Hamdani / Barreto 3D Environment Design with Blender

Enhance your modeling, texturing, and lighting skills to create realistic 3D scenes
1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-1-80323-351-2
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 344 Seiten

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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Hamdani, Abdelilah

Barreto, Carlos

Fachgebiete

• Mathematik | Informatik EDV | Informatik Professionelle Anwendung
• Mathematik | Informatik EDV | Informatik Programmierung | Softwareentwicklung Spiele-Programmierung, Rendering, Animation

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Table of Contents - Most Common Modeling Mistakes That Prevent You from Achieving Photorealism
- The Basics of Realistic Texturing in Blender
- Efficient Unwrapping and Texturing in Blender
- Creating Realistic Natural Plants in Blender
- Achieve Photorealistic Lighting in Your Environment with Blender
- Creating Realistic Landscapes in Blender
- Creating and Animating Realistic, Natural-Looking Water
- Creating Procedural Mud Material
- Texturing the Landscape with Mud Material
- Creating Natural Assets: Rock
- Creating Realistic Flowers in Blender
- Using Particle System to Scatter Objects in Blender
- Finalizing the Landscape Scene

Leseproben

1

Most Common Modeling Mistakes That Prevent You from Achieving Photorealism

Have you ever tried to create a photorealistic scene in Blender? Are you looking for a step-by-step formula to help you achieve photorealism in Blender? Do you find yourself stuck getting the right settings? If so, you’re not alone.

In this chapter, we’re going to break down the three modeling mistakes that most 3D designers make that prevent them from achieving photorealism in Blender.

Modeling represents the foundation for what’s coming next: texturing, UV mapping, lighting, compositing, and rendering. Getting the foundation wrong will make all your efforts be in vain, so the goal of this chapter is to help you get the modeling foundation right.

The first mistake is relying on only your eyes to estimate the scale of objects you’re modeling. When it comes to photorealism, getting the right scale plays a crucial role. So, we’ll be discussing the Blender unit system and how to perform research to get the right, realistic measurements of objects before modeling them.

The second mistake is related to scale matching: most designers immediately dive into creating a 3D scene based on a real reference without doing any scale matching. This makes it really hard to get the same camera settings, such as position, rotation, and focal length, that an actual photographer would use. This results in an unmatched result to the reference you’re working with. To overcome this issue, we will learn to use fSpy, a tool that allows you to replicate the camera settings adopted by a photographer (focal length, camera position, and rotation) when taking a picture of an actual image and export it into Blender. We will explore how the fSpy interface works, how to use it, and how to install the fSpy add-on into Blender and import fSpy project files.

The third mistake is modeling without the bevel modifier on. By the end of this chapter, you will understand the importance of using the bevel modifier when modeling and the role it plays in achieving photorealism. You will also understand the different beveling settings and how they work inside Blender.

In this chapter, we’ll be covering the following topics:

• The importance of using a real-world scale
• Learning scale matching using the fSpy program
• The importance of using the bevel modifier when modeling

Technical requirements

This chapter requires a Mac or PC capable of running Blender Version 3.0 or above.

You can download the resources for this chapter from GitHub at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/3D-Environment-Design-with-Blender/tree/main/chapter-1

The importance of using a real-world scale

When creating complex scenes in Blender, it’s easy to fall into the trap of eyeballing the scale of objects when modeling them, without taking the right measurements. This can lead to multiple problems that will prevent you later on from achieving a photorealistic and eye-pleasing result.

We think our eyes are accurate – “”; however, we’re really bad at estimating measurements simply because we give more emphasis to the things that we pay attention to and neglect the parts we deem unimportant.

This then affects the photorealistic aspect of your scene: you end up wondering what is wrong with your scene. Something just looks off and you don’t know what it is. You start messing around with the materials and the lighting, and maybe those are perfect but then you realize the foundation was wrong. So, it is important to get this modeling foundation right.

So, the solution is to .

Let’s say you’re designing a wood cabin; the first thing you need to do is research on Google: What is the height of a log cabin?.

Figure 1.1 – Google search for the height of a log cabin

So, now we understand that a wood cabin must not exceed 3 meters in height, so everything between 2 and 3 meters should be reasonable. With the apex roof included, another meter is added.

Since we must not exceed 30 m2, we can give a dimension of 5 m wide and 6 m long (5 m × 6 m = 30 m2.).

Next, we will check the Blender unit scale:

1. Go to Scene Properties.
2. Click on the Units tab.
3. Then choose the Unit System measurement that suits you.

Figure 1.2 – Blender scene properties units system

Choosing Metric will measure the length in meters and mass in kilograms, unlike Imperial, which will measure the length in feet and mass in pounds. This is the right way to set real-world measurements in Blender.

Another good reason to always use a real-world scale is because of how physics simulation works in Blender. Physics in Blender, such as gravity, rigid body, and mass, relies on real measurements to work properly.

To emphasize this even more, let’s create a sphere; by default, the sphere will be 2 meters in diameter. Next, we go to Physics Properties, and we click on Rigid Body while making sure the sphere is selected. Under the Settings tab, you’ll see that Mass is set to 1 kg by default. This means that the 2-meter diameter sphere you’ve just created has a weight of 1 kg.

Figure 1.3 – Blender physics properties

Now, if you press the spacebar, the physics simulation will start. Our sphere will fall down due to gravitational force. If we change the scale of our sphere to something around 0.2 meters and give it a weight of 4.5 kg, our sphere will behave exactly like a bowling ball. Similarly, if we scale down our sphere diameter to 5 cm and a weight of 170 g, our ball will act like a billiard ball.

The bottom line is, always use a real-world scale: it’s crucial for achieving photorealistic results that match reality.

Now that we have seen the importance of using real-scale measurements when modeling, let’s learn scale matching. It’s an awesome trick that allows us to get almost the exact camera settings from an image reference, so that we can then easily recreate the scene in Blender.

Learning scale matching using fSpy

Next, let’s learn scale matching. To put things in perspective, let’s say you have a real reference that you want to replicate as a 3D scene. You can load it as a camera background, and start modeling it, but soon enough, you will encounter a big challenge, which is to match the same position, rotation, and focal length of the camera that took the shot.

You can see in this example the difficulties in matching the same log cabin reference:

Figure 1.4 – Wood cabin model not matching the reference

Our objective is to place the modeled cube exactly on top of the cabin reference (the red lines must be on top of the green lines). The corners must match each other in order to have true camera matching; doing it by eye won’t cut it, so we need to do it the right way.

Luckily, we have fSpy, which is a free open source software program that allows us to estimate the camera parameters from an image reference and import it into Blender.

The way it works is as follows: you import the reference image whose camera settings you want to match, and you choose the number of vanishing points; you will find this feature on the top left side panel of the fSpy program.

Figure 1.5 – Vanishing point axes in the fSpy interface

Basically, the number vanishing points depends on the type of reference you’re using:

• One vanishing point: This means that your reference has a point where all lines meet. If you follow any parallel lines in the reference, they will end up meeting at one point.

Figure 1.6 – Example of one vanishing point reference

• Two vanishing points: You can use two vanishing points in case there are two kinds of parallel lines in your reference, with each side seemingly slowly fading away into distance; they will meet at a certain point in the distance. An example would be something like this:

Figure 1.7 – Example of two vanishing points

The camera parameters are as follows: focal length, rotation, and position of the camera.

In our case, we will be using a wood cabin reference that has two vanishing points; you can...

Über Autor(innen)

Hamdani Abdelilah:

Abdelilah Hamdani is a 3D photorealistic designer and an online tutor specialized in making 3D photorealistic environments based on real references using Blender. He runs a dedicated website and YouTube channel named Reality Fakers, where he runs online courses on Blender and photorealism subjects that have been taken up by thousands of students.Barreto Carlos:

Carlos Eduardo da Silva Barreto is a 3D generalist with more than 26 years of experience in the 3D industry, creating animation add-ons primarily in Blender to develop efficient and fastest workflows that make life easier for Blender artists. His add-ons have had thousands of downloads which goes on to show the Blender community's love and appreciation for his work. Carlos is a challenge seeker, constantly trying to improve existing processes with new tools and ideas to benefit the Blender community.