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 a realistic wood material using procedural texturing in Blender

Let’s apply everything we have learned so far to create various wood materials using procedural-generated texturing and apply it to our wooden cabin created in Chapter 1, Most Common Modeling Mistakes That Prevent You from Achieving Photorealism.

Let’s begin by understanding procedural texturing in Blender.

Procedural texturing is the process of creating textures within Blender itself by using a collection of node textures that are defined mathematically. This is nice because it allows us to create high-quality textures without relying on external textures.

Let’s set the Blender scene first:

  1. Create a new plane.
  2. Assign a new material to the plane and name it Wood.
  3. Switch the bottom panel to the Shader Editor.
  4. On the 3D Viewport, switch to Material Preview using Z in order to see the progress of our material.

Make sure you’re selecting the plane in...