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 snowy mountain

Select the mountain object, jump into Material Properties, and create a new material called Mountain:

Figure 6.11 – Adding a material called Mountain

Figure 6.11 – Adding a material called Mountain

Switch the bottom window of Blender to the Shader Editor window and let’s start tweaking the Mountain material:

Figure 6.12 – Switching the bottom window to Shader Editor

Figure 6.12 – Switching the bottom window to Shader Editor

Now, I want to create a snow mask, which is a black and white mask that will tell Blender what portions of the mountains we want to be rock and what portions of the mountain we want to be snow.

To explain further, we need to highlight only the flat surfaces that are facing the z axis in our landscape because these are the areas where the snow will gather.

To do that, let’s add the following nodes.

Add a Geometry node:

Figure 6.13 – Adding a Geometry node

Figure 6.13 – Adding a Geometry node

This node gives us geometric information about...