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 landscapes using the A.N.T add-on

To add landscapes, let’s press Shift + A, choose Mesh, and on the bottom, you’ll find Landscape; click on it and voila – you have a landscape in your scene:

Figure 6.4 – Adding a Landscape 3D object

Figure 6.4 – Adding a Landscape 3D object

Adding a landscape using A.N.T. should open a menu on the left-hand side of the 3D Viewport – you can press F9 to maximize it. We will use this menu to customize the landscape shape.

Note

Make sure not to click – otherwise, if you click away, you will lose your settings. Be careful to only click once you’re satisfied with the shape of the landscape you’re building.

Tweaking the shape of the landscape

Let’s look at the steps to do this:

  1. The first setting to change is Mesh Size to 5.00 on both the X- and Y-axes:
Figure 6.5 – Tweaking the landscape mesh size

Figure 6.5 – Tweaking the landscape mesh size

  1. Next, Noise Type: let’s change...