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

Animating the water flow

We will have a look at a cool trick that will allow us to animate our water surface, making the waves move:

  1. Add Mapping and Texture Coordinate nodes.
  2. Connect the Generated slot on the Texture Coordinate node to Vector on the left side of the Mapping node.
  3. Connect the right-hand Vector slot of the Mapping node to Vector on Noise Texture.
Figure 7.23 – Adding the Mapping and Texture Coordinate nodes to Noise Texture

Figure 7.23 – Adding the Mapping and Texture Coordinate nodes to Noise Texture

Now, if you change the value of the Z location on the Mapping node, you will notice that Noise Texture is moving.

  1. To animate the Z location value on Mapping, we need access to the Timeline editor, so hover your mouse over the bottom-right window, left-click, and drag upward.

This will give you a new duplicated window of Shader Editor. Let’s switch it to the Timeline editor and jump into the first frame:

Timeline is identified by a clock icon; it is used for manipulating...