Book Image

3D Environment Design with Blender

By : Abdelilah Hamdani, Carlos Barreto
Book Image

3D Environment Design with Blender

By: Abdelilah Hamdani, Carlos Barreto

Overview of this book

Blender is a powerful tool for creating all kinds of visual assets, but with such power comes complexity. Creating a photorealistic 3D scene seems like a Herculean task for more than 90% of 3D designers, but don’t be discouraged! 3D Environment Design with Blender will get you up and running. This practical guide helps reduce the complexity of 3D environment design, advance your Blender skills, and produce lifelike scenes and animations in a time-efficient manner. You'll start by learning how to fix the most common mistakes 3D designers make with modeling and scale matching that stop them from achieving photorealism. Next, you’ll understand the basics of realistic texturing, efficient unwrapping and achieving photorealistic lighting by turning an actual reference of a wood cabin into a realistic 3D scene. These skills will be used and expanded as you build a realistic 3D environment with natural assets and materials that you’ll create from scratch. Once you’ve developed your natural environment, you’ll advance to creating realistic render shots by applying cool camera features, and compositing tricks that will make your final render look photorealistic and pleasing to the eye. By the end of this book, you'll be able to implement modeling tricks and best practices to make your 3D environments look stunningly lifelike.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
1
Part 1: Turn a Real Reference into a Realistic 3D Scene in Blender
7
Part 2: Creating Realistic Landscapes in Blender
12
Part 3: Creating Natural Assets
15
Part 4: Rendering Epic Landscape Shots

Texturing the Landscape with Mud Material

In this chapter, we will be texturing the landscape by mixing two different materials, the rocky snow and the mud we created in the previous chapter. To do that, we will be using a mask that separates the rocky snow from the mud in an organic, nice-looking way.

You will be comfortable with mixing two different materials on the same object while controlling where and to what degree you want the mixing to occur. Being able to mix different materials is a great skill that helps you generate unique materials and apply them to your objects.

In the second part of this chapter, you will learn how to optimize and organize your node setup by using groups. This is an important skill to acquire when working with complex material nodes. Node grouping will allow you to simplify a node tree by hiding away complexity.

You will learn to pack all your nodes related to a specific material into a single group node that only has the essential parameters...