Professional 3D Environments with Blender

A detailed breakdown of my latest piece: "Mando Arrives"

00:00 - Intro
02:11 - Reference
04:00 - Gaea
07:19 - Blender Animation, Lighting, Texturing
14:06 - Geoscatter Forests
20:35 - Geoscatter Manually
25:51 - Render Settings & Last Comments

I hope this brief overview provided useful insights, I will be making more content teaching you how to create professional looking environments in the future!

[azarelthecreator]

You mentioned animating everything in its base form. This is how big production houses do it. There are people who handle just the animation of the characters and scenes and if you watch any behind the scenes you will see the animation being done with solid color and no texture maps or fancy lighting. It doesnt matter how good your machine is, at some point its going to be impossible to get close to realtime playback enough to animate anything effectively.

[Maarten-Nauta]

*Didn't completely get my explanation of roughness and specularity right. Basically what I'm trying to say is that roughness only dictates how directly light gets reflected. At a high roughness lots the light scatters in lots of different directions causing the reflective sharpness to lower. However roughness of a texture can't emulate the 'absorbtion' (don't know a better word to describe it) of lightrays that happens with lots of foliage. Turning down the specularity lowers the amount of light that gets reflected which kind of emulates what would happen when a lightray hits a real 3D patch of grass rather than a flat grass texture.

Edit: just want to thank all of you for the insane support on my first real video. I really hope my future content helps all of you just as much! <3

[paranoiac]

bro that specular thing for large landscapes has been tripping me since that blender conference. thank you for clearing this stuff out man

[craigjohn]

I’ve had GeoScatter for over a year and never felt like I truly knew how to use it. Tutorials like these are demonstrating how powerful this tool can be and I’m so glad people like you are bringing it to light. Great stuff man!

[jeffhowe]

Very nice. The specular tip is priceless. My grass was always washed out looking towards the sun. Now it's grassy again. Thank You!

[lucasdigital]

Amazing work and lots of gems of wisdom for those of us new to environment work. I'm look forward to seeing more.

[momentum_animation_studio]

This is hands down the best tutorial and pipeline! Thank you so much for being open and sharing your whole process and thoughts behind your 3D Environments. I was actually following this same exact process for UE5, but it is not my native program. So naturally I was getting really bogged down, thinking that the UE route was the best option for me to create landscapes for my project. It is great to see how to manage all of the foliage assets efficiently within blender! I have a lot of animation in blender, so I feel more confident keeping the rest of the assets contained there too. Great stuff Maarten!!!

[KingKong]

You have a WINNER of a channel right here man. PLEASE do more covering these massive environments because I find myself needing to utilize a lot of these videos for my own projects. The more techniques the better!

[heckensteiner]

Great job on your first tutorial and amazing shots! Thank you for not taking a 100(s) hour process and making it look like it takes just 10 minutes! Conversely, thank you for not taking a 10 minute process and drawing it out into 100 hours.

[maximusgerardin]

That's really cool man! Been looking for those artists craving for this studio quality shots and you nailed it, congats

[Chiho.]

For someone with only 546 subs your work is very impressive.

[ThreeDCreate]

Really like the part of the video at .21 so realistic feels very real, great job! Also, great ways to explain all the thing you are doing, very helpful

[sazaam]

Extremely smart and priceless tutorial. Especially like the part talking about specularity for the huge grasses and also very interesting that the deeper forest trees would have less leaves on the bottom because of inner forest shade but also avoid some amount of polys as well. Thanks a lot!

[savin]

Thank you for mentioning the spec thing with Andrew Price, as I was thinking of the same thing when you talked about touching the specular sliders!

[SadGhost_]

some great insight into environment design! I found youtube to be semi lacking in this content and I really liked that you went over how to keep your scene efficient for preview because this is such a large hurdle when you're trying to get into this stuff. Great work

[RomboutVersluijs]

I believe anisotropic in volumes is what in other engines is called symmetry. It means of the scattering is based more outwards vs inwards in mediums. For instance with scattering in objects like marble it's negative, more inwards vs like objects like skin and flesh it's outwards thus plus in numbers

[SLTH]

Bro, after watching your tuts I also made realistic large environments for my animations

[fretstain]

Nice man. I'm looking forward to the patreon.

[gregorkalmar]

Amazing. Looking forward for more tutorials.

[superkaboose]

nice job! I love it when people who really know their stuff show off what they do!