Fake Large-scale Forests in Blender

Рет қаралды 255,604

Күн бұрын

In this video, @MartinKlekner teaches how to convert 3D trees into 2D particles, which still look 3D, to save tons of performance. This technique allows to render millions of particles, fast.
⇨ Master 3D Environments course: www.cgboost.com/courses/maste...
⇨ Project files and Blender Shortcut PDF: cgboost.com/resources
⇨ Blender Launch Pad Course: www.cgboost.com/courses/blend...
⇨ Blender Secrets E-book (affiliate): gumroad.com/a/436106355
⇨ Receive our latest updates: cgboost.com/newsletter
LINKS
⇨ Landscape breakdown from this video: • Large-scale Landscape ...
⇨ Martin's short film project: • Heroes of Bronze: The ...
⇨ Martin’s 1st breakdown tutorial: • Large-Scale Environmen...
⇨ Martin’s 2nd breakdown tutorial: • Environments with Geom...
⇨ Martin’s compositing tutorial: • Introduction to Compos...
⇨ Martin’s Tips for creating Epic Landscapes in Blender: • 10 Tips for creating E...
⇨ Making 3D Soldiers into 2D Particles (paid): martinklekner.gumroad.com/l/m...
⇨ The Grove: www.thegrove3d.com/
⇨ Vegetation Add-On (Affiliate): blendermarket.com/products/ve...
⇨ Botaniq Add-On (Affiliate): gumroad.com/a/618599539/MOZJY
CHAPTERS
00:00 - Intro
01:04 - Startup file
01:52 - Process overview
02:12 - Rendering base color
04:54 - Rendering remaining maps
07:02 - Setting up the 2D image
10:14 - Translucency
13:04 - Translucency normals
14:46 - Color randomization
17:21 - Orient towards camera
18:40 - Outro
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Пікірлер: 225

@cgboost 8 ай бұрын

⇨ Download the project files here (click on KZfaq tutorials & Project Files): cgboost.com/resources ⇨ Check out Martin's "Master 3D Environments in Blender" course here: www.cgboost.com/courses/master-3d-environments-in-blender

@Hartley94 8 ай бұрын

Great system there.

@beaustine6093 2 ай бұрын

Hello! Wanted to say thanks so much for making this tutorial. 🙏🏻 I have a question… I’m having an issue with rendering the material index. For some reason the tree is coming out as all white and the background black. Where I see your renders are more black around the leaves and then brighter at the center of the tree. Any idea why this is happening. I do want to mention that I am using a Botaniq tree that has multiple materials for both the bark and leaves. However I have turned the Leaves material to 2 for index pass, and the bark materials to 1, as instructed.

@EmaSans-tu5eg Ай бұрын

@@beaustine6093 Same thing to me... I see black trees (only in cycles render)

@beaustine6093 Ай бұрын

@@EmaSans-tu5eg So I went ahead and took the albeto map into photoshop and tried creating my own mask image. The result came out pretty decent. From what I understand I don’t think the mask is super important. If you can’t figure it out, you’d probably be ok with just using the black and white image. Hope that helps. 🤙🏻

@adrianstarfinger5721 8 ай бұрын

This is a real smart paradigm to have in general, not just for trees!

@galaxydirewolf6606 8 ай бұрын

Doing environment scenes in college. This is literally perfect, Thank you!

@galaxydirewolf6606 8 ай бұрын

@Loniyke it's one in the UK

@KingKong19100 8 ай бұрын

Same here haha

@hankookofthewest 8 ай бұрын

for me i am going to london met rn@Loniyke

@jon_franklin 8 ай бұрын

Love this tutorial but I just wanted to mention that for the constraints you don't have to add a 'track' and a 'limit rotation', you can simply use a 'Locked Track' constraint. Set the Z as the locked Axis and the Y as the direction.

@kelajuan_ 8 ай бұрын

Thank you for listening to our requests of remastering this tutorial 😄👍

@MartinKlekner 8 ай бұрын

🥳

@dimashekmatyar1439 7 ай бұрын

jangan laju2 bang

@Groffili 8 ай бұрын

It's smart, it's versatile... and I love it!

@theDyingArts 8 ай бұрын

Seriously, a fantastic tutorial. I'm not familiar with your channel, but the pink highlights on the settings you're adjusting make it so easy to follow without having to pause. And in addition providing the assets / sprites is icing on the cake. Mad respect, subbed.

@MartinKlekner 8 ай бұрын

Cheers, glad to hear that!🥳

@PeepsFamily 8 ай бұрын

Incredibly useful tutorial, thank you!

@liridoncani 7 ай бұрын

This is unique. Its not only improves your rendering but also looks as realistic as 3D. This is great for large scenes. Amazing video.Thanks a lot👍

@_stanfx 7 ай бұрын

You're a legend Martin!! Thank you for this tutorial and the course :)

@alexandreancel6423 8 ай бұрын

Truly useful and awesome advices, thanks for sharing, Martin !

@Rockndolls 8 ай бұрын

You can make amazing backgrounds with that technique

@duck_entertainment 27 күн бұрын

Yep! That’s going in the blender playlist!

@ojotropico2120 8 ай бұрын

Amazing tutorial, thank you very much ✴

@claudiusraphael9423 8 ай бұрын

Now i need to learn how to embed that into procedurally generated maps and control it programmatically inside Blender. Thanks for sharing, nice pace and quality content - instant like and subscribe!

@WolverineMKD 8 ай бұрын

Oh its Martin again! I watched and commented on your amazing showreel you released a day ago! I didn't know you were with CG Boost this is amazing. What a legend keep up the amazing work!

@MartinKlekner 8 ай бұрын

Welcome, and thank you! ☺

@SmoStory 8 ай бұрын

Love it! Thanks.

@elcamsterino4798 8 ай бұрын

I learned so much from this video, Thanks! I had no idea about so many of these techniques

@john_donne 8 ай бұрын

Awesome! Thank you!

8 ай бұрын

That was fun and interesting. Thank you very much.

@jakejake6029 8 ай бұрын

Your tutorial was so helpful

@3dlab334 7 ай бұрын

Juast discovered you guys! I'm really IMPRESSED

@Kimera_Alternate_Realities 7 ай бұрын

Thank you for this guys

@teammetavian 8 ай бұрын

Nice tutorial. verry helpful information for creating cg invironment thank you to provide valuable amount of information keep it up

@Tecillius 8 ай бұрын

Thats an amazing tutorial.

@thisspaceforrent5737 8 ай бұрын

Just dug up the file I made with the old tutorial and started tweaking. Thank you so much for this!

@MartinKlekner 8 ай бұрын

Glad to hear!

@marcfuchs6938 Ай бұрын

I feel smart having used this 2D trickery before this tutorial. =) Though not as elaborate into the details. I came to the idea to do such a thing, simply through videogames. Even today they need to watch out for the ressources, but 10 or 20 or even 30 years back, developers were relying on loads of trickery, such as 2D elements. PS1 and N64 games usually couldn't exist without those. So many elements in those old games were 2D. Which was still not the end of the optimization process, since they also had very limited memory for things like textures. So you needed to use 2D elements, but which were also blurry/pixelated as hell.

@samk9632 8 ай бұрын

I think it would be great to go over how powerful instancing is. I scatter hundreds of thousands of assets, each w/ hundreds of thousands of polygons, it's something not many people really know the utility of

@Purpial 8 ай бұрын

Yoo what's up Kruger!

@xanzuls 8 ай бұрын

Exactly what I was thinking. Especially with geo nodes, I was able to instance thousands of 4D animated scans in Blender and have it play real-time.

@thomas7726 Ай бұрын

This is gold! Helped me a lot (doind a massive asteroid field)

@Dradeeus 5 ай бұрын

Woah this is actually the first time learning about the matcap that shows things as normal colors. Just never came up before.

@zeronsham 8 ай бұрын

Great job.

@its_entrepreneur 7 ай бұрын

Animation is beautiful 😍

@SumNumber 8 ай бұрын

The results are very cool. I am starting to use image planes myself on everything I can . You do take this to a new level I have not tried . Thanks for the share. :O)

@wasoha 6 ай бұрын

I was having some trouble getting the normals to behave in version 4.0 and discovered this is because they changed the Normal Map node's strength calculation, I needed to turn it way down compared to this video in order for it to appear correct. Just an FYI for anyone else following along in newer Blender versions.

@cgboost 6 ай бұрын

Thanks for pointing this. Actually 4.0 makes a real improvement in handling normals .

@GrimK77 8 ай бұрын

Cool, I'll have to test it, but with initial renders done with sky texture lighting. You seem to correct with curves what's essentially too dark render, and in large scenery trees still stand out from scenery as illuminated with downlight.

@Brovider 8 ай бұрын

Beautiful

@dwsel 8 ай бұрын

V-useful tutorial!

@mercylucero8160 7 ай бұрын

wow i like this!

@WanerRodrigues 8 ай бұрын

Really cool, thank you! Adding tags to search latter billboard billboards 2D trees

@iluvpandas2755 6 ай бұрын

What do you mean?

@WanerRodrigues 3 ай бұрын

@@iluvpandas2755 I can search on my comments history and find the words I used, billboard is a good word for me to find this video, but the word isn't in the title, this keywords commentary help me to find it

@DrTheRich 8 ай бұрын

Btw, what you do with the rgbcurve node, just dragging one point to bend the curve, is basically the same thing as using the gamma node, which is a bit faster to calculate, and neater

@MartinKlekner 8 ай бұрын

I somehow grew accustomed to the Curves node but no problem in using gamma :) Gives you less freedom, but in this case, its fine ;)

@kuhanesh 8 ай бұрын

Please may I ask, when rendering the normal, why did you use the render in viewport option as opposed to using the normal pass like you did the material index?

@bUildYT 8 ай бұрын

excellent

@BigWallsy 8 ай бұрын

Thank you.

@ghufranahmad5730 8 ай бұрын

Pretty clever

@spaceexpireaudio666 8 ай бұрын

00:00 Large scale forest with a large scale donut😀

@TruthSurge 8 ай бұрын

amazing vid! It would have taken me about 52 years to figure this out on my own w/o any example!

@anashajyoussef2905 8 ай бұрын

thank you

@ComplexTagret 8 ай бұрын

Nice tip, thank you a lot! And you are right, the last chapter of the video should be scattering along surface. Anyway, thanks!

@gurratell7326 8 ай бұрын

Would really like to see you do a comparison where you compare the render time with these scattered planes vs scattered full polygon trees. Because Cycles actually prefer render lots of polygons instead of lots and lots of alphas, with the bonus that the polygon trees will look quite a lot better :)

@TruthSurge 8 ай бұрын

If I had to just guess, I would say that rendering a 4-vertex plane with 512 pixels of resolution would be way, way, way faster than rendering a tree with 200,000 polygons. So, it wouldn't matter if you had 10 trees or 10 million. It seems clear that rendering light on a 512 pixel plane would be faster than trying to render most any normal poly-based tree. No? If rendering a polygon tree was faster, Martin wouldn't be going to these lengths to create trees like this to scatter across a HUGE area of land. You can make one tree like this and one just polygons and test it yourself on your machine and time it. See which one renders fastest. I'm going to bet the image planes render faster. If you are adding 10 or 11 trees to a small scene, then this method probably is a waste since you can just add 3 or 4 trees, instance some and use high poly trees. Just how I see it.

@gurratell7326 8 ай бұрын

@@TruthSurgeI have rendered scenes with maybe a million scattered trees with around 70k polygons each and it was just fine, Cycles really eats polygons. It really doesn't care, instead what takes time is to calculate what the rays are doing. So something that Cycles doesn't like is calculating if a rays should go through an alpha or not, and the denser the forest gets the more transparency ray bounces you need to not get pure black so the render times just goes up. I did a test a couple of years ago where I rendered some scattered grass, one where the grass was a simple plane and a alpha, and one with modelled (and subdivided) grass with a few thousand polygons, and the polygon one did look significantly better render while also rendering in about half the time as the alpha one. I'm gonna do a similar test again soon to see if the difference is the same, but I doubt I'll see any big differences from before :) Having that said, if you're rendering in Eevee it's a whole different story, there the planes with alphas will win big time!

@user-vr9dj4eo8v 8 ай бұрын

@@gurratell7326waiting for the results

@TruthSurge 8 ай бұрын

@gurratell7326 compare apples to apples. Put same numbers out and use same settings. So I'm no expert but this alpha plane idea is probably easier on viewport but I haven't tried a scientif8c comparison. Maybe one day I will.

@gurratell7326 8 ай бұрын

@@TruthSurge Yes, the settings are the same, just that it's high poly objects that are being instanced instead of alpha planes. Of course the viewport would be very heavy showing billions of polygons, but you can set those objects to show only the bounding boxes, no problem :)

@steprockmedia 8 ай бұрын

Wow. That's a landmark training session - no pun intended!

@KenMFT 8 ай бұрын

Making the maps just look sick, didnt know thats how they were made

@brutalheetman5357 8 ай бұрын

awesome

@Mr_sibo828 8 ай бұрын

plz give us a part 2 i really need it please

@degibocu 8 ай бұрын

you are awsome dude

@noobplays4376 7 ай бұрын

Wow I didn't understand anything but I am excited to learn

@brutalheetman5357 8 ай бұрын

Waiting for part2

@shadowmonarch_ 7 ай бұрын

2-3 weeks ago I leaned about Maya Mesh tool and how to use it to create a realistic forest. Today YT recommended this video (looks like have to install Blender), to be honest Maya's forest was looking more realistic then this, but considering these are just png image it's looks pretty nice.

@tudnofich 8 ай бұрын

Magic.... Really !

@TEST-kw2xw 8 ай бұрын

I love (not really) these types of tutorials - it all comes down to "buy my cool addons"

@cgboost 8 ай бұрын

Only that using the technique shown in the turorial does not require using any addons.

@spyegle 8 ай бұрын

There is no paid addon in this vid lmao, in fact that tutorial is the process to recreate the same effect as "Alphatrees", a paid addon, for free :')))))))

@AmberSantana-is3dq 8 ай бұрын

2d is perhaps the most important and powerful tool in 3D modeling because it’s not heavy on the hardware and sometimes the quality is better

@SimFiftyFifty 8 ай бұрын

Great tutorial and nice refinements since the older one. Tho imo in your example scenes some trees are way too close to the camera, it's quite obvious they're planes and it feels cheap. This should be used only for background trees.

@ege.the.engineer 8 ай бұрын

Hi is there any way to use this approach on something like *the fantasy tree generator* addon (that has an animated wind and particle system), what I'm trying to mean is that can we just create 2D gifs/image sequences that have transparency and all other kinds of stuff in this video to create huge, massive environments that have a bunch of animated (at least in terms of wind animation) trees?

@redfiend8479 8 ай бұрын

please add the follow up video of scattering the image planes to create something to what you did.

@MartinKlekner 8 ай бұрын

Will do!

@Lord__Gold 8 ай бұрын

Small input at 2:14: any resolution you can put there is rectangular. You meant square. :)

@BlaBla-sf8pj 8 ай бұрын

génial !

@arjungowda6452 8 ай бұрын

Thank y❤u

@wolkar2494 8 ай бұрын

Hi Martin, I am a student of yours! Thank you for all this. You are teaching me a lot. I'm curious about that: in the past you have made some nice tutorials with World Creator. You may know that the 2023 release has recently come out, and it looks very promising. Are you planning to publish any new content on this topic?

@Zolbat 6 ай бұрын

14:30 should the green (up/down) channel really be inverted?

@jmtm00 5 ай бұрын

Does this course covers also rendering and if so, wich engine you are using in this course? All best

@cgboost 5 ай бұрын

Hi, thanks for your question. Yes, the course includes the rendering part and uses Cycles as render engine. ~ Masha

@craneyu7287 5 ай бұрын

Thanks for your tutorial One question,how to separate the leafs and branch?

@MartinKlekner 4 ай бұрын

If you have separate materials for the leaves and the branches, you can go to Material menu and in edit mode, hit Select on the leaves material and the separate selection with P. Alternatively, I recommend using assets where the branches and leaves are already separated.

@craneyu7287 4 ай бұрын

@@MartinKleknerthanks so much for your reply.

@KingKong19100 8 ай бұрын

Nice job! I’m very curious as to how to render out a holdout for a view layer but have it NOT cast a shadow onto other layers

@kuhanesh 8 ай бұрын

In cycles, you can go Object Properties->Visibility->Ray Visibility->Shadow (check/uncheck). Not sure if that's what you're looking for !

@KingKong19100 8 ай бұрын

@@kuhanesh Thank you but unfortunately not. That is where my mind first jumped to as well but due to my workflow using different view layers it affects other renders as well. Thank you though!

@ali32bit42 8 ай бұрын

9:29 i dont think you need two normal maps for this. you could bake object space normal maps which will fully preserve all the directional information for you. bump maps work too

@MartinKlekner 8 ай бұрын

The overall normal adds plasticity to the whole model, making it feel like the treetop is more spherical, while the specific tree normal map adds plasticity to the leaves and trunk.

@ali32bit42 8 ай бұрын

thats why i said to use object space normal maps. they are specifically designed to keep the curvature of the surface@@MartinKlekner

@MartinKlekner 8 ай бұрын

Thanks for the note, ill have a look@@ali32bit42

@ThisGuyIsOld 8 ай бұрын

Nice tutorial! Tree shadow is missing. And constaints now can be copied without Addon, by select all (last one with constraints to copy) then Object -> Constraints -> Copy Constraints to Selected Objects

@MartinKlekner 8 ай бұрын

I will address the shadow topic in the next part :-) Thank youfor the note! 🙂

@comosdedos 6 ай бұрын

Can't wait for the next part then !@@MartinKlekner

@goddessxiaowu 8 ай бұрын

can you share the .blend of this 0:00 or can i buy it because i would like to use it for our school project 😅 please 🙏🙏

@_blender_man_ 7 ай бұрын

Unter 👍🏻 have to try it first. Does it work with standard default blender Tree gen (in curves) ?

@cgboost 7 ай бұрын

It should work for any 3d models of trees - just follow the guidelines in the tut when making the 2d textures out of the 3d trees.

@starsartbar 8 ай бұрын

couldnt you pack all of the details into an openexr file for better optimization?

@claudiusraphael9423 8 ай бұрын

Can particles as used here be animated/tweened to keyframes - e.g. to let a tree burn or bloom, etc.? And are they addressable like instances?

@kuhanesh 8 ай бұрын

Not sure if this will work but here's a suggestion: When creating the initial trees, animate it there. Then render as individual frames. When importing it using 'import images as planes', you can set it so it uses the whole sequence and will therefore animate it while using the same node setup

@claudiusraphael9423 8 ай бұрын

@@kuhanesh Ah, so its kinda like a blitter, letting use the particle like a video-buffer change the quasi-frame-content, cmp. RotoScope/AniGif/MNG or classic layered Multi-Sprites in 8/16-bit-hardware. I really have to dig into the possibilities step by step and play with it, this will be fun. Thanks!

@basspig 8 ай бұрын

What if you used a spherical camera and place the camera inside of a cylinder or a sphere and projected the image onto the spear? Wouldn't that make a 3D fake tree instead of a 2d fake tree?

@valtaoi1586 8 ай бұрын

can you create a series for understanding nodes?? plz its very difficult to understand how nodes work and how to use nodes to to create different kind of things. plz make

@MartinKlekner 8 ай бұрын

Ive made exactly that in my Master 3D Environments Course :)

@cre8eve 7 ай бұрын

Legendary Donut

@gabrielomane-yeboah 8 ай бұрын

That made me the environment guy 😂 Love your videos though

@MartinKlekner 8 ай бұрын

😊

@binyaminbass 8 ай бұрын

This tut comes as I am trying to render a long animation in a park with lots of grass and trees and I used geo scatter which was great but it’s just taking forever. I wonder if this is worth trying for grass?

@cgboost 8 ай бұрын

If the grass isn't too close to the camera, you could totally try this out. ~ Masha

@SurinamElephant 8 ай бұрын

Got a question about the advertised course. Are the mountains shown here created using imported heightmaps or will the course cover how to create mountains based on more specific requirements or visions ?

@MartinKlekner 8 ай бұрын

Hi, both, in one chapter we create mountains using ANT landscape addon, in another using shader nodes, and then we also import height maps.

@robinvegas4367 8 ай бұрын

Wait, is that my tutorial donut in the background?

@BenjaminZinn 2 ай бұрын

Can this be done but with grass? Knowing that normally the camera is more looking down. I want to create very big grass fields, and this method would save a lot of memory.

@cgboost 2 ай бұрын

Yeah I think you can totally do that with grass! ~ Masha

@israelmarzo5318 8 ай бұрын

Quick question this be use in game engine such as unreal or units?

@marsmotion 3 ай бұрын

yes

@Mr_sibo828 6 ай бұрын

please tell me how you scattered those trees

@MartinKlekner 6 ай бұрын

Soon, I will release a second part of this tutorial, focusing on this topic...

@Mr_sibo828 6 ай бұрын

@@MartinKlekner thank u very much I need this in my school project , and thank u for making this tutorial

@yzoro9358 8 ай бұрын

Is this method also ideal for making like a grassy environment also?

@cgboost 8 ай бұрын

Yeah it should work with the grass too, if it's not too close. ~ Masha

@Spartacular 6 ай бұрын

Hi is there a discount on this course?

@cgboost 6 ай бұрын

Hi, no unfortunately right now we don't have a specific discount for this course. We have a generic student discount you can request by contacting us: www.cgboost.com/contact ~ Masha

@Purpbatboi 8 ай бұрын

Its the same technique used in like Breath of the Wild / Tears of the kingdom 2D Pre-Rendered Trees with normal maps

@roadtoenviromentartist 8 ай бұрын

Use impostors in your trees, this a evolution of your billboards.. similar but yo have the posiblity use the camera in extrem planes no breaking the fake foliage. You must learn this technics. Your system I used 25 years ago. Anyway I follow using in composting this alpha layers but combining with impostors. I understand that for younger people everything is incredible amd new. Nice content guy.

@Rayyarhs 2 ай бұрын

Doing the whole stuff and there is the download file :D I now am gonna remember nothing.

@von.3d Ай бұрын

Hello. For some reason, when I render the index passes, the leaves turns out to also be white. Why does this happen? Your render got it black while the trunk is white. @6:35

@MartinKlekner Ай бұрын

Shouldn't really matter, you just put an invert node after your Index Pass image texture and it flips the black and whites...

@von.3d Ай бұрын

@@MartinKlekner actually, both the trunk and leaves were white in different saturations. I got it fixed. It was just the pass index that I had to set to 0 instead of 1.

@mrCreepsy 8 ай бұрын

Since the shading of the tree also changes with the camera rotation, this is not very practical if the camera is rotating, isnt it?

@NarekManukyan 8 ай бұрын

this is a very good tutorial, I have a large scene with a lots of threes in there, but can you please tell me, I will need a camera from top, and I guess this method can't work in that case

@MartinKlekner 8 ай бұрын

Just render out the trees from the too, similar angle as your final scene 🙂

@NarekManukyan 8 ай бұрын

@@MartinKlekner but as the trees follow camera, they will be visible as from side, but from the top🤣

@MartinKlekner 8 ай бұрын

@@NarekManukyan I think playing with the constraints and changing their axese will solve that :)

@namdoyle 8 ай бұрын

I wonder what if this method mix with a 360° image sequences and these 360° texture will be show base on the view angle😬❓ isn't it completely look like a real 3d object?

@pa_artiffect 7 ай бұрын

While using this planes as particles it does not follow(rotate along the axis) the camera.

@cgboost 6 ай бұрын

Hi, it's hard to say what's wrong without seeing the file. Can you please post it in our community? community.cgboost.com/home ~ Masha

@Prahinsfilms 8 ай бұрын

What about proxies

@johnadriandodge 8 ай бұрын

Shalom AMAZING

@nassl4232 3 ай бұрын

a t on avis je pourrais me servir de cet technique pour rentrer mes arbres dans une map que je fais pour beamng je dois exporter en collada pour etre lu dans le jeu

@cgboost 3 ай бұрын

Hi, you can try it out and let us know if it works :) ~ Masha