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

Sizing the buttercup flower

Our last step is to give the flower the right measurements. Based on Google research, buttercups reach 31 cm in height, so any size in height between 20 cm and 30 cm will look reasonable.

In our example, the longest stem height is 0.27 m, so we can say that our flower branch size is reasonable. In case you have a different size, you can press N to access the right-hand Transform panel, select all the flower elements, and scale them up or down until they reach a realistic size.

Figure 11.37 – Measuring the buttercup flower main stem

Figure 11.37 – Measuring the buttercup flower main stem

Now that our flower is complete and well-sized, let’s take a look at how our flower will look in the Render mode.

To make sure it looks good when imported into our landscape scene, this is how our buttercup flower will look when finally rendered:

Figure 11.38 – Final render of the buttercup flower

Figure 11.38 – Final render of the buttercup flower

I did the following:

  1. I set up HDRI lighting...