VFX Artist follows Bob Ross Tutorial using 3D Graphics

[Music] hi I'm Steve lon and welcome to a new exciting video on CG geek if this is your first time with us allow me to extend a personal invite to hit that subscribe button to be notified when more videos are posted and if you've been here before allow me to thank you for continuing to watch and enjoy in this video we'll be putting a start on more primitive tools icon brush and canvas and instead be using more modern technology to create our nature scenes using 3d graphics and what kids are calling nowadays CGI I can't keep doing this it's might have gotten the gist we're gonna be using 3d graphics blender 3d specifically to follow along with the bob ross tutorial and bring one of his classic paintings somewhat to life you know what maybe I'll keep the hair on though it's pretty hot so that's the gist of it I think it'll be a lot of fun to see what the bob ross painting would look like in 3d graphics being able to render it from different angles we even animate it seeing what one of his classic artworks in this case is going to be the island in the wilderness scene that wouldn't be following along with so without further ado let's send it over to Bob and see where we start we'll use about a dozen colors of some unorthodox brushes and yeah today we're using blender 2.8 to a beta not exactly the same but pretty close okay so Bob starts as you do with most painting sort of in the very most background of the scene and then kind of paint your layers forward so we'll kind of replicate that in our 3d graphics so I'm gonna use a 360 HDR and HDR is very commonly used as it's basically a 360 panorama so you can use it as a backdrop but it also works to shine light into your scene and also cast shadows and reflections so I'm just going through HDR Haven comm here and I'm gonna pick an HDR that has a nice sort of backdrop of a sunset a palace floor of the same sort of colors that we have in the Bob Ross Island painting here here I've just opened up that HDR in our 3d software now and I've positioned it in the background as set it up as an environment light for our scene now to the next step and just beat the devil at it they have a lot of our pain tablet okay so Bob went ahead and added the water to the scene some nice still water that's really easy to achieve in 3d all we have to do is add in a plane I'm gonna scale it up and then throw a reflective material on this the material I'm actually gonna use is one that I created in a previous tutorial over on my channel I showed how to create waves using blender and I create a basic ocean material in that scene that is exactly the same material that I'll be using for this water surface so here's our simple water material now kind of mimicking the sky in water that bob has already painted on his canvas I think we're looking pretty close our colors are gonna be off a little bit until we kind of tweak them at the end here can adjust the size of those waves a bit I can make them extremely big or very subtle I can also adjust the amount of reflection if I want it to be a very sharp clear reflection I'm gonna go with somewhere in the middle of a nice sort of shallow reflection kind of matching when he has here moving on Bob we caught up okay so that's super cool bob has painted some painting some mountains in about minute and that look dope now to create these mountains in our 3d software I'm gonna use an add-on that actually comes with blender and it uses textures to kind of generate geometry to create things like mountains so using this add-on I can go ahead and just crank some of these settings up a bit bigger and as you can see it's just using a noise texture over my mesh here tweaking these settings a bit to kind of match the shape and size of mountains that Bob is painting in the background of his video and we're gonna scale these up a little bit as these are gonna be the most distant mountains here are just positioning those mountains in front of those real distant mountains to kind of give the illusion of two layers of mountain now I'd like to take a quick moment to give a sincere thanks to this video sponsor audible when you spend hours at your desk working on art and whatnot like I do having a good audio book to listen to makes the work even more fun and thanks to audible you can listen anywhere from any device at any time and I'm currently listening to the brain and Sanderson audible exclusive Steelheart audiobooks series and really enjoying it I can totally recommend it it's a brand new year now and no better of a time to pick that perfect audio book that motivates you currently audible is issuing a fun challenge to all current and new members finished through audiobooks by March 3rd and get $20 free Amazon credit and you can start listening today with the audible 30-day trial choose one audiobook - audible originals absolutely free just visit audible.com slash GG geek or text CG geek - 500 500 that's audible.com slash CG geek or txt CG geek - 500 500 for your 30-day trial now let's get back to work and now I needed some distant materials for these mountains in the background so what I did is I created a simple PBR material set up here where we use some rocks and a snow texture here and I just kind of combine them using a little bit of a mask here with the pointyness node on the geometry this allows me to pick the edges of the mesh and I'm going to make just the edges of those the snow material so as you can see combining those with a mix shader' kind of gives me these mountains that bob painted in a matter of seconds it took me a little bit longer as you can see as we switched to the camera view we have those mountains already reflecting in our water which is already kind of matching Bob's painting now for the mist I'm just adding in a short rectangle of a cube as you can see here and I added a simple volumetric material to this cube picking a color here that matches the color tones the Bob is using in his painting and here's a little rendered preview of what it's looking like with that volumetric fog being added to it I just have a simple gradient texture here to kind of be able to gradually have that fog get less dense as it gets higher up on the mesh the volumetrics is something that is really slow for three software to render as it's a lot to calculate so what I'm doing is I'm using an RT X and video card and if you enable optics in the blender user preferences this is a new feature that I've just come to blender you can use those RT x course in the new RT x and video GPUs to really accelerate your workflow oftentimes up to twice as fast these are a little closer you can't do that that fast before these pine trees the Bob is effortlessly painting into the background it's a little bit more work to do with 3d graphics so my plan for these pine trees is I shot a few pine branches on a white background that I could remove in Photoshop and then as you see here I'm left with just the pine branches and a transparent background here I've just been duplicating them making a larger branch out of that small branch and 3d along with a little bit of a branch stem here that I just extrude out and through a little branch texture on now what I'm also doing is I'm making sure that I'm pulling them downwards as his pine trees are really kind of sagging in those branches then I just created a simple cylinder here with a basic texture on it for a bark material then I'm gonna use particle instancing which allows me to take those branches that I made and add a multiple times to our Steen randomly generating them across our object here and here you can see what it looks like once I add those on just took a little bit of tweaking and I had to define a few things like where the branches should appear on the tree and using a weight paint group I was also able to tell blender to scale these branches down towards the top so we have more of a realistic growing pine tree and once I had this setup I was able to apply those particle systems and then use this as another particle system for another instance group for those pine trees in the background of our scene but there you can see we have some of those dark pine trees along the horizon line of our scene and then with that fog turned on you can really get the contrast separating those pine trees from the mountain and it's matching Bob's painting pretty closely now imagination is it's it's like any other muscle in your body the more you practice the better I like that imagination is just like any other muscle in your body that's good that's quality stuff Bob so now we already have that pine tree model for the distant trees I'm just going to be duplicating that and kind of lining them up in the same scene scale and rotation to what Bob is placing his trees and now you see here Bob's painting reflections reflections is something we don't even have to worry about anymore because in 3d the reflections are now calculated automatically by that reflective material that we set up so as you can see here we already have the reflections of those trees in the water so we're one step ahead a bob so I wasn't feeling like I was getting enough of those highlights on my trees just using the HDR for lighting as Bob kind of had in his scene even though this might be more realistic and what to match Bob's painting as close as possible so to kind of match the highlights that bob is painting on the pine tree I went ahead and added that Sun lamp and that kind of a lot of those materials to pop a little bit more you get a bit more green in those pine trees and it matched his work a little bit closer and down here there's Littlefoot that's so crazy okay so we have some catching up to do to kind of match what Bob is doing now we need to make a little island and so at this point we need some new greenery to kind of match the bushes that he just painted in a matter of seconds so for this occurred some little sort of tree like bushes and if you guys are curious on how I created these I actually did a one-minute tutorial there'll be a link up on the scription there and how I did that these are just some very simple little meshes using the same technique that I did in that one-minute video tutorial and yeah these are gonna work for some of the greenery on that island I also created some without any branches on them to kind of match what he'll do for the dead sort of branches there on the tree so here I just duplicated a bit of that mountain mesh that I already created for the background placed it over my water here as a little bit of an island and then using some more particles to instance those little bushes that I showed you guys that I created there then we have an effect looking something like this we're getting some of those greens sort of nature like bushes on a little island underneath those pine trees that are kind of drooping down except Bob also painted some of that shoreline some of those like waves and sand that you would have along the shore and as you can see I'm still missing all that so to achieve this I'm using a texture of clouds inside of the texture painting tools with blender and then using a white material here I'm just going to go around and kind of paint some white textures around the base of the island this is gonna kind of look like that sandslash waves along the shoreline of the island then all I had to do was take that texture that I painted into my material and add it to my color material for my ocean and then we'll have to do is connect that up and as you can see now that I add that over the top of the water we kind of have that white sort of sandslash foam /water along the shorelines of our island here and as you can see it definitely helps kind of separate that island from the water and gives you the same kind of look that bob painted on his scene so one of the ways we're gonna give this little island a little bit more life is I went back to where my old classic videos and how-to photoscan 3d objects and ahead photoscan an old stump and I just grabbed that model that I created in that old video here as you can see this giant stump and just placed it nice and small on our little island here and that just gives a little bit of extra to have some of that nature sitting on that little island this is something that was for scanned in my backyard so it's kind of cool to be including some of the little Easter eggs in the scene so here at bob's kind of painting the final layer to the scene the foreground as you could say and as you can tell he works from the very background of the scene all the way up to the foreground which is kind of different for me because when I'm working in 3d generally I work on what's in the foreground and then worry about the background later so this process of creating it in 3d following along with the tutorial it's a little bit backwards for what I'm used to but it's actually pretty fun to kind of mix up the workflow here [Music] take the hook carefully out of his mouth and put a bandaid on him little CPR Teddy rp2 and put him back in the water but after adding a few of these objects to kind of fill out the scene with a little bit more detail you can see we were getting close but I still didn't have this sort of depth to the scene that Bob can paint because of the background being a lighter color in the foreground being a darker color so what I did for this is I used a similar method that again I taught in a recent tutorial and when i created forests and blender and that is using a basic noise texture on a plane and instancing it multiple times across our scene as you can see I did right here this plane just has a very faint sort of noise texture on it as you can kind of see here in the render but once I put it instance multiple times across a render you can see we get that low-hanging fog that Bob kind of painted along the water and along the horizon of the trees there adding in that low-hanging fog with that texture being instanced multiple times really added the depth and realism to the scene as you can tell it really worked to kind of separate our little island here from the distant pine trees as well as separate evening the foreground trees here from the little island and this is what really pulled my 3d render to look a lot closer to what bob ross is painting has been looking like here all these little details and tips and tricks that bob adds to kind of finish out your seater so cool I mean I've never even painted something like this close to this in my life you know I find it really enjoyable to watch Bob is just a legend he's just pretty much the greatest effort and seems like a really nice guy so here is our render straight out of our 3d software blender without any rendering or anything and it looks pretty cool but the colors don't quite match what Bob's do so what I did at this point is I fired up Lightroom and I'm gonna bring this image into it and make just a few adjustments to kind of pull the colors a little closer to Bob's finished painting so adjusting the tonal curves a little bit I was able to kind of make those colors pop a little bit more and then also increase the exposure of the overall image a little bit more give it some more contrast increased the clarity a bit as well as gave it some vibrance as well as kind of bringing down some of the and bringing up some of the shadows to give you a little bit of detail I also comped week the white balance here to kind of pull the colors to be a bit of a cooler color to kind of match the overall tone of Bob's finished image as well as giving it a little bit more green but there's my finished result guys compared to Bob Ross's finished painting this was a ton of fun though one of the most enjoyable things for me to create in 3d is often nature scenes I've done a lot of them in the past but never have a followed bob ross doing one of them and so this was a lot of fun bob ross is basically the king of nature scenes so working off his inspiration and bringing it into 3d was a ton of fun actually I think something like this could be really cool animated because now that we have it in 3d I could technically render this out as an animation maybe kind of a swooping animation pulling past those pine trees in on the mountains so yeah what do you guys think would you like to see an animated version of this scene it would take me a bit of time to render but it'd be something I'd be willing to do and let me know if you want to see it with a like on the video if this video reaches 10,000 likes I'll go ahead and render and animate a sequence of this painted Bob Ross rendering and yeah I would share it over on my CG geeks Instagram and Twitter accounts there'll be links in the description for those so yeah if this video reaches 10,000 likes guys we'll get an animated sequence render of this and again I'd like to thank audible for sponsoring this video visit audible.com slash GG geek or txt cg geek - 500 500 to get you a free 30-day trial of audible there'll be links in the description well do it for this video guys I hope you had some fun and enjoyed it and I'll see you all in a future video Bob [Music] we got this we got this we cool cool Bob Bob Ross

Channel: CG Geek

Views: 373,330

Keywords: Bob ross, tutorial, vfx artist, Blender, 3D, Graphics, VFX, Comedy, Funny, Artwork

Id: -lvx3NB5icE

Length: 15min 34sec (934 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 30 2020