So Im trying to learn scenery like plants, lighting, the ground, not like the just HDRIs so does anyone have any project to recommend for a noob
For landscapes, I would recommend learning about the scatter modifier. It’s going to be useful for spreading grass and plants on the ground.
Something else that is useful is to learn how to blend multiple textures on the same object. That’s useful for painting large landscapes.
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Thank You a lot, also I’m thinking A closing this project in, and instead working on something new to better learn and display Scenery and UV Editing, any thoughts on what the project should be.
For practicing UV editing, what you have been doing with this building is a good project. A landscape will probably have little UV work by comparison.
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Have you attempted landscapes at all in the past? Do you have any idea what kind of landscape you want to represent?
If you don’t, I am going to say that landscapes include multiple different skills and you should probably try the ones you need on a smaller scale to know what to expect before trying a massive project.
I would split landscape making into a few categories.
- Making large scale terrain, distant mountains, large cliffs, plains, canyons etc.
- Making convincing grass. Modeling grass meshes, scattering them on a ground. Small foreground plant detail.
- Making trees. Either using a tree making app / addon, or learning to make them yourself.
- Making convincing rock and boulders. That’s harder to get realistic than you might expect.
- Texturing a landscape in a convincing way.
- Realistic water and oceans in landscapes.
So, out of those things, what were you imagining? You mentioned adding vegetation around the house, so is that the direction you wanted to go? I could elaborate about whichever topic if needed, it’s just that “scenery” is a bit much to explain in one comment and a bit much to try learning all at once.
I’m looking mostly at the first 2, I have never attempted landscaping in the past. Yea I was going to add some things around the house and mostly a grassy plain
For making big landscapes, the way that will give the quickest results is just to make a plane, subdivide it in edit mode, then go in sculpt mode and start sculpting.
No need to even know much about sculpt mode, I did this in about 1 minute without even trying using the clay brush with default settings.
An other way that can give you good results is to use a terrain creation tool. The ANT landscape addon is a common one that’s used a lot.
Those kinds of landscapes can be textured quickly using an automated material trick: changing which texture is used based on the angle of the slope. This allows having rock cliffs on heavily sloped areas, but soil on the flat surfaces.
Here is an example on the quick sculpt I did earlier. I quickly added extra detail using a displace modifier, it tends to work really well with this texture trick.
And this is just using flat colors, it would look even better with actual rock and grass textures.
Here is the file, so you can see how the trick works.
landscape_example.blend (809.9 KB)
For making grass, the tricky part is having good grass meshes. Scattering them on the landscape is easy, thanks to the scatter modifier (the tutorial I linked in a previous post).
What makes good meshes for grass:
- Realistic grass isn’t just a line, it has a structure with a stalk and leaves. Especially in a natural field with tall grass.
- Use a few variations of grass, including maybe even different kinds or species.
- Grass isn’t just solid green, it tends to become a bit yellow at its base. Something to consider when texturing it.
- A large field of grass will have some other plants mixed in, like flowers, bushes, clover. Also there will be patches of drier or greener grass, it’s not an even carpet everywhere.
To get the meshes, you could model them yourself if you can or if you want the learning experience, or search for asset packs that already exist. Plants are so common that you can be sure other people have already made them.
Thank you a lot but how can I optimize my laptop for the scatter modifier because every time I use it my blender crashes and lags, also I now have a better understanding of the displace modifier.
On the scatter modifier, there is a “viewport visibility” slider. You can reduce it and it will show fewer plants in the viewport, but they will all come back at render. This works especially well in Cycles, as the modifier works with instances (the same mesh gets re-used multiple times without taking more space in memory) and Cycles can handle a near unlimited number of those.
If that’s still not enough, there is also a trick you can use to make the object that’s being scattered show up as a simpler version of itself in the viewport, but come back to its full detail at render. That is especially helpful for a high polygon count plant, like a tree.
Go to the geometry nodes editor and add this setup on the object that’s being scattered.
At render, the tree will appear as its fully detailed mesh, but in the viewport, it will instead appear as a blob in the rough shape of the model with much less resolution.
If you want, it’s also possible to replace that convex hull node with any mesh you have made yourself, it’s just that convex hull is a quick way of making a simplified version.
Thanks a lot, I will try this out
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can I see how you set up your grass, every time I use the scatter modifier it crashes, even when I lower the viewport visibility, even when I use cycles.
How big is the landscape? If it’s hundreds of meters or more, you will have to be careful about how the grass is made.
You can use individual grass blades on a small area, like for foreground detail, but that would cause too many objects to be generated on a large surface. The number of meshes itself has a cost, not just the polygon count.
In that case, what you want to use is clumps of grass, that will allow covering a large surface with fewer meshes.
Here is a scene, I think this should be light enough for your machine.
grass_field.blend (973.8 KB)
yea I could see it but it was still slow, it might just be my device
That’s going to be a bit of a problem for making vegetation. It’s definitely still possible, but it’s going to need some trickery to have good performance.
I would try splitting the ground mesh in 2 objects, one for the areas close to the camera and one for the distant areas. Make the distant areas use fewer grass pieces, but make each larger. You could even make a second grass mesh for those distant areas with thicker blades so fewer of them are needed.
Try this one:
grass_field_2.blend (980.3 KB)
Also, if this is for a still image, use grass only in the visible cone of the camera.
Actually I think it might just be my device, I’m on a laptop but I have a computer at home, so I may just use that instead. But does anyone have any suggestions on optimizing my laptop in general?
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By the Way, Ive made another topic for landscaping, but I going to create one more for Creature modeling, because currently I’m overseas and I don’t access to my computer and when I do get back I have to make sure I can actually use it, so I want to start learning something else in the meantime
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On a laptop, you will be limited by the hardware you have, especially if it’s not a gaming laptop with a decent GPU. There isn’t much to do for the machine itself, the biggest thing you can do is just to limit which art style you do for as long as you are on that computer. Modeling and texturing are going to be fine even on a relatively weak computer, but large scale grass, hair, or physics simulations should probably be left to the better machine.