughness was turned back to srgb not sure how but make sure that that is says non-color plugged into the roughness and then this is going to be we're going to hit this little button here go to our displacement of course go here to non-color and then we're going to plug this color into the mid-level so you can see some stuff happening here and that's just going to be happening on the bump so what we do is first go here to cycles and i'm gonna hit this drop down do scene world scene light so we can get some kind of default lighting happening in our scene now click on this material button here scroll to the bottom go to settings and then right here on displacements is bump only to displacement and bump and some magic will happen let's go ahead and get a subdivision surface modifier and shade smooth here so now we have this of course for me there's two things wrong with it so what i'm gonna do is first off right here on the scale on the map you know i'm gonna click and drag and click two that's basically gonna tile this material by two so notice that there is now four duplicates of this one so if we just go to one no duplicates and then click and drag two but if say if you don't want that you can actually do how much duplication you want but since we're rendering it this direction it's not going to be super obvious so i'm just going to go to 2. now if we go here to the render it's way too powerful so i'm going to bring my scale down to be something like 0.39 so that's where my displacement is at 0.39 and we're done with our rock ground material it looks pretty good it's not perfect but because of the lighting it'll be just fine all right so now let's go ahead and deal with our lighting so we have this whole scene here i'm going to hit this drop down and click scene world scene lights so we can kind of look at the lighting so first off in the world bring this all the way down and then let's go ahead shift a and get a spotlight we're going to bring it here i'm going to hit s to kind of scale it down bring it here bring it like there all right and we're going to need a pretty high strength of like maybe 30 000 for the area light and then let's go here to cycles and bring our radius really soft and then bring our spot size down so now we have the spot size at 17 my radius at 1.16 of course depending on what you're doing it may need to be different and then i'm going to hit g and kind of move it back so now we have this line this is how it's going to look in eevee and this is how it's going to look in cycles drastically better in cycles but you do what works for you so now i'm going to go ahead and put my camera right about here shift a get a camera and then i'm going to hit ctrl alt 0 snap to view and let's see how that looks so i'm going to hit g middle click move back and then i'm going to hit this whole situation move it closer to the ground and then i do want to do one thing back in geometry notes to make this look better so notice how we have these two things and this one kind of goes farther out i want to make i want it to look a little more aggressive so i'm going to click and drag and bring it out some more when it's too clo when it's too close it doesn't look quite as aggressive and i want it to look really cool so there we go now keep in mind when you're just in flat shaded mode it's okay if this is intersecting with that because when we go to the render that whole ground plane is going to be a little bit different so here in geometry nodes let's go ahead and actually animate this whole situation so i'm going to go bring my mouse over here so there's this little plus icon drag it up we're going to go to timeline and in your preferences so edit preferences make sure in the animation tab your default interpolation is set to linear so we're gonna go ahead and animate this guy right here which i'm gonna honestly bring him out a little bit too okay so i'm gonna go hover into the timeline go back to frame 0 and i'd say 250 is probably fine on the frames and then we're trying to animate it on the y-axis so right-click insert keyframe go to the very end and type in 360. and then click insert keyframe and now we're going to have this animation doing what it wants to do and then right over here we can probably animate it like this if we want but let's just go ahead and animate it at negative 360. so [Music] right click insert keyframe go to the very end negative 360 insert keyframe and now we have this little alien looking thing gooping around and if we look at it here in cycles so far we have a very basic looking scene but it's it's cool it's cool enough for now now let's go ahead and get our background lighting so i'm going to go ahead and get another plane rx90 ry90 for me could be rx90 for you and then i'm just going to scale this up to fit my scene just like that now let's go back to shading all right i'm gonna hit zero to go to my to my camera view and we're just gonna go ahead again here in material preview i'm gonna click new and i'm just gonna go ahead and delete this principled shift a search emission plug that there we're going to get a color ramp and we're going to get a gradient gradient texture having this click i'm going to hit ctrl t and go to the object coordinate plug color here and then if you'll notice the gradient's working right there so i'm going to do is i'm going to go from linear to b spline and then you can just play with your location and then i'm going to go to the render view here just to make sure that everything's going to work correctly so let's bring this down to be something like this play with that color ramp and then bring that up see how it kind of has this ugly line right there it's almost it's kind of unreadable but you can still see it so we want to play with our color ramp just until that's gone and then play with your x location and then if we go here we can see how it's working now so now we have that i'm going to give myself a little bit of color so i'm going to click on this point spotlight go slightly to blue and then i'm going to go and copy that hex code then here i'm going to click on that and paste in the hex code there cool now we need to add a little bit of realism so there's two things what we can do to make this look a little bit more realistic so the first one i am going to hit g and kind of bring that down and then just kind of bring my camera up a little bit um but that that wasn't one of them so the first one is and zoom in a little bit the first one's going to be is depth of field so i'm going to zoom in bring my f-stop down and then play with my distance tell this this thing is in focus and you can also check focus in just the flat shaded view by going by clicking this drop down and clicking depth of field and then you can kind of play with your distance that way too so i wanted to be focused right about there and then go back to the view and then bring that f-stop down tell most of this thing is in focus and everything else is out of focus and we're getting something pretty cool last thing we're going to do is something i've done a thousand times here on the channel is volume volume makes things look cool so we're going to go here to the world click on volume click this and we're going to go to principled volume right there and then just kind of hold down shift and slide this over until you like the amount of volume in the scene and this is going to go miles to adding some realism into this scene last thing we're going to do is create a material for this i initially wasn't even going to add a material because the flat shade looked really cool but i wanted to add some texture so that's what we're going to do so what we're going to do is click on this object go to this button here and click the plus icon click new now let's go over here to geometry nodes and get set material put that there and get that new material which is 003 for me whatever that new material is called select that now we're going to go to shading and we're going to go to the material preview and let's go ahead and just go bump node color ramp noise texture ctrl t to get that object coordinate plug factor here and then let's go ahead and bring that detail to 12 bring that roughness up and then kind of do this little number here playing with that color ramp and then also bring up the scale of this color ramp and then we're just going to kind of just play with it we want to add these kind of weird bumps there something like that and then on this material we're going to hit this drop down click that too so we have that same material on both and the reason we have that is just simply to mess with lighting so there's some lighting mess happening if i just go ahead and put that bring that down you can kind of see now there is some bumping happening and now we have the scene i'm going to go ahead and hit the render button to see how this looks right now all right so this is how our scene is looking at the time um looks like it took 15 seconds to render it at 300 samples for me so pretty good timing what i'm going to do is go back to shading and i'm going to go to cycles and i'm just going to go ahead and bring the brightness of my back background up a little bit to match the brightness that's going on my object so now we can see that that's looking really really nice all right that's pretty much it and we do have it animating here so what i'm going to show you is your render settings and we're going to we're going to be finished so right here click on this little printer icon go here and select where you want to save your file i highly recommend this is going to be a cycles animation that's going to take a little bit to render so i'd say render this overnight so we're going to do a png sequence if you don't want to do a png sequence which right now you'd be done if you wanted to if you don't want to do pg seconds you just want blender to render out a video for you go to ffmpeg video on encoding go to mp4 medium quality to perceptually lossless render and render animation and you'll have an animation like this one so thank you guys for watching i hope you enjoyed this one this one was really fun to make again if you want to check out that blender market sale all my products 25 off until monday the 18th and i'll see you guys in the next tutorial

Channel: Ducky 3D

Views: 205,179

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Id: t_Xfl9Nub-I

Length: 20min 10sec (1210 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 14 2022