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

Compositing the scene

Compositing allows us to add awesome effects to our final render to make it look more believable. We can change the mood of our render, giving it a cold, bluish look or a warm, sunny feeling.

To switch to compositing, you need to make sure that you have already rendered your scene; otherwise, there will be no initial input to work with under the Compositing tab.

At the top of your Blender scene, you’ll find a bunch of tabs. Go to Compositing and check the Use Nodes box.

Figure 13.23 – Switching to the Compositing tab in Blender

Figure 13.23 – Switching to the Compositing tab in Blender

To see our render in the background, let’s press Shift + A and search for the Viewer node:

Connect the Render Layers Image slot to the Image slot of the Viewer node. This way, we’ll be able to see the render displayed in the background.

Figure 13.24 – Adding the Viewer node in our compositing setup

Figure 13.24 – Adding the Viewer node in our compositing setup

Let’s start with the first compositing...