The Best Way To Create Nature In 3D

after 15 years of trying to achieve realistic nature and blender this is the best way I found to create it so I was supposed to make a video promoting my brand new nature Essentials acid pack but you know what forget that I'll just show you how to make realistic nature yourself first you'll need some reference and texture so grab a camera and head to your backyard throw it on a blank canvas in the shade for shooting these textures or just a piece of paper could work then start picking some grass blades or weeds to shoot textures for your assets shoot a variety of these and you'll be ready to start 3D modeling in blender we'll use the default Cube to delete it then go ahead and add in an image reference open up a grass blade and rotate it in your viewport pull it straight down along the z-axis slightly to keep it out of the way and then go shift a and add in a mesh plants kill this way down and place it at the base of the grass blade then tabbing into edit mode grab the top two vertices and pull these out along a grass blade here you can use the shortcut by holding Ctrl and right clicking to continue extruding out this plan scaling when necessary to fit the shape of the grass blade and extruding it all the way along your image scaling it down to a point at the tip you might have to tweak a little bit of these vertices afterwards but then we quickly have a grass blade modeled now let's throw the texture on it so drag out a new window and open up the UV editor here select the image that we already opened as reference and then in edit mode on your grass blade select everything with a and go U project from view now you can see our grass blade in the UV editor and we just need to rotate it and scale it along the x-axis to fit over that grass blade again you might have to tweak these vertices in the UV editor now to follow the grass blade a bit tighter then switch this window to the Shader editor and click new material here just add in a new texture image texture and again grab that image reference we opened and connect the color to the base color right we just added a texture to our grass blade and you can see where I still messed up on the UV unwrapping here a little bit idiot so if you did this too you'll have to switch back to the UV editor and again move those vertexes around a little bit to be within the grass blade texture but now you can hit X and delete that reference texture and add a little bit more detail to this grass blade by going Ctrl R and adding a cut down the length of the grass blade pulling this down just a little bit to add some curvature to your grass lid will look a lot better move that grass blade to the side and add in a second reference image this time we'll open up a reference image of the full grass stock that we shot then go ahead and repeat the process again this time just on the grass stock here unwrapping it and throwing the texture on it as well just like before then you can duplicate the grass blade that we made pulling it over to the grass stock and forming our grass stock in 3D duplicating again and throwing a few Blades of grass onto this grass stock grab all of them and then the grass stock last and go Ctrl J to make it a single model now if you check the proportional ending option on you can easily adjust this mesh and give it some natural bends and curves I found twisting it made it look nice to mimic realistic grass you can also change the shape of proportional editing to Sharp this will sometimes give us some more natural bends and be sure to edit this in both views so you have a nice looking 3D object I'll grab that grass stock and hit e to extrude it down for a little bit of thickness then alt right click an edge Loop and go Ctrl B to round off that grass stock a little bit as well do this on a few of the corners to make it look a little bit more round and natural the last step which adds a lot of real is to duplicate some of those grass blades now pull it down to the bottom of the stock and make these some old dead looking Blades of grass then hovering over those and hitting L to select them we can make a new material and assign it to these Blades of grass or this material we'll select the one we already made but Tab out of edit mode and click the number next to the material to make it its own material now if we drag out a new window and open up the Shader editor again we can drop in a color Hue saturation node and just take the Hue down and the saturation down a bit on this material as well as the value to make it darker for some dead pieces of grass now rotate the blade so it's facing upwards in your scene and make sure it's placed in edit mode over the little orange origin point in blender now in the world tab if you open up an environment texture for some lighting and choose an HDR from polyhaven.com you can see that it's rendering pretty well already go ahead and add a few more grass blades to this asset and then make a few variations of it as well choosing one of these graph stocks and assigning the dead grass to it so we have some variation now let's create our own little patch of Nature and to do this you can download the free g-scatter add-on for scattering your assets just use the G scatter Link in the video description and download the latest version here then within the blender preferences under add-ons install the add-on by clicking install and selecting the gscatter zip file click install add-on and then just make sure it's enabled under the user installed add-ons then it will show up in your properties tab along the right here then under the emitter use the eyedropper to select that plane so with a graph stock selected go Ctrl a and apply the scale and rotation to that asset and then click scatter selected you can see this works like a particle system except it uses geometry nodes and scatters all of your assets on the plane you have a bunch of flexibility here where you can change the scale and rotation and the distribution you can crank the density up here but you can see that the grass is looking kind of flat and not very organic so pull out a new window and jump to the Shader editor again grab your grass blades and let's make this material really pop start by connecting the color from the texture to the roughness on the principled Shader and then adding in a color ramp node flip the black and white values here take the white down to more of a gray color color and increase the black this will give us a little bit more shine and realistic specular highlights on the grass then connect the color output to the normal on the principled Shader and then drop in the bump node to control that texture move it from the normal to height input and decrease the strength a bit down to a 0.2 and here's where the real magic happens add in a new Shader add Shader then add in the second Shader translucent Shader connect this to the bottom socket on the add Shader and this allows light to pass through your objects just like it does on real grass or leaves connect the normal output to the translucent Shader and the color to the translucent Shader as well and that really pops now you can add in the Hue saturation node and adjust the color taking the Hue down slightly and increasing the saturation and value to make the color of the grass a little bit more vibrant where the light's passing through it and you can add some realistic distribution to your grass assets by adding an effect layer we'll choose the Muse grave texture as a mask and you can see what kind of effects this has under the visualize effect layers you will want to add some subdivisions to your plane so you have more detail for these textures to work now just take the skin scale down on that texture maybe choose a different random seed until you get some nice grass patches then you can grab another one of the grass stalks that you modeled maybe the one with the dead grass material and Scatter this one as well on the plan adding in another Muse grave texture to handle the distribution picking a different random seed and scale for this one taking the overall scale down a bit and increasing the black value on that texture so we get some grass everywhere across the plane this looks pretty good and even better when you add in a little bit of random rotation to it go ahead and repeat this process with any sort of grass or nature assets that you created that's the thing with nature it can be as wild and crazy as you want and still look really good it looks better the more you throw at it here I'm just going to open up the asset browser in the G scatter add-on and Scatter some of the assets from my nature Essentials pack the CD grass looks really good and with one click you can just scatter that across your scene as well adjusting the scale and density for a little bit of variation in that grasp once you render also adding some foliage to the ground looks really good so here I'll grab the oak leaves and Scatter those and I'll scatter possibly my favorite asset the branches these just look so good as foliage underneath your grass assets and really adds a lot of realism to any sort of nature scene and it looks great from every sort of lighting angle there's a link in the video description for my brand new nature Essentials asset pack but if you created yourself that's cool too I just hope you had fun with this video and create some realistic nature that's it for me guys see you all in the next video peace

Channel: CG Geek

Views: 770,937

Keywords: Blender, Nature, Tutorial, Grass, Easy, Grass tutorial, realistic, how to, Blender 3, Free, Fast, CG geek, Best way, 3d nature, 3d artist, vfx, nature tutorial

Id: 7Um3FaXJixg

Length: 7min 18sec (438 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 26 2023