The Best PLANT AND LANDSCAPE Add-Ons for Blender!

what's up guys Justin here with the CG essentials.com so in today's video we're going to talk about some of the best landscape and environment add-ons for blender so let's go ahead and just jump into it alright so first off um probably no surprise Geo scatter so geoscatter is a tool specifically designed for the scattering of objects inside your scenes right because recreating nature and the way that things uh the way that things sit um in the real world can be a little bit difficult but luckily this has a ton of tools built in for doing different things like adding different assets scattering them adjusting the way that things are scattered other things like that so this is probably and I usually say this this is probably the most feature packed tool that I've seen for blender so it just comes with a ton of different stuff it has the best documentation of any add-on that I've seen and so the documentation explains to you exactly how all of the different tools are going to work so you know exactly how to add different objects adjust the scattering other things like like that so it's got little clips and videos in here that show you what the different video what the different tools do as well as a very large example file section so that you can download all of these example files and see exactly how this tool is going to work so you can select an emitter you can select a scatter preset or you can select biomes which are basically presets that are built in that are going to automatically scatter objects based on settings that you set so let's say for example that I was to select this Wasteland right here what it's going to do is it's going to import it and automatically scatter it based on that biome inside of your scene so there's also a ton of tools in here for doing things like culling which is going to allow you to hide things that your camera doesn't see and I'll go ahead and toggle us into EV and so this would look even better in Cycles but I don't want to crash my screen recording software you can see how that came in here and that scattered all these different plans based on the biome that we selected so one of the other cool things about this is this tool also supports external asset packs so you can use these scatter packs from different programs in order to scatter other things so one of my personal favorites is the trash kit which you can use in order to download and Scatter trash so if I was to do that so let's say that we wanted to add we'll go with one of these junkyard features right here but I'm just going to click on the plus button in order to scatter that that's going to go through and it's going to scatter those trash assets in my scene and so between all of the features that are contained in this all the example documentation that you get and the ability to actually interface with a lot of the other libraries which we're going to talk about in this video geoscatter is a very powerful tool that I usually recommend for Landscapes and environments so next up we have botanic botanic is a tree and grass Library tool specifically designed for adding vegetation to your models so it comes with trees grass flowers just a ton of different stuff it's a pretty complete library of different objects for creating Landscapes and environments so note that there is a light version and a full version as well as a starter version in here so if you just want to kind of like give it a try you might start with the starter version that's just going to affect the number of assets that are contained inside of this tool but this has a lot of functions in here like animation of their trees as well as as scatter assets function that you can use in order to scatter objects it does have some pre-made particle systems I'd say from a scattering standpoint it probably doesn't have all the features that geoscatter does but it also has a larger library of different assets that are in here and they're all really easy to use so for example let's say that I wanted to spawn some assets or some trees I can just click on the button to spawn asset and you get access to all of these different trees and all you have to do is just come in here and select tree that you want click on it click on OK in order to drop it into your scene then if you wanted to you could snap it to the ground so there's Tools in here for like randomly transforming and rotating those trees which can be really helpful if you have a bunch of them that are in here so let's say I was to just duplicate a bunch of these trees and we can just go to the top down view so just duplicate duplicate but you could just take all of those snap them to the ground and then randomize the transforms in order to make them not look the same and so you also have the ability to take these trees and let's say I convert this to editable I can add animations to the trees there's different kinds in here right but we're going to go with the best fit I'm going to click on OK well now if I click on play notice how that tree is being moved around and animated and if you want to get a better look at what's contained inside a botanic you can just check out their page on the blender Market which I'll link to in the notes down below but you can see how there's just a ton of stuff contained inside of this tool so what I like about this tool is it does have all of these contained inside of it so your pine cones your lily pads all your rocks your tropical trees all of this stuff if you get the 100 version is all going to be contained in here so it's kind of a One-Stop shop for a lot of these uh a lot of these plants okay so next up is another add-on from the developer of geoscatter but this is a free add-on it's called the plant library and basically the plant library is just a collection of free plans so you can download and bring in it's not nearly as deep as the scatter library but you can download it and bring it in for free so in addition to that you can also download their biome reader add-on and so the biome reader add-on is basically it's like a light version of scatter in the sense that it can actually read those biome files and actually do some scattering in your scene it's not going to be anywhere near the depth of the scattering functions that are contained inside of geoscatter but it is a great free option that comes with free plans as well as the reader itself which is also free so it's a great place to get started if you're just looking for something that can kind of quickly create these environments in blender alright so next up we've got to talk about bag of pie so bag of pie is an add-on that has both a free version as well as an asset version so the bag of bag of Pi modifier itself is a really cool tool that comes with a bunch of different architectural tools built into it so it's got tools for doing scattering it's got tools for creating objects along paths along curves as well as a bunch of architectural generators so it can generate stairs it can generate fences you can do spiral stairs just a ton of stuff built into this one there's also a quick IV generator and more so um if if nothing else you should go down download and try the bag of Pi modifier because it is free and it is a really powerful tool they've also added a new function in here which I haven't really had a chance to look into yet called geopac that's supposed to allow you to kind of build your own geometry node tools and then turn them into an add-on I need to look at that one a little bit more but this is definitely a cool tool for that in addition there's also a really great asset library that you can get if you want to support the creator of bagapi you can purchase the asset browser so that's going to come with all of these different plants and rocks and other things like that they're pretty detailed assets so the plants and the rocks and everything they look really good plus they also have the ability to be used with geoscatter so you know how we talked about the external biomes that are in there bag of Pies biomes are compatible with geoscatter giving you the ability to actually plug those assets into geoscatter if you have it and so one of the Cool Tools that's contained in here is just the quick scatter functions you can just select this you can tap the J key and you can do a scatter in here and then you can adjust things like the dense using the sliders on the right hand side again this scatter function is free and included with bag of Pi these assets are a paid version if you do want to do that but another thing you can do is it's got the scatter paint functions and function in here so you can use this in order to paint and then when you paint and we're going to go get go ahead and bump that density up but notice how when you paint this it's going to scatter based on the vertexes or vertices that you paint so the scatter paint function is really cool and again you can access all of these other tools from directly inside of bag of pi as well so let's say for example we wanted to add this spiral stair that's always a good example you can add this stair really quickly and then you can adjust things like the high other things like that procedurally because this is being built on top of geometry nodes okay so this next one is just kind of a fun little add-on it's very simple you can download it for free it's called nature clicker and basically what it does is it gives you the ability to place objects just by click on them and the cool thing about that is what it does is it'll add kind of some random rotation and other things like that so very simple to use you just select an object you click on start clicking and then you just click on this surface right here and notice what that's doing so that's coming in here and that's just placing these objects and it's doing it with a random rotation and scale so again not a ton to it but if you're just trying to place a bunch of plants in one location you don't want to mess around with like vertex painting or making things complicated this is actually a pretty easy way to do this and so you can set like how strong that scale is going to be when it places these and this isn't like a live geometry node setup or anything like that it's it's literally just placing the object randomizing the scale and randomizing the look the rotation but for a lot of situations that's all you really need so this is a free add-on that you can download and try today so we've also got the tree gardening landscape and grass add-on from bee production so bee production has a number of different add-ons in this case we want to focus on forestation Gardener grass blade and vegetation so these are these are asset collections that are a little bit more specific in each collection right so vegetation is a little bit more of an all-in type add-on so um it's got different biomes that are ready for geoscatter it's got a ton of different assets they have a bunch of different variations so vegetation is a little bit more of an all-in so it's got trees it's got hanging plants climate or climbers it's got tree Hedges so you can see everything that's contained in here but this one is more specifically tree focused so you've also got forestation which is some higher resolution higher quality trees they have like micro displacement in order to make them look a little bit more a little bit more detailed so these are like the super high quality trees so that's going to be available as a separate add-on I'll link to all these notes down below so Gardner is a tool specifically for adding bushes Hedges and shrubs and so if I was to compare this to something like botanic I would say botanic is designed to be a little bit more of like an all-in add-on so it's got kind of a collection of a little bit of everything it's got a really deep library in it for sure but this one is probably going to be a little bit deeper in specific areas right so Gardner is going to have more bushes Hedges and shrubs than botanic Woods you know grass blade is going to have more grass than botanics so if I was comparing across the two if you have a specific need these are probably going to meet that need a little bit better but it just kind of depends on what you're looking for they're both they're all great collections and then grass blade is a great collection of assets for grass and weeds and Fields And so this one is just going to have some more Assets in it for creating those fields so it's got over 550 assets and they're all a little bit more specific specific to creating grass and other environments so you can kind of scroll through and see what's included in here there's there's some so this one also has some different scattering tools as well as some other biomes of like stones and Pebbles and other things like that so this is a pretty deep collection of assets specifically for creating grass and flowers and that kind of thing inside a blender so um if you're looking for something that's a little bit more targeted for specific use cases you might check out the uh the bee production collections alright so next up we have ant Landscapes and ant Landscapes is a tool that's built into blender that you can use a hundred percent for free and so you just want to go into your blender preferences under add-ons make sure you've enabled admesh a Dot N dot T landscape and basically what this tool does I'm going to move Bonnie out of the way basically what this tool does is it gives you the ability when you do a shift a to add a landscape and when you add a landscape there's a bunch of different things that you can adjust so it's got a bunch of presets that are specifically designed for creating a bunch of terrains in here so you can see how there's a bunch of different presets so there's one that creates like Lakes there's a Dunes if you want to create more of a sand type situation so there's just a ton of built-in presets that are in here not only are there presets you can also come in here and you can adjust the way that this is placed in here right so the size of the noise size other things like that in order to create different looks so the one thing I dislike about this tool is once you've added this you can't really get that menu back so this isn't live right it's just like been created it's not being done with modifiers or anything like that everything is just created on the front end so if there's any developers out there that are looking for another great add-on idea a remake of this one in Geometry nodes would be really cool but either way this is a great tool that you can use for free all right so this next tool is a tool that's designed to help you quickly create large groups of trees in a way that doesn't necessarily hurt the performance of your model so Alpha trees is a tool that basically uses two-dimensional trees in order to simulate giant forests so because 3D tree models have so much detail in them they can really kind of slow down your model but using these Alpha tree cards this can be a lot faster so you could use this if you have something where you have a bunch of trees off in the background you could use this in order to add these two-dimensional cards and they're really going to look a lot like 3D trees without taking that same performance hit and so the way this tool works is it basically uses a particle system in order to scatter these objects so you can add that particle system in here and then within the settings for this what you can do is you can select different trees and I'm going to go ahead and bring this scale on these down because they're a little big but notice what it does is it places like thousands of these Alpha trees in here like this and so what you do and notice how this would look really good from this standpoint you can't really distinguish them from actual 3D geometry when you get your camera kind of a little bit but basically what it does is it'll set these so they face your camera and notice how I can adjust the culling in here a little bit because what it's doing is it's culling out objects that aren't where my camera is looking but you can also adjust things like the density or a number of trees as well as the scale of those trees using those settings right here so note that this is also compatible with the geoscatter biome scatter function and so let's say you wanted to add a forest in here what you would do is you would just select the surface with geoscatter but then you can come in here and you can add the forest biome like this and if you look at this notice how this has kind of that like way waiting built in so that you don't have just a couple or so that you don't have just like uniform scattering of trees in here you've got a collection of different trees in here that look a little bit more like a forest and what you might do depending on what what you're trying to create you might set this up where these scatter a little further back and then have your actual 3D geometry trees in the foreground if you need a closer up but from a performance standpoint this is a great kind of clever tool for creating giant forests of trees without just like absolutely slowing blender down to a crawl all right so if you're looking to add more like weather two-year scenes rain generator from Antoine bagatini could be a good fit to do something like that basically what it is is it's a rain Shader that you can use basically it's a rain simulator that comes with a rain Shader that allows you to basically simulate rain inside of your scenes so it's really easy to set up basically what you do is you just add the rain but then it also comes with a rain Shader that can take your materials and make them look like they're wet or like they have puddles on them so um like I said it's really easy to use and so basically the way this one works is it has two steps right so the first steps to add the rain so all you do is you click on the add rain button and what that's going to do is that's going to set up your scene with this rain actually kind of falling down and we can jump over into cycles and take a look at what this looks like for just a second and it's a little bit hard to see without a complete rendered view but it's basically rendering out both the falling right rain as well as simulating some different splashes and other things like that so if I was to click play on the animation you can see how these are going to move down and this is kind of struggling to keep up but it gives you an idea so it simulates that rain then we do render it out it looks really good because these are actually moving now you can adjust things like the density of the drops the size of the drops as well as things having to do with the splashes inside of this tool as well but in addition to this you've also got the range Shader which works with surfaces that your rain is supposed to fall on to make them look like they're splashing you can take this surface and you can click on the option for add rain Shader right here and so basically what that rain Shader is going to do is it's going to add a Shader to your surface that gives you the ability to simulate rain so or splashes so if I click in here notice what it's going to do is it's going to generate these splashes that are in here and it'll look better in Cycles obviously but you can adjust things like the scale of the water you can adjust the detail level of the water the density of the water or the density of the splashes in here just using these settings right here and so what happens is the raindrops that it's simulating as well as the Shader kind of work together to give this illusion of rain falling down and they're actually being splashes on the ground where the rain is hitting that water so when you add that to that surface it gives you kind of like this full complete effect in here that actually looks really good if you want to simulate rain in your models and so if you need to add IV to your scenes Baga IV generator is probably I would agree with this statement this is probably the most complete IV generator for blender so it's specifically designed to give you a collection of different kinds of Ivy and then you can quickly and easily draw them in your scene right so you can select where you want it to go as well as the kinds of IV and it's going to quickly add that so it's got a ton of different presets varieties of different kinds of Ivy and they're really easy to add as well it does have have some animation functions and other things like that but what this does is it gives you the ability and it's built on Geometry nodes just like uh just like the other stuff from Antoine but the way that it works is you basically can select a Target so let's say I wanted to add Ivy to this object right here and then I wanted to pick an ivy right so it comes with all these presets you can pick all of them so let's say we wanted one of these with flowers right this one with yellow maybe so what you would do is you just click on ADD IV and what it's going to do is it's going to put you into a mode where you draw on the surface like this so I'm just going to draw on the surface right here and it's going to automatically add that IV to your scene so if you look at that IV notice what it's doing is taking that preset and it's bringing it in here well you can also adjust things like the length of the truck the length the branches other things like that in order to get a get whatever result you're looking for right you can adjust the density of the leaves up and down the density of the flowers um just a ton of stuff in here about the IV that you can adjust so it also has the ability to add some animation so you can set that animation in here and then if you were to click play so we'll just jump into our timeline right here and we'll zoom in and we'll click on play and you can kind of see this but notice how these leaves are now moving because we've set that animation function so this gives you a big library of IV it gives you a bunch of things you can adjust and the ability to add things like animations to your scenes note that I could come back in here because this is still active and I can just add some additional IV my scene so I could add it to these rocks too if I wanted to now that's a little weird because I'm adding it to this object actually but notice how you can quickly add and adjust that IV in here you could also remove portions of IV just by deleting some vertices out of your curve like this all right so I'll link to all of these in the notes below this video leave a comment below let me know if I left anything out if there's anything you're using I just love having that conversation with you guys as always thank you so much for taking the time to watch this and I'll catch you in the next video thanks guys

Channel: The CG Essentials

Views: 6,305

Keywords: blender, blender 2.82, blender 2.8, blender modifier tutorials, blender tool tutorial, the blender essentials, the cg essentials, thecgessentials.com, justin geis, justin geis blender, blender 2.9, blender 2.91, blender plants, blender landscapes, blender scatter, blender scatter add-on, blender botaniq, blender grassblade, blender ivy, blender rain

Id: J6tKyyBmHGo

Length: 22min 18sec (1338 seconds)

Published: Fri May 05 2023