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 and rocky snow

Now it’s time to use the Mud material and the mask we created, but before doing that, let’s put the landscape’s material called Mountain into a group.

Using groups to organize the rocky snow landscape node setup

Let’s reconnect the Mountain material that we disconnected in the previous Creating a Texturing mask section.

Next, let’s put the landscape’s material called Mountain into a group to keep our node setup organized:

Figure 9.24 – The Mountain node setup

Figure 9.24 – The Mountain node setup

Repeat the same steps we followed for the Mud group material – and don’t forget to rename the Group Output slots of the Mountain material please as shown in Figure 9.17.

Now we have three node groups: Mud, Mask, and Mountain.

Let’s bring in all the node groups we have created – they are saved in Blender nodes now. Press Shift + A in Shader Editor, go to Group...