Stylized Anime Trees in Blender 3D [EEVEE] - Comfee Tutorial

trees we all love them especially when they're painted in the anime art style but what if I told you that this is actually 3D and I'm going to show you how to make it let me explain a few weeks ago I got a comment asking if I could make a fully 3D tree that resembles the trees in Makoto shinkai's films so with little to no experience making trees of any kind in blender I accepted the challenge and within a few hours of messing around with nodes and a couple weeks of perfecting them I think I found that Makoto shinkai look hi welcome to the comfy mug Channel my name is Christian and I spend countless hours learning how to make anime stuff in blender so that it's quick and easy to learn for you if you want to learn how to make materials and models that resemble your favorite anime Styles in blender then you've come to the right place so subscribe with notifications enabled so you don't miss out on any future tips or secrets and check out my patreon for pre-made anime assets and other special goodies like this tutorial tree and much more before we get started I want to give a huge shout out to the founding patrons of the comfy mug thank you guys for supporting me so early on now this tutorial will be going over everything from the geometry of the tree and render settings to the shading of both the leaves and branches of the tree each of these sections will likely have a few subsections all of which will be placed as chapters in the video with their respective titles for your convenience so please enjoy so when we open up blender we'll want to enable node Wrangler and the sapling tree gen in our system preferences well also want a height reference to make sure our trees aren't too big or small so let's add a cylinder with the depth of 6 ft that's 1.8 m in case you're using the metric system for your units now let's enable snapping and open this popup menu to check absolute grid snapping this way when we hit tab to go into edit mode and select all the vertices by pressing a we can move the base of our cylinder to the exact surface of the world with ease Tab out of edit mode and move this off to the right we'll also add a sun with with its strength set to three as well now I figured the easiest way to make a tree is probably the best way for the purpose of this tutorial so let's press shift a and add a sapling under the curves section why is it there I have no idea but once you add a sapling you'll see a little popup menu to the side that you'll want to open up if you go under the geometry settings tab and find an option that says load preset you'll want to click on that and select the Japanese maple tree you can use any seed you'd like but I'll be sticking with the default and change the scale to three the curve resolution won't change the tree too much so to save processing power we can change this to three or two now if we go back to the geometry Tab and change this to Branch splitting we'll want to change the level from two to three allowing for more leaves to group together changing the base split can adjust the trunk and how many branches it splits off into and if you go to the first value on the split angle lowering the amount will bring the base splits closer to each other if you want the tree to look more narrow but again I'm going to leave the default for now going back to the tab selection and changing this to the leaves tab we'll change the leaf shape to rectangular and adjust the number of leaves to 25 to start we want to keep this a small amount right now so that when we select the show leaves option our computer won't crash before we increase the amount of leaves we'll want to change the scaling so that the leaves have more of a square shape these settings should do the trick we'll also want to change the leaf down variation and leaf rotation variation to these settings as well and the last thing we need to do in this menu is change the leaf amount to get a look you and your computer processing power can agree on the more density you can afford the better your tree will look but just keep in mind that the Shader will also take up processing power if your computer can only process a certain amount of leaves and it's not looking as full as you'd like it to be don't worry I have a solution for you at the end of this video here but once we're happy with the amount of our leaves I'm currently using 110 and the geometry of our tree we can now safely click on our tree and say goodbye to the popup menu forever our tree is looking pretty decent but it's leaning far more on the PBR Spectrum than I would like the solution to this however is what I believe to be the secret to making any anime stylized tree and foliage it doesn't have to do with the shaders we use though that will help a lot but instead it's amongst a few options in our render settings under the shadow tab you'll see the cube size and Cascade size options this controls the quality of the Shadows the higher the pixels the greater the detail but if you lower the cube size to 256 pixels and the Cascade to 128 we find that sweet spot for making soft Shadows that almost act like a gradient you may get a few artifacts here and there in your viewport but when you render the image you'll get a really smooth finish that cheats that painted look now this may be the secret to anime looking trees but the shading boosts that look even further our leaves Shader setup will be broken up into three parts the Shader output Leaf alphas and leaf color so after opening the Shader editor We'll add a new material you can keep the principal bsdf or you can change this out for a diffuse either way we'll want to turn the roughness all the way up and add a normal node connected to the normal of our Shader this will give our leaves more rounded shading almost like it's acting as a sphere rather than each individual Leaf casting Shadows now if you just pick a green color and leave your Shader like this these leaves will work perfectly for background foliage that doesn't need too much detail and isn't in the focus but for trees that are more in the midr ground to closer up to the camera we'll want to do a little more work to make these leaves look nice so leaving our Shader output to the side for now we'll want to start on our Leaf Alphas to set this up we'll need three Color ramps a mixed color set to linear light a gradient set to spherical and a voro texture connect each of the nodes and adjust the color amps in the order you see on screen setting the linear lights factor to 0.7 then select the voronoi texture and press control T and change the vector input from UV to object we'll do the same thing for our gradient texture but leave the vector as UV zooming in to see an individual Leaf we adjust the location of our mapping node to place the spherical gradient roughly in the center of each Leaf it doesn't have to be perfect but once it looks good to you we'll move on to creating a distortion control for our voronoi texture by adding a noise and mix color node with its Factor set to 0.75 and the B color turned all the way up to White press contrl t on the noise texture changing the vector input to object and connect the noises color output to the a input of the mix connect the result to the scale of the voro mapping node and then change the detail of the noise to 0.5 and the Distortion to 1.5 last but not least for this part We'll add an object info node connecting the location output to the corresponding location inputs of the voronoi's direct mapping node and its Distortion controls mapping node note that you will not want to connect the object info node to the mapping node of the gradient texture now to give a quick explanation of what we're doing here this assembly of nodes will act as the alpha of our leaves the gradient being the basic shape of our leaf and the distorted voronoi giving each individual Leaf a unique shape before moving on to keep things organized let's select our Alpha setup and press shift p to place it in a frame press the F2 button on the top of your keyboard to rename the frame to Leaf Alpha and now we can disconnect this and move it to the other side so that we can start on our second part of this Shader now our Leaf's color setup is fairly similar to our Leaf Alpha but has a few changes so to start things off we'll need two mixed color nodes the one on the left being a linear light with its Factor at one three color ramps a voro set to smooth F1 a noise and gradient texture set to spherical then connect each of these nodes and adjust the color ramps in the way you see on screen we'll then press contrl t on both the gradient and noise changing each of their Vector inputs to object the purpose of this setup isn't to texture each individual Leaf but rather to create an overall texture for the entirety of the foliage so that we can add some fake shadows in anime leaves are usually divided into two layers the outer leaves which are lighter and More in clusters and the inner leaves which are darker and act more as a core for the bush or tree there can of course be holes in the foliage to see through to the other side but this way of rendering foliage is not only easier for the artists to paint speaking from experience there but is the major distinction separating stylized foliage from photorealistic renderings and it's exactly what we're trying to replicate with this setup so in order for us to see exactly what we're doing right now we'll change our mixed colors a input to Black and the B input to White we'll go back and change these to the colors we want for our tree later on but for now seeing things in black and white will really help now we'll want to change the scale of our gradient texture to 0.2 for all axes and change the location to place our gradient right in the center of our trees leaves turning to our voronoi we will change the scale to 0.9 and the scale of our noise to six you can adjust the linear lights factor a little if you want the voro to spread a little past the spherical gradient but once you're satisfied with the look of your leaves we can change the colors of our mix color to dark and and light greens remember that the a input color is for the inner leaves and the B is for the outer leaves if you want to make your leaves the same color as mine I put the hex codes on screen and in the description of this video so that you can just copy and paste them into your Shader for those of you who want to make your trees different colors for example pink blue or purple red and yellow or even a tinted silver color we'll be able to do all of this with one simple node in our Shader output so stick with me and we'll get there okay editing Christian here I was adjusting this Shader a little more after starting work on this video and I think I figured out something huge originally the smooth voronoi was only meant to add a small variation to the core leaves acting as a fake Shadow but if we adjust the linear light a bit and turn the scale of the voronoi up we'll get a different and in my opinion much more useful effect on the leaves colors this will increase the detail of our leaves without making them look photorealistic but instead acting as painted clusters of dark and light leaves after all that we can place everything in a single frame with shift p and rename it to Leaf color with the F2 button returning to the Shader output we will need to add a Shader to RGB Hue saturation and value node a math node translucent bsdf transparent bsdf add Shader and mix Shader connect each of the nodes in the way you see on screen making sure that the transparent BSD f is connected to the top input of the mix Shader now you'll want to change the math node from add to multiply and adjust the bottom value anywhere between 0 and 0.3 this is affecting the saturation of light that's passing through the leaves once you find a look you like best zero on the math node being fully saturated and one being fully desaturated we can connect our Leaf color to the color input of our principal or diffuse bsdf depending on which one you're using we'll then connect our Leaf Alpha to the factor of our mix Shader with our Mouse hovering over the Shader editor press n to open the toolbar select the option Tab and change the blending and Shadow modes to Alpha hashed this will make the black areas of our Leaf Alpha transparent while the white areas stay opaque you can make a few more adjustments to the Shader where you see fit and if you want to change the color of your leaves all you need to do is change the hsv's hue value to find the color you like most you can also turn the saturation down to get a more silvery look as well but after placing our Shader output in a frame we will have finished our Leaf Shader but the branches are still untextured so we got to do something about that this Shader will be much simpler than the leaves though I do have a more detailed tree bark Shader tutorial planned for the future if you're looking to make scenery like this where the tree trunk is up close to the camera but for now after we select our tree branches and add a new material we will turn the roughness all the way up add a mixed color node two color ramps a voro and a noise texture connect the nodes as you see on screen with the color amp on the right plugged into the factor of the mix color and the a color input set to Black so we can see what we're doing select the noise texture and press contrl T change the vector input to object and plug the vector output into the voro as well we want to change the scale of the noise to 10 and then reduce the mapping nodes Z axis scale to 0.4 we can then add an object info node to influence the location of our textures and change the colors of our mix color to a couple Light tan Hues the hex codes for the exact Shades I'm using will be on screen and in the description of the video as well and one last tip if you want the tree to look fuller with more leaves simply select the leaves and press alt D to make an instance of your leaves and rotate them on the z-axis if you don't know what an instance is you're basically creating a duplicate of an object without your computer needing to process both the original and the duplicate at the same time instead it only needs to process one allowing you to add much more detail to your scene with minimal setbacks and there we have it a fully built and shaded tree in the Makoto shinkai anime style I hope you enjoyed this tutorial but there's plenty more insights and secrets I have to share with you for recreating your favorite anime styles blender so remember to like the video and subscribe with notifications let me know what you think about this style in the comment section below and if you want pre-made anime assets like this check out the link to my patreon in the description thank you so much to all of my patrons who are going above and beyond to support me and this Channel and thank you so much for watching I hope you have a wonderful day and I'll see you here next time at the comfy mug

Channel: Comfee Mug

Views: 3,815

Keywords: anime in 3d, blender anime tutorial, 3d anime trees, anime tree tutorial, blender anime tree, studio ghibli tree 3d, makoto shinkai tree, studio ghibli blender, makoto shinkai blender, anime blender, stylized tree, stylized tree blender tutorial, anime style blender, anime shading blender, anime material blender, procedural texture, stylized blender, blender beginner, anime blender tutorial for beginners, painterly blender, blender tutorial, comfy mug, comfy tips, anime

Id: xNWL6HDmGww

Length: 15min 3sec (903 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 24 2024