UPDATE - How to Create Realistic Rocky Surfaces in Blender 3.6.4

rocks what greater use could there be for the modern art form of Animation than the creation of rocky surfaces or at least statistically speaking that seems to be of the greatest interest here on my channel I've had so many requests for an updated tutorial on this subject in the most current version of blender so in today's video we're going to be taking a look one more time in how to create realistic rocky surfaces in just a matter of minutes inside of blender we're going to be looking at two very different but both both very effective methods to follow along with this tutorial you're going to need three things one blender two rubberduck Rock pack from blend swap.com which is completely free to download and three a rock texture of your preference from your preferred texture site I'll link all those items in the description below and once you have them and are ready to go let's jump in and start the [Music] tutorial to begin with let's go ahead and open up a new project inside of blender and we're going to change a few settings to make sure that you're running the same settings as I am to help follow along we want to make sure we're using the Cycles Render engine so if you're currently set to Eevee go ahead and switch that to Cycles make sure you set device to a GPU compute so it's using your graphics card which will speed up the rendering process if you're not sure how to do this you can head to edit preferences and under system just select a render device such as Cuda or Optics that allows you to take advantage of your graphics card underneath our World Properties make sure your color is set to Sky texture which will allow us to use blenders inbuilt in a sheeter sky texture for realistic lighting as you can see here next let's go ahead and delete our default Cube and default light they will be missed but instead we're going to go and hit shift a and add in a plane I'm going to hit rx90 enter to rotate it to stand up vertically then tab into edit mode and hit GZ1 and enter again so now it's resting on this invisible grid floor I'll hit S5 enter to scale it up five times larger and then I'm going to tab into edit mode and just go ahead and select my move option here underneath my cursor appearance and also select Edge select mode so that I can just grab one of these edges next I'm going to make a basic geometry for a rock wall we essentially already have a wall here I just want to make it slightly more interesting so I'm going to hit e and then X to extrude it out along the xaxis and just pull that forward a little bit then hit e and x one more time and bring it along like so I can just adjust that to what I prefer and now tapping out of edit mode we have our nice rock cliff wall the point of this tutorial I should mention isn't so much to focus on modeling because this process of creating Rocky Services can can work on any shape so rather than looking at how to model a particular rock or environment scene it's just looking at how to apply it to any particular model you have the first method we'll look at is the one that seems to be the most popular and that's using Rock brushes to go ahead and start using some rock brushes we need to do two things the first of which is hit contr a and apply our location rotation and scale transforms next under our modifier properties we're going to add in a multi-resolution modifier and subdivide this about eight times tabing back into edit mode I'm going to hit a to select all and then shift e and just pull my mouse out till I see this purpley pink outline and left click to confirm what that does is it just allows me to keep the original Transformer without adding too many curves you can soften a little bit like so if you like just by tapping into Ed mode hang Shifty and pulling your cursor in and out I'll right click shade smooth and then let's go ahead and start sculpting by switching to the sculpting tab we bring up all our sculpting options right clicking will allow you to increase the radius of your brush and also the strength or impact of that brush I'm going to go and hit file and append in the Rock brushes I downloaded now these Rock brushes are from blend swap.com a free site where you can share your own blender projects and the user rubber duck has so kindly and generously provided free rock brushes that can be downloaded with a free account and used for any commercial project or hobbyist project projector you want so make sure to go there and leave a comment thanking Rober duck for their fantastic brush pack or leave a comment here thanking them in case they ever come across this video if you've downloaded that brush pack you can go ahead and locate it where you've save it for me that's my downloads and then we should see a folder called brush the top folder inside of it we will see all 32 Rock brushes I'm going to hit a and select append it's important that you append them not link them just because I did read a lot of people having trouble with the thumbnails showing up up but when you append brushes into your project you might just need to wait a minute but clicking on this little icon should load in all those thumbnails so you can see what brushes you're working with now all we need to do is go ahead and just select one or two different ones and click and drag but you notice if we do that it's quite an Abrupt transition between the rock brush and the flat wall some people even compared it to looking a bit like a pimple which isn't very appealing to correct this let's just go to our fall off and change it from Custom to smoother now if I click and drag you can see it's a much smoother transition I can also turn the strength down if I don't want it to affect my mesh quite that much and now just as a matter of clicking and dragging we can see instantly we're adding in some pretty cool detail we can go as crazy as we want this is really just the fun part you can check on some music and start designing your rock wall okay and there we have a very basic sort of setup for this rock wall I'm pretty happy with it so I'm going to jump back to my layout tab and if I switch over to render view just up here we can see that already it's looking pretty good if I turn my Lighting in my world properties just by adjusting the sun rotation we'll probably be able to see it a bit clearer what exactly our scene's looking like but if you want to use this as a background asset maybe in just something quite simple you could add in a material just give it a color and for a stylized environment that'll look really awesome for me though I want these to be photorealistic so what I'm going to do is add in a photo realistic texture to do that I'm just going to be using one from quixel bridge you can use any texture site that you like including completely free ones like poly Haven 3D assets. one or textures.com but just for the sake of demonstrating how this works in this tutorial I'm going to go ahead and import this rockliff texture from quickel bridge back here in blender I'm just going to split my view by going up to the top left hand corner until I see this little Crosshair and then left click and drag and select instead of 3D viewport Shader editor I'll hit end to remove that right hand side toolbar and under material I'm going to select my rock cliff texture which has been imported I'm going to tab into edit mode and go U to unwrap and select Cube projection now we can see that this material has been applied and it looks really good I'm really happy with that and that's all there is to it to create this realistic looking Rocky texture of course if you do want to go the little extra mile this is where we start to venture into the second method of how to create realistic rocky surfaces when it comes to this method we're going to be looking at displacement this doesn't need to necessarily be used in connection with the rock brushes as they already give quite a solid level of geometry detail using micro displacement is almost unnecessary when you've already sculpted or vice versa sculpting is almost unnecessary if you're using a displacement map but let's just go ahead and look at the varying results and see which one we prefer so you can make an informed decision for your own project what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and shift d duplicate one of these image nodes and just drag this material output down here a bit and connect the color into the displacement slot going to hit shift a and just add in a displacement node and drop in between the two make sure that my color is plugged into height and then here in this little folder I'm going to navigate to where I have a displacement texture for this texture that is saved set color space to non-color and now if I go and render you'll notice that nothing has changed because I still need to adjust one more setting under my settings I'm just going to select displacement as displacement and bump and now you can see the displacement taking full effect and now seen looks pretty cool it actually looks even better than it did before if we go ahead and just duplicate this Cliff I'll hit shift d and then just move along the y- axis what I'll do is I'm going to rotate that on Z 180° just to line up so we can have a bit of a canyon scene and I'm just going to delete this multi-resolution modifier and add in a fresh one without any sculpting detail I'll subdivide it the same amount of times now if we switch to of view we can have a look and see the difference between the two options so here we have one let me just turn my lighting around so you can see that clearly here we have one applied without much sculpting detail and displacement it looks pretty good we could really go ahead and just hit this little copy to set this as purely a displacement material or a new material and could really crank the value up on that something like two to sort of see what this looks like and and it looks really good so contrasted with our other Rock Cliff it's really a matter of personal preference as to what you think looks best as I said both of these methods can be applied quite easily to any shape that you desire to give a rocky realistic looking Look to You can simply start sculpting add in a photo realistic displacement map and there you have a great background or foreground environment a few final tips that might help if you're wondering to render out your scene zero will switch to camera mode and then by hitting n you can bring up the right hand side toolbar under view you can select lock camera to view and here in output properties we can just select render region because I only want to render what the camera is seeing back in render properties you can set film to transparent so that our background is transparent if you want to add in any other images later in compositing or photoshop and then just simply lining up our shot is all that that's left to do I like to change a couple of camera settings personally this is all completely optional but by clicking on my camera and going to my camera Properties or camera data I can enable some depth of field so that if I turn that down we can see a nice bit of blur on our footage and I even like to sometimes turn up my focal length to be more zoomed in so that it creates a more cinematic look I might adjust my lighting of my world again and this is why I really like being able to use the in the sheet Sky texture it's so easy to set different times of day just by lower the sun angles finally under output properties I'm going to change my resolution to 3840 by 2160 which is 4K as I like to be a rendering 4K and under render properties benath sampling I'll just turn on to noising under color management I'm just going to select the look to high contrast and enter to that right hand side manual but there we have it that's all there is is to creating this realistic Rocky Cliff effect it's that easy it doesn't take long I really appreciate you coming here to watch and asking for tutorials on these subjects I find them so fun to create sometimes it does take me a while to wrap my head around what to say in a tutorial about this but I really do hope this has been helpful that you can use it to create your own projects and if you are able to please feel free to show me what you've made I really love to see all the work you guys do from these videos but until next time this has been just the basics of how to create realistic rocky surfaces in just minutes inside of blender version 3.6.4 thanks for watching everyone I guess life is like a rock it's really [Music] [Music] hard

Channel: Just The Basics

Views: 10,735

Keywords: Just the Basics

Id: q9GbbZKBwNg

Length: 12min 54sec (774 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 11 2023