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 buttercup flower

Before we can proceed with texturing our flower, we need to make sure that all the petals of the flower are merged into one piece. To do that, you can press Ctrl + J to join them all into one unit. Now, let’s proceed with texturing the petals:

  1. Select the petals, go to Material Properties, add a new material, and call it FlowerLeaves:
Figure 11.16 – Assigning the flower petal material to the Flower model

Figure 11.16 – Assigning the flower petal material to the Flower model

  1. Switch the bottom window of your Blender scene to Shader Editor.
  2. Drag the image reference we used earlier into Shader Editor and connect it to Base Color:
Figure 11.17 – Connecting the texture to Base Color

Figure 11.17 – Connecting the texture to Base Color

  1. Now, if we press Z and switch to Material Preview, this is how our flower will look:
Figure 11.18 – Default unwrapping of the flower

Figure 11.18 – Default unwrapping of the flower

Our flower isn’t properly textured because it has bad UVs....