The Worlds Best 3D Environment Tool Is Now Free Forever!

[Music] hey what's up guys and welcome back to asknk today we have exciting news Folks at Bentley just recently announced their a on set of tools which they purchased sometime in 2015 are now totally free and available for everyone to work with and today we're going to talk about these tools and see how you can guess that be working with them and of course a few things you need to know about this interesting company called Bentley so starting off Bentley is an infrastructural and engineering software company that has a huge huge huge huge set of tools that you can work with they've purchased a couple of tools over time and one of the most remarkable ones that we did talk about some time ago is them purchasing Lumen RT so for those who have no idea what Lumen RT is Lumen RT used to compete with tools like twin motion lumion and the folks at Bentley hasn't really promoted or developed that tool as much as we thought they will and that brings us right back to the E on software that deals with the view and also the plan factory and for view view was just this beautiful tool that you can use to create interesting Landscapes and do amazing stuff and of course we're going to talk about how you can do that and we do have plant Factory which is also another impressive tool that you can use to do some very impressive impressive plant creation and these two tools are high-end tools that you can work with additionally they've also released the plant catalog which is a beautiful one so starting off for those who like to get this you can simply go over to link in the description and check this out as this is now the new platform where you can get it as the previous website site is no longer available on the internet which means you can only view this with the Wayback machine and before we proceed is is what mentioning this tool no longer has update and for the most part it is having basically every single thing that you want in terms of both USD and Industry standard support and for those who are looking for plugins that this can work with once you start doing the installation this installs plugins for both Maya on real engine 3D C Max Cinema 4D and also light wave so if you're wondering about that those plugins are already inbu so you can go in and rest easy and to download this is as simple as coming over to the download section and clicking on the word download this is going to ask you if you would like to just accept the terms and condition which deals with the fact that you can use this literally for anything that you want and you can also commercialize the products or anything that you create with this however you cannot commercialize anything that is within the plant catalog but of course you can create yours and do some cool stuff with it and if you like to download the view or plant Factory alongside your updates there is a 2023 and also 2024 version of both and this is for Windows and Mac and for Content archives there's a 20 23.3 content archive which you can download and the same thing can also be said for the view extra tools that you can get so with all this said let's dive directly into view and take a look at how this actually works and for plant Factory we're going to make a separate video for that so we don't stretch out this video so long and one thing I need to mention before we dive in is once you open up view this takes the whole screen size that you have So currently we have a very interesting screen size but we simply just died it down because of the size of the content that we're making any adjustment that has to be done is after the welcome page so right in here you can see we can select how we would like to create stuff so we just going to start up very basic okay just simply click on empty and the scene loads up and I'm going to just simply resize our viewport so once you have this open the first thing which you notice is you've got this gigantic viewport by default this isn't what you get so what you get typically is this four quad view very typical with standard tools that already exist the navigation for this is very industry standard which has to do with holding down alt on your keyboard with your left Mouse button you can obit holding down alt on your keyboard with your right Mouse button you can zoom in and zoom out and holding down alt on your keyboard and with your middle Mouse button you can pan however if you like to pan without holding down alt if you press down your right Mouse button and you move you can control the camera as well so how do you build stuff and what is this UI so to build stuff is very easy like we mentioned this is a very wonderful tool for creating interesting landscape and I kind of think except for the joen that is coming out this just simply knocks it out of the pack especially with the fact that you can do some very interesting sculpins and all that stuff so to start creating is as easy as going over here and you can click and drag in a height map and and you see look look at that that is how you start creating stuff so we can zoom all the way out let's just get this camera all the way out and you would also notice that this has a small looking widget it has a tiny widget which has to do with scaling things up and down this widget will come in handy when we start talking about the procedural Landscapes that you can create meanwhile this other section is where your object properties exist at the same time you've also got a window that has to do with an interactive rendering and right here is where we have our scene graph or our inspector so to preview anything that we're doing we can simply click on this button and automatically we can start seeing that so if we like to make copies of this simply hold on all click and drag and there you go so we can have that and I can stretch this out you know depending on what we want and I can also go over to another view and I can click and stretch this out as well so with this we can make some changes and I can just navigate across our viewport just to get things going and if you like to make adjustment to the height map or any of the things that you're working with of course you can all you need to do is have this selected and you can go over to where you have this Cog and the Cog simply means properties so you can click on that can go in and from here we can start defining how we want this terrain to be if we like to get these things as mountains we can set that if we like to have these things as Peaks we can set that and the same thing can be set for like erosions and you know as many of the things that we want to do we can click and just Define the kind of heill or the kind of terrain that we're going for if you like to start painting this that is also super easy go over to the paint section and you can select any of these painting brushes and you can start painting if you like to have a bit of a rise we can do that and let's just simply back down go over to the radius increase that drop the flow a little bit and this is what we call strength here so we can drop that down and of course we can actually let's just crank this a little bit up and we can go in and make some of these changes now there are also multiple things that you can add to whatever thing that you're making which includes adding some surface details so if you're done maybe scoping maybe you just want to add a little bit of a play to let's say you go in increase the flow add that play to as much as you want and possibly maybe you just want to add a little bit of a rise here and there you know once you're done doing all of this and you like to add some more noise or probably some effect how you can do that as well is super easy go over to where you have the effect and you can start putting in some effect there are some erosion effect that exists here so you can use those erosion effects or you can use a Global Effect and this includes the grit the gravel Stones Pebbles you know whatever you want you can do that at the same time you've also got like this rock hardness and you can also use that to control how things are placed in terms of PS you can also click and add pics to this and if you click and hold the P just simply applies automatically for any of the things that you have here if you proceed to right click you can have access to the properties and you can make adjustments to the properties how you want so in this case if we're comfortable with what we have here we can simply go in here and click on okay so I'm just going to make sure that we have this within the viewport and once you click on okay automatically you've just made changes to your model and most of you guys might also be wondering what are these things here because you notice that you get to see it on every viewport so these are very simple stuff this is for the parent object this is for the local this is for Global and this is for the view so you probably wouldn't notice that changing the Gizmo as much but if we simply switch to perspective you would notice that so I can click right here and we have that and I can click here there and here and you'll notice those changes so once we start clicking and doing those stuff you would notice those changes there and You' also notice that we have the move the rotate and also the scale so we have the rotate so if we like to rotate this by the local axis probably by the global Axis or the view axis we can do all of that so depending on what you're trying to create actually you can work with this Gizmo set and get on with it and again to any of the things that you're doing if you simply click on this button you can refresh it this also support an automatic rendering so if you like to have that you can always right click and click on auto update so whenever we move our camera this will automatically update so you don't necessarily need to click that you just simply move your camera and this would automatically update if you like to secure your camera so you don't get to move it all the time there is a lock button that you can use to lock that camera in place so what we'll do now is just simply unlock this and I'm going to click on this button and from here we can choose to play with any of these views actually if we go in here and we set this to perspective this is now the perspective as we have this camera locked in so we can set this active and we can lock in that camera because maybe this is the view we're going for and and if we like to expand our perspective we can click on this button and we can do a simple maximize so in this case we have maximized our scene then we can start doing some stuff [Music] [Music] if you like to add water to your scene you can click and hold and you notice that you've got different parameters or different types of waters that you can throw in I'm just simply going to go for the default one which is going to be this huge ocean so we can have that and you can start noticing that we having that rendering going on on this side other things that we can do from here includes adding vegetations throwing a couple of leaves probably you want to throw in some clouds yes you can so we can click on this button as well and I'm just going to drag this into our scene and we can start defining the kind of cloud that we want say you would like to get the cloud opacity drop down you want to increase the density play with the coverage you know whatever you want you can make this changes here you can also play with the direction of how you want things to be probably add some velocity if this is what you're into and once you click and let that go you notice that we have a new object here which Now controls the cloud within our scene let's simply go ahead and drag this out a little bit more so that we can see see what we're dealing with and of course if you like to add a few vegetations yes you can so because this is fully tied with a plant tool you can click on this button and this is going to launch a new plant so we can drag in that plant tap F on the keyboard and we can zoom right into that plant if we want to have it but this isn't how we want to place plant actually if you're looking for more plants you can right click and this is going to present you with a catalog of plants from plant Factory and also some Legacy plants so if we would like to throw in trees we can simply select all the Tre trees and we can use them however placing these things one after the other isn't what we want to do as we like to Simply paint vegetation and to paint vegetation is very very easy all you need to do is go over here where you have the paint click this is going to launch an echo painter we can go over to the echo painter which is what we have right here and we can decide what we want to paint so we don't have anything here and to add items we can simply click on ADD items and we can click on ADD plants so these are the plants that we like to have I can go in and have them selected click on okay and say we would like them to be static meshes of course if you like them to be animated meshes procedural meshes you can choose to do that I'm just simply going to make sure that we have them in here and we can load up all of these so just like we have with twin motion and all the other stuff that we've talked about and that has to do with painting we can go in and paint this vegetation however we choose there's also a global setting for the paint brush so if you like to increase or reduce the radius you can of course go in and do all of that and like we mentioned once we start making changes you would notice that they automatically update because we have our real-time renderer simply doing the hard work for us if you like to clean up any of the ones you can simply click on the erase brush just like you have with the vegetation tool in Unreal Engine and you can clean this up as well and once you're done painting you can of course launch a new ecosystem so if you like to work with multiple ecosystems you can have that this also comes with some presets so probably you don't want to spend so much time setting up these things yourself you can use the presets that already exist and go in and make the painting decisions for yourself and contrary to popular belief this actually handles huge polygons very very well so if you're trying to set up something like that you can simply go in and do all of these things by hand another thing which I think should be super useful is painting things like pebbles say for example we would like to paint a couple of pebbles in our scene and what we can do is similar to what we've just done all we need to do is click on add item section go over to where we have the Rocks select the Rocks we like to paint in say for example we like to paint in this holding down control we can click and select multiple ones we can proceed to just simply click on this button to apply them so once we have that we can go ahead and paint the Pebbles however we choose there's also multiple ecosystem tools that you can also go in and paint and all of these are currently available for you to explore and start creating amazing looking Landscapes and if there's any Echo painter you like to reuse you can also click on the save button to save this there's a couple of presets and parameters that you you can always explore and this is for those who like to paint their ecosystem by hand and get things going and for the plant content if you like to have more the folks at Bentley has also released a plant catalog so you can of course click on this plus button and locate the file section where you have the catalog and you can add this in case you want to have varieties of plants that you can spread within your scene and if you like to play with other tools that exist here of course you can first off we're just going to go in and we're going to do a hard click and drag and we're going to get a procedural out terrain because you know I kind of think that we should add one more so I'm just going to move these over to this point and we would use the widgets and simply change it okay so that looks really really nice we can just drag that down and we can make another copy by holding down alt on the keyboard and we can switch transforms with the standard tools which is the q w e and r so we're just going to use that to do a simple rotation so once we have that I can also go ahead and bring this down and position this right right where I think it should leave okay so once we have this going we can go ahead and play with planetary bodies so I can click right here and we can load in a new planet if we scroll down you'll notice we have a planet right there and I can move these into position so this is currently the moon so if we would like to have this within our scene let's refresh that and see so if we like to have this within our scene yes we can so we can throw in the moon there if this is what we want if we like to change this to probably venu or something else we can of course go ahead and do that and automatically that would also be reflected there there's a couple of object parameters that you can use to change and position how these things is and you can play with the phasing to get the most out of it now one thing which we haven't mentioned is textures so if you want to texture anything let's actually start off with this one if you like to texture anything have that object selected and then you can go over to the object inspect or the object aspect as it's called here do a simple double click in let's drag this into our window and you can make changes so if we simply double click we can also select the type of landscape textures that we want most of the landscape textures you ever be looking for already exist and there's a couple of interesting materials that exist right here so probably we would like to have that and I can simply have that there and click on okay and automatically that becomes what it is we can of course go in double click if we like to have an overall color let's go in and drag this slightly lower make that slightly darker and we can have it going the same thing can be done for these other ones so we can also go in and have them selected let's actually select the procedural terrain and we can go ahead and make some changes as well just to apply the kind of material that we want them to have at the same time just like you have with a simple terrain if you proceed to double click on the procedural terrain or if you select the procedural terrain and click on this button you can of course go in and make some tering editing if these are things that you're going for so probably we might want to conver add this to a canyon we can go ahead and do that let's add some craters to these and probably terase it just about that much okay so once we have that we can also click on okay and now we have this right here the same thing that we just saw with the previous ones for the textures is also the very same thing that we're going to do for this one too so we can have that and click on this button to preview what they look like when we're done with the final rendering so you can proceed to add as many textures as you want and style the scenes to your hat content and with this ready if you like to see the material summary probably you want to see what and what you have in your scene you can so you can simply just go over to your material summary and you can see all the materials that you have right here so we can also go in have this SC selected and choose to expand that if we want one final thing which I think a lot of you guys may also want to see is is this even animated as much as you can place all of these things in here you can go in and throw wind and other kind of effects to drive your scene so if you like to hide lock and unhide stuff how you can do that is very simple say for example we like to hide this terrain what we can do is click on this button so you've got two clicks the first one would lock the object so you cannot move the object and the second one is definitely going to go in and hide it so we can do the same thing here so we can lock and hide and because you know we have it selected that's why you can still see that if I go in and just turn that off and the same thing can be done for every other thing right here so if we go over to this Terrain you can lock it it turns gray and if you click one more button you hide it and that is how you hide and lock stuff in your viewport now within the World Browser or the inspector you can also find some more stuff here so these are places where you can find what is connected to what how you can access those and how you can tweak the settings for all that like in this case with a physical seawater we do have the foam and the default water so in case you like to make changes to this of course you can go ahead and do all of that the same thing happens with what textures is l to what textures and you have the properties that exist within one layer which means you can go in and create as many layers as you want and build as many scenes as you want on top of whatever you're creating and like I mentioned earlier contrary to what most people do believe that you need like a beefy computer to get things going this technically do not really rely on a massive amount of computing power to get things going all right let's talk about animation which I believe a lot of you guys will be super excited about so in this case we have our lovely scene and maybe what we would like to do is just get our camera move from this point over to this point okay so we can do that and how to do this is extremely simple go over to animation use the animation Wizard and of course if you do have an animation part probably you've tracked the camera and you've converted that camera track to a part you can also come over here and import it you can also import synchronized data as well and you know these are just lovely stuff so for here we're going to click on animation Wizard and we can go over to next select the kind of animation we want so if we like a standard animation good and fine if you like this to be a missile a helicopter shot whatever shot you want you can simply do that in this case I'm just simply going to say maybe we want a speed bolt because you know it is here or probably we can just do a simple standard one okay and we can go over to next and it's going to ask us if we want this to be a one time team a repeated stuff a loop pendular stuff which is like back and forth whatever we want we can select it in this case again we're going to select once go over to next and if we want our camera to spin on our rival we can so we can turn on the spin and we can decide how much spin we want say for example we want this to just spin about 8° okay that would spin about 8° within a given axis so you can select that if you want if you want your camera to vibrate you can also add the vibration you can turn off the spin if you want of course and whatever thing you get to select you notice that there is a preview for it so once we have that going we're not going to select any of this because that isn't what we want want we can click on next and here is where we Define our camera movement so we can see where our camera is right here and if we like a movement or a path to be created we can click and then click and that is how easy it is now in some cases you would also notice that you've got this tiny Bend happening there so what you can do with that is literally simple go in here and use the edit okay so we can use the edit to edit that and we can move these over to a point like so and this is how we can set it up and once you're ready probably you want to insert multiple points you can go in and insert that you want to delete points you can do that but once you're ready you can click on next and right here you can select the duration of your movement for this one we're just simply going to set 10 seconds because I think that's fair enough and we can click on next and with that we have our shot now if you're not comfortable with the speed or any of the things you can always go back say for example we can go back well and I can drag this slightly closer Let's uh undo that let's use the delete tool to delete that small stuff that we just added right here we can use the edit and I can just maybe we want this to move from this point then maybe to this point and also to this point as well maybe a little bit faster will be fine we can go over to next 10 seconds sounds good and we can have it so depending on what you're trying to create you can simply go ahead and make these decisions and get your camera animated and once you have that this automatically gets plugged into your timeline so if you go over to your timeline you would notice all of the points that we added earlier they are now converted to key frames and you can proceed to open up these things and make more decisions on how you want them to react so right here we're looking through the perspective let's switch over to the active camera so we can see it so this is the active camera and this is what our animation would look like so at this point if we would like to set a key frame we can so we we can have that selected and we can go ahead and make a key adjustment so we can go in make a key adjustment in this case and by every means these things are set to automatic key frames so if you right click you notice auto key frame is turned on so once you've got something animated automatic key frames are turned on and you know you can always go to town with it this case I can also have that selected right click and we can go over to the key frame probably we don't want to keep that and I can delete that key frame and we can move over to the final key frame which we have here and we can make some changes to that let's also zoom in so if you hold on control you can zoom into this and I can simply pan with the right Mouse button over to a position like so and with a few sort of features for the camera so maybe you like to play with the camera position the camera orientation all of these are totally up to you and you can work with them so in this case if you press the playback button you would now notice that we can get that animation working so again depending on what you're trying to make you can flip these cameras in and out switch these cameras get some cool stuff working for you and animate your scenes however you choose and once you have this you're good to go and want thing to keep in mind for timelines is this that for a timeline like this if you choose to make any adjustment there is an automatic key frame that already exists so if you right click you would notice auto key frame is turned on and this is something you can turn off if you don't want to create unnecessary key frame frames as you move your camera so I'm just simply going to go ahead and have that selected right click go over to key frame and we can delete that key frame so if you don't want to have automatic key framing all the time turn this off and you can go in and key frame these things however you choose when you want to key frame it so in this case we can go over to a position like so move this slightly upwards right click and we can go over to key frame and add a key frame for that and once you're ready to render how you can render is very simple so you can go over to the render section actually you would notice that we've got two different kinds of rendering the NPR and we also got the render so we can right click and we can come over here and Define the kind of render we want so if you like this to just be a simple render probably final render an ultra render Superior render broadcast render you can set that render how you choose this is where you get to define the aspect ratio of what you're trying to make and for our case we would like to do a simple 1920 x 1080 let's actually go ahead and find that that should be a 16x 9 and this is what we want as much as I know you can render images I've actually not found a setting that allows you render videos actually most of the times you probably would have to send this off to another destination and get the rendering happening and you know it is one of those things and speaking about renders it is also mentioning that we've got Cycles rendering here so we've got both the Cycles rendering and also the simple patraca rendering which is also amazing so in this case we can go over to the edit section of the pat Tracer and edit the pat Tracer however we want again this is depending on what you're trying to create and in this case once we're ready to go we can simply click on the render button and this is going to initialize a render currently this is outside my screen but then it will initialize a render and we can use that to see what the final rendering result would look like for multiple renders and you know stuff like that I would definitely suggest that you EXP this and use this in other DCC apps as they will probably give you more flexibilities on dealing with animation and rendering the final shot there's one final thing which I think you guys may also want to know and that has to do with exporting so you can export your entire scene as both fbx a Lambic and also USD this is a 2024 tool which is definitely future proof for a very long time of course updates may not be coming to this after this particular release probably patches and all that might be the only thing coming to this to but for the most part if you're looking at exporting this probably you want to use it for zbrush or probably you want to use it as an almic file then you can go ahead and see these things for yourself and Export them to the desired file type that you want so this is it view is now here and a huge shout out to the folks at Bentley for making this one available of course we're going to make another video where we're going to talk about the incredible plant Factory tool which they've also announced with this and for those who like to see it and probably follow us through or through walk through they link to that would also be in the description of this video and of course Vice ver tell me what you guys think about this one in the comment section and of course you like this video I something from this you can go ahead and give a like and don't forget to share with a friend I see you guys in the next one peace [Music]

Channel: askNK

Views: 139,612

Keywords: asknk, maya, 3d Tutorials, Houdini, BLENDER, asnk, blender2.9, blender2.91, blender 2.92, blender 2.92 new features, blender 3, blender 2.92 released, character creator, 3d character creator, reallusion character creator, blender 2.93, blender, blender 2.93 new features, blender 3.0 new features, b3d, unreal engine, rendering, free assets, free 3d model

Id: WCCBRW2iU7M

Length: 27min 28sec (1648 seconds)

Published: Mon May 13 2024