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

Creating rocks using the rock generator add-on

To create rocks using the rock generator, let’s jump into the 3D Viewport and perform these actions:

  1. Press Shift + A.
  2. Go to Mesh and you will find Rock Generator.

This add-on also comes with many tools, such as Gears, Pipe Joints, and so much other stuff. For the scope of this chapter, we’ll be focusing only on rocks.

Figure 10.3 – Adding the Rock Generator in the 3D Viewport

Figure 10.3 – Adding the Rock Generator in the 3D Viewport

Once you click on Rock Generator, a rock will appear in your scene. At the bottom left, you’ll find a tab called Add Rocks. Click on it to start the customization of the rock.

Figure 10.4 – Adding a rock object

Figure 10.4 – Adding a rock object

Click on the left arrow to expand the panel and access the rock generator settings.

The first thing to do is to disable the Use a random seed feature. This feature randomizes the shape of the rock automatically. When you change the Deformation...