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 the sun to emit realistic lighting

The first method we’ll be using to add lighting to our scene is to create a sun light source. So, let’s add it using the following steps:

  1. In our 3D Viewport, press Shift + A.
  2. Go to the Light tab and choose Sun:
Figure 5.2 – Adding a sunlight to the scene

Figure 5.2 – Adding a sunlight to the scene

Note

Make sure you’re on the Cycles rendering engine, although this lighting method works well on both engines, Eevee and Cycle.

  1. Now, let’s go ahead and switch the shading mode to Rendered in order to see how the lighting looks:
Figure 5.3 – Switching to Rendered view

Figure 5.3 – Switching to Rendered view

  1. The lighting currently looks dark and creepy so the first setting we need to adjust is the sun light’s strength.
  2. While selecting the sun object, jump into the Object Data Properties pane represented by the light bulb icon and find Strength value set to 1 by default. Increase it by...