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

Using a particle system to scatter plants and leaves in our scene

Now that we have plants and leaves, the next step is to scatter them all over the ground. You can do it manually by duplicating plants, scaling and spinning them around to make them look different, but this method will take a lot of time and effort and won’t be efficient.

Luckily, there is a better way: using the particle system in Blender. It’s used to scatter objects across a surface. In our example, we’ll be scattering plants and leaves:

  1. Select the ground, which is the object that will emit the particles.
  2. Go to Particle Properties.
  3. Press the plus icon to add a new particle system:
Figure 4.33 – Adding a new particle system to the ground

Figure 4.33 – Adding a new particle system to the ground

Immediately, you will see little spheres scattered all over the ground, as shown in Figure 4.29. This is the Emitter particle type.

Emitter particles are free particles that can be affected by force...